PART TWO
Chapter One
Ben Cory searched the bay, his eyes ardent for greater distances. Here at the wharf the ships relinquished wakefulness and power, becoming boxes of cargo for the calculations of landsmen: the harbor is not the sea.
"Watch, Ben—he'll take in sail presently." John Kenny was holding his dwarfish body erect to make the most of it, ancient head slanted so that he might look down his nose even at Boston Bay. He thrust his gold-headed cane against a crack in the wharf—his wharf, and smiled at the boy—his boy. "Luck of the Artemis, this breeze. When she nears the wharf Jenks will haul his tops'l to set her aback. You'll see her reach the piling a-tiptoe, a lady, all whisper and dignity. Didn't I say she'd be the lucky thing, when I took thee and Reuben up the Mystic to watch her a-building on the ways?"
"Yes, Uncle John." The mild westerly breeze fluttered Mr. Kenny's gray coat and the gray owl-tufts above his ears. It woke the dance of whitecaps under April sky, and seventeen is a kind of April. "She's a fair ship, sir."
"Hoy, mind your terms! A ship is all square-rigged, commonly a three-master. Two-masted, a ketch, is Artemis—well, a loose name, seeing we use it also to mean small harbor craft. But with her fore-and-aft mizzen you mustn't be calling her a ship. I wish Reuben had come. He's missing a pretty sight, and all to go strolling in the woods." Ben winced inwardly, knowing that the old man, for all his understanding, had been hurt by that. He ought to know by this time, Ben thought, how when the black mood came over Reuben there was nothing to do but let the boy alone, let him go walk in the woods or whatever else he wished. Ben himself did not know whether it was the flame of Deerfield that attacked Reuben at such times; had not been able to learn, in all the three years since they came to Roxbury and Uncle John had opened heart and home to them. "Artemis is near three hundred ton, Ben. That's not big, but she could sail anywhere in the world."
The lonely man, blue-eyed and gaunt, who stood at the outermost end of Kenny's wharf, swung about to gaze at the old merchant. Ben had not until now observed the stranger's face, motionless as a boulder in a patch of grass against the raised collar of a shabby green coat. Grave, Irish maybe, handsome in spite of a signature of smallpox from jutting cheekbones to the edge of an angular jaw. Under a battered tricorne hat Ben saw coal-black hair and a forehead high and pale. The mouth was thin, the upper lip compressed. Hands projected immensely from frayed sleeves, a sailor's hands broadened at the knuckles. Others on the wharf had been watching Artemis; discouraged by the chill of the breeze, they had abandoned the airy region to Ben and Mr. Kenny and the blue-eyed man.
Anchored in the near waters or drawn up to the many docks, an orderly jungle stirred to the bay's mild motion—stem masts, steep bowsprits, nervous bodies of the drowsing wind-wanderers. To Ben's eyes, Clarke's Wharf over yonder hardly dwarfed Mr. Kenny's single squat warehouse and three hundred feet of pier. All around Ben spread an apparent confusion of ropes, tackle, mooring-posts, more meaningful than when he had first stumbled through it three years ago, but still a confusion to one whose hand had never yet felt the lurching sting and thrust of a working rope across the palm.
Woolgathering, Ben had missed some remark about Artemis' rigging. "She owes much to that fore-and-aft mizzen. Fore-and-aft or square, either'll bring you the service of all the winds, but the way of the fore-and-aft is a woman's way, Ben, seeming to yield, winning by yielding. Your squares'l is male, standing up to wrestle the sky breast to breast—nay, but he can drive almost as near the wind's eye—point or two less, what's a point or two in a long journey? Artemis don't roll too much. I've been aboard her under sail only the once, when we tried her out. She didn't roll much, for all Mr. Jenks tempted her to it so to learn her paces. Fast she is, Ben. You can feel it even now when she's picking her way slow as a dream."
"Sir, if I—supposing I might ship aboard——"
"You?" Mr. Kenny jabbed his cane at the planking, his crinkled face gone blank. "Ben, boy, you must stick to your studies. You'll have sea enough when Mr. Hibbs brings your Greek far enough on to read the Odyssey. Better to drown in poetry than salt water."
