The Turtles of Tasman.
by Jack London.
I
Law, order, and restraint had carved Frederick Travers" face. It was the strong, firm face of one used to power and who had used power with wisdom and discretion. Clean living had made the healthy skin, and the lines graved in it were honest lines. Hard and devoted work had left its wholesome handiwork, that was all. Every feature of the man told the same story, from the clear blue of the eyes to the full head of hair, light brown, touched with grey, and smoothly parted and drawn straight across above the strong-domed forehead. He was a seriously groomed man, and the light summer business suit no more than befitted his alert years, while it did not shout aloud that its possessor was likewise the possessor of numerous millions of dollars and property.
For Frederick Travers hated ostentation. The machine that waited outside for him under the porte-cochere was sober black. It was the most expensive machine in the county, yet he did not care to flaunt its price or horse-power in a red flare across the landscape, which also was mostly his, from the sand dunes and the everlasting beat of the Pacific breakers, across the fat bottomlands and upland pastures, to the far summits clad with redwood forest and wreathed in fog and cloud.
A rustle of skirts caused him to look over his shoulder. Just the faintest hint of irritation showed in his manner. Not that his daughter was the object, however. Whatever it was, it seemed to lie on the desk before him.
"What is that outlandish name again?" she asked. "I know I shall never remember it. See, I"ve brought a pad to write it down."
Her voice was low and cool, and she was a tall, well-formed, clear-skinned young woman. In her voice and complacence she, too, showed the drill-marks of order and restraint.
Frederick Travers scanned the signature of one of two letters on the desk. "Bronislawa Plaskoweitzkaia Travers," he read; then spelled the difficult first portion, letter by letter, while his daughter wrote it down.
"Now, Mary," he added, "remember Tom was always harum scarum, and you must make allowances for this daughter of his. Her very name is--ah--disconcerting. I haven"t seen him for years, and as for her...."
A shrug epitomised his apprehension. He smiled with an effort at wit.
"Just the same, they"re as much your family as mine. If he _is_ my brother, he is your uncle. And if she"s my niece, you"re both cousins."
Mary nodded. "Don"t worry, father. I"ll be nice to her, poor thing. What nationality was her mother?--to get such an awful name."
"I don"t know. Russian, or Polish, or Spanish, or something. It was just like Tom. She was an actress or singer--I don"t remember. They met in Buenos Ayres. It was an elopement. Her husband--"
"Then she was already married!"
Mary"s dismay was unfeigned and spontaneous, and her father"s irritation grew more p.r.o.nounced. He had not meant that. It had slipped out.
"There was a divorce afterward, of course. I never knew the details. Her mother died out in China--no; in Tasmania. It was in China that Tom--"
His lips shut with almost a snap. He was not going to make any more slips. Mary waited, then turned to the door, where she paused.
"I"ve given her the rooms over the rose court," she said. "And I"m going now to take a last look."
Frederick Travers turned back to the desk, as if to put the letters away, changed his mind, and slowly and ponderingly reread them.
"Dear Fred:
"It"s been a long time since I was so near to the old home, and I"d like to take a run up. Unfortunately, I played ducks and drakes with my Yucatan project--I think I wrote about it--and I"m broke as usual. Could you advance me funds for the run? I"d like to arrive first cla.s.s. Polly is with me, you know. I wonder how you two will get along.
"Tom.
"P.S. If it doesn"t bother you too much, send it along next mail."
_"Dear Uncle Fred":_
the other letter ran, in what seemed to him a strange, foreign-taught, yet distinctly feminine hand.
"Dad doesn"t know I am writing this. He told me what he said to you. It is not true. He is coming home to die. He doesn"t know it, but I"ve talked with the doctors. And he"ll have to come home, for we have no money. We"re in a stuffy little boarding house, and it is not the place for Dad. He"s helped other persons all his life, and now is the time to help him.
He didn"t play ducks and drakes in Yucatan. I was with him, and I know. He dropped all he had there, and he was robbed.
He can"t play the business game against New Yorkers. That explains it all, and I am proud he can"t.
"He always laughs and says I"ll never be able to get along with you. But I don"t agree with him. Besides, I"ve never seen a really, truly blood relative in my life, and there"s your daughter. Think of it!--a real live cousin!
"In antic.i.p.ation, "Your niece, "BRONISLAWA PLASKOWEITZKAIA TRAVERS.
"P.S. You"d better telegraph the money, or you won"t see Dad at all. He doesn"t know how sick he is, and if he meets any of his old friends he"ll be off and away on some wild goose chase. He"s beginning to talk Alaska. Says it will get the fever out of his bones. Please know that we must pay the boarding house, or else we"ll arrive without luggage.
"B.P.T."
Frederick Travers opened the door of a large, built-in safe and methodically put the letters away in a compartment labelled "Thomas Travers."
"Poor Tom! Poor Tom!" he sighed aloud.
II
The big motor car waited at the station, and Frederick Travers thrilled as he always thrilled to the distant locomotive whistle of the train plunging down the valley of Isaac Travers River. First of all westering white-men, had Isaac Travers gazed on that splendid valley, its salmon-laden waters, its rich bottoms, and its virgin forest slopes.
Having seen, he had grasped and never let go. "Land-poor," they had called him in the mid-settler period. But that had been in the days when the placers petered out, when there were no wagon roads nor tugs to draw in sailing vessels across the perilous bar, and when his lonely grist mill had been run under armed guards to keep the marauding Klamaths off while wheat was ground. Like father, like son, and what Isaac Travers had grasped, Frederick Travers had held. It had been the same tenacity of hold. Both had been far-visioned. Both had foreseen the transformation of the utter West, the coming of the railroad, and the building of the new empire on the Pacific sh.o.r.e.