"Still, Uncle John, the sea——"
"Now let me tell you a thing: never admit to a sailor that you love the sea, if love is the word. He'd despise you for a landsman. A sailor may love a ship, if she be fair and not vicious. Not the sea, not the old blind murdering bitch-mother."
"No, I think love is not the word, but—nay, I don't know."
"You think I don't feel it? Didn't I take ship as a common seaman when I was twenty? I ran away, Ben. My father's blood was partly cold vinegar—something of that you felt in your day with my good sister. My brother George's and mine was red, and hot. Well, I had but a few years of it, he too. Not for me with my piddling strength. We went into trade, we prospered, and I'm a landsman—but I know her. Sometimes if my bad toe's a-troubling or I go to bed with too much drink in me, I dream I'm fathoms down in the cold, the green dark. I see their faces, I mean those of the dead, men I knew who own no grave except the sea. They float by me orderly, no crowding—hoy, you learn not to crowd a man in the neighborhood of live ropes! They go by me one by one—Amyas Holt maybe, that was first officer of the ship Marigold and would never sing except he was stone cold sober, but I have heard him sing, marry have I. Went down with the Marigold off the Bermudas—all hands.... Isn't the land fair, Ben? Full of good things? Good work, women, children, warmth of an earned fireside? And the time of year that's coming now?—but maybe you suppose an old man don't notice the spring. Is not the land fair?"
"Yes, Uncle John," said Ben, and turned his face away.
"Sometimes I see Danny Roeder too, laughing boy, ready for anything, dead of the scurvy when we stood thirty-four days becalmed south of the Line, a run to Recife in the ship Providence—most of his teeth fallen from puffed purple gums, not laughing then.... I've but now remembered, Ben, this is the first time you've seen Artemis afloat. When she left the ways last August you and Reuben were a trifle indisposed."
Ben grinned weakly in acknowledgement. Last August he and Reuben had had the measles. After a day or so of misery they had grown busily critical of each other's spots, the despair of Mr. Kenny's housekeeper Kate Dobson, who tried to make them mind the orders of Mr. Welland the doctor and stay covered up in bed. Plump Kate did not frown on pillow fights in principle. She suppressed a few nobly, knowing her massive rear to be prime target, because she believed the boys were in a rarely tender condition. Kate had heard that measles could become the lapsing fever—whatever that was, and never mind that Mr. Welland rumbled and chuckled and took snuff and said it wa'n't so. Kate had sniffed pointedly and severely about Mr. Welland of Roxbury, asking after his gentle departure how a head under such a Lord-help-a-sinner wig as he wore could hold knowledge of the healing art or in fact anything else.
More than a year in building and the pride of Mr. Kenny's ancient years, Artemis took to the water—tide and wind and season won't wait on the measles—with no help from Ben and his brother. By the time Mr. Welland decreed they could leave the house, she was gone, with half a cargo, mostly hardware and woolens from England. She slipped down to Newport to fill her hungry hull with flour and cheese; on to Virginia for a quick turnover; then with tobacco and what remained of the Yankee hardware—anything you like from frying pans to thimbles—she was for Jamaica in the warm seas. At Kingston she ran into a bit of trouble; Captain Jenks sent word of it by a homeward-bound. Tropic fever and smallpox had played hell with his crew, and he was delayed seeking replacements. He would not put out in late winter even on the Kingston-Boston run with nothing better than a passel of louse-gnawed Jamaican monkeys who'd die like Caribbee butterflies at the first breath of a northerly and anyway couldn't tell the head from the hawse-holes. Jenks ripped out other comments, cramped by the need of setting quill to paper, concerning Jamaican speed in loading his logwood and molasses while the remnants of his good crew were too sick or drunk to lend a hand. "They doe labour a Moment," he wrote, "and falle into a most sweete bloudie Slummber." Snorting over that letter in the company of Ben and Reuben, John Kenny remarked that he couldn't picture man, monkey or butterfly winning much sweet slumber when Mr. Jenks spoke in his natural voice—the which, said Mr. Kenny, was the secret of Mr. Jenks' virtue, for by raising that voice to strong conversational pitch he could lift you the father and mother of a typhoon out of a flat calm.