Frederick Travers thrilled, too, at the locomotive whistle, because, more than any man"s, it was his railroad. His father had died still striving to bring the railroad in across the mountains that averaged a hundred thousand dollars to the mile. He, Frederick, had brought it in.
He had sat up nights over that railroad; bought newspapers, entered politics, and subsidised party machines; and he had made pilgrimages, more than once, at his own expense, to the railroad chiefs of the East.
While all the county knew how many miles of his land were crossed by the right of way, none of the county guessed nor dreamed the number of his dollars which had gone into guaranties and railroad bonds. He had done much for his county, and the railroad was his last and greatest achievement, the capstone of the Travers" effort, the momentous and marvellous thing that had been brought about just yesterday. It had been running two years, and, highest proof of all of his judgment, dividends were in sight. And farther reaching reward was in sight. It was written in the books that the next Governor of California was to be spelled, Frederick A. Travers.
Twenty years had pa.s.sed since he had seen his elder brother, and then it had been after a gap of ten years. He remembered that night well. Tom was the only man who dared run the bar in the dark, and that last time, between nightfall and the dawn, with a southeaster breezing up, he had sailed his schooner in and out again. There had been no warning of his coming--a clatter of hoofs at midnight, a lathered horse in the stable, and Tom had appeared, the salt of the sea on his face as his mother attested. An hour only he remained, and on a fresh horse was gone, while rain squalls rattled upon the windows and the rising wind moaned through the redwoods, the memory of his visit a whiff, sharp and strong, from the wild outer world. A week later, sea-hammered and bar-bound for that time, had arrived the revenue cutter _Bear_, and there had been a column of conjecture in the local paper, hints of a heavy landing of opium and of a vain quest for the mysterious schooner _Halcyon_. Only Fred and his mother, and the several house Indians, knew of the stiffened horse in the barn and of the devious way it was afterward smuggled back to the fishing village on the beach.
Despite those twenty years, it was the same old Tom Travers that alighted from the Pullman. To his brother"s eyes, he did not look sick.
Older he was of course. The Panama hat did not hide the grey hair, and though indefinably hinting of shrunkenness, the broad shoulders were still broad and erect. As for the young woman with him, Frederick Travers experienced an immediate shock of distaste. He felt it vitally, yet vaguely. It was a challenge and a mock, yet he could not name nor place the source of it. It might have been the dress, of tailored linen and foreign cut, the shirtwaist, with its daring stripe, the black wilfulness of the hair, or the flaunt of poppies on the large straw hat or it might have been the flash and colour of her--the black eyes and brows, the flame of rose in the cheeks, the white of the even teeth that showed too readily. "A spoiled child," was his thought, but he had no time to a.n.a.lyse, for his brother"s hand was in his and he was making his niece"s acquaintance.
There it was again. She flashed and talked like her colour, and she talked with her hands as well. He could not avoid noting the smallness of them. They were absurdly small, and his eyes went to her feet to make the same discovery. Quite oblivious of the curious crowd on the station platform, she had intercepted his attempt to lead to the motor car and had ranged the brothers side by side. Tom had been laughingly acquiescent, but his younger brother was ill at ease, too conscious of the many eyes of his townspeople. He knew only the old Puritan way.
Family displays were for the privacy of the family, not for the public.
He was glad she had not attempted to kiss him. It was remarkable she had not. Already he apprehended anything of her.
She embraced them and penetrated them with sun-warm eyes that seemed to see through them, and over them, and all about them.
"You"re really brothers," she cried, her hands flashing with her eyes.
"Anybody can see it. And yet there is a difference--I don"t know. I can"t explain."
In truth, with a tact that exceeded Frederick Travers" farthest disciplined forbearance, she did not dare explain. Her wide artist-eyes had seen and sensed the whole trenchant and essential difference. Alike they looked, of the unmistakable same stock, their features reminiscent of a common origin; and there resemblance ceased. Tom was three inches taller, and well-greyed was the long, Viking moustache. His was the same eagle-like nose as his brother"s, save that it was more eagle-like, while the blue eyes were p.r.o.nouncedly so. The lines of the face were deeper, the cheek-bones higher, the hollows larger, the weather-beat darker. It was a volcanic face. There had been fire there, and the fire still lingered. Around the corners of the eyes were more laughter-wrinkles and in the eyes themselves a promise of deadlier seriousness than the younger brother possessed. Frederick was bourgeois in his carriage, but in Tom"s was a certain careless ease and distinction. It was the same pioneer blood of Isaac Travers in both men, but it had been retorted in widely different crucibles. Frederick represented the straight and expected line of descent. His brother expressed a vast and intangible something that was unknown in the Travers stock. And it was all this that the black-eyed girl saw and knew on the instant. All that had been inexplicable in the two men and their relationship cleared up in the moment she saw them side by side.
"Wake me up," Tom was saying. "I can"t believe I arrived on a train. And the population? There were only four thousand thirty years ago."
"Sixty thousand now," was the other"s answer. "And increasing by leaps and bounds. Want to spin around for a look at the city? There"s plenty of time."
As they sped along the broad, well-paved streets, Tom persisted in his Rip Van Winkle pose. The waterfront perplexed him. Where he had once anch.o.r.ed his sloop in a dozen feet of water, he found solid land and railroad yards, with wharves and shipping still farther out.