A clop of hoofs, a grind of halting wheels—Ben heard that above the mutter of small waves fumbling the piles of the wharf, and turned to see the coach drawing up near Mr. Kenny's warehouse. A dark woman stepped out, doll-size with distance, helping two others alight. The breeze snatched at full skirts; an arm flew up restraining a blue bonnet; Ben heard a ripple of remote laughter, and the women consulted, bonnets grouped like the heads of little lively fowl. Plainly not working-women nor dockside sluts, they must have some errand at the warehouse, and would not be coming out here into the raw smell of tar, fish, sewage-corrupted water and salt air. Mr. Kenny, with slightly dulled hearing, was unaware of them. Ben looked again to Artemis.
"Watch, Ben! Wouldn't you think he was bearing down smack onto the bow of that three-master? She's a New Yorker, by the way. Hoy!" Mr. Kenny danced a stiff caper. "Like an old woman threading a needle! But if the watchman on that Mannahatta tub pissed his britches, no shame to him at all. Watch!"
The lonely blue-eyed man was watching too, in the curve of his long back something hawk-like.
Mr. Kenny relaxed, chuckling. "Ben, I recall you've never met Mr. Jenks. When he's ashore he never visits around, damn the dear man, not even to Roxbury. There's a reason—never mind. Had he a contrary wind this afternoon he'd likely bring her in anyhow. Once I watched him fetch my wallowing old Hera to this wharf. Filthy little northeast blow, and she about as comfortable to handle as a bull on ice. I thought he'd drop anchor alee of Bird Island and wait. Not Jenks—brought her in like a homing dove. Knows every inch and instant of the tides as they'll never be known by your landside chart-makers, noticed it a thousand times. I don't mean he'll take foolish risks. With Hera that time—to him it was a nothing, did it easy as a milkmaid strips a cow. Hera went down off the Cape—'d I ever tell you?—seven years ago in a fog. Floating hulk stove in her la'board side. Filled in twenty minutes, no fault of Jenks, and didn't he bring off every man alive in one boat and one damned little dory? Not a soul lost."
He had told of it before. Ben never found it difficult to hear Uncle John's repeated tales as if new. In a way they were, since Ben knew he had probably missed something in the earlier telling.
Wharf hands slouched from the warehouse, taking command of the space where soon the figurehead under the low-slung bowsprit of Artemis would gaze inward toward her homeland, if that grave white face, something less than a woman's and something more, knew any homeland now but the one she shared with Mother Carey's chickens. The men busied themselves over ropes and fenders, with raucous horseplay. The blue-eyed man certainly noticed them, but never turned from observing Artemis with the intentness of a schoolmaster or a lover.
The roustabouts brought a stench of cheap taverns, rum, tobacco, sweat. Bulky short-worded men, some tattooed and wonderfully scarred, their noise slightly restrained by the presence of an important merchant and a well-dressed boy. The boy envied their carelessness. To watch them you'd think the homecoming of Artemis from her maiden voyage was a trifle, worth no more than a shot of spit off the jetty. Ben saw a leather-hided giant twiddle free a length of rope and try it on the legs of a companion who yelped and grappled with him harmlessly.
Behind Ben a crystalline voice abruptly asked: "Will she anchor, Mr. Kenny, or come in to moor direct?"
"Direct, my dear." Mr. Kenny was beaming, a hand on the girl's arm. "Did your father ever make me pay lighterage if he could help it?"
"What a pert breeze! I vow I'm brave to be out in it."
"This little air? Why, Faith, it would scarce raise a kite for a running boy. Anyway 'twas no breeze put the brier roses in your cheeks, you was born with those, well I remember."
Mr. Kenny's back was turned to Ben. Ben was standing quite alone, hearing yet the long murmuring of the water, as he fought away the dead weight of shyness and discovered the April grace of her, dressed in shining blue, wind-clasped; looked again, and encountered a wounding sweetness of blue eyes.
John Kenny's woodland had never been surveyed; somewhere it blended into crown-grant timberland or unclaimed wilderness. His house stood beyond the natural limits of Roxbury—he liked that—on a rolling rise of ground south of the road to Cambridge. From his back pasture, Reuben Cory had heard him say, you could keep under forest cover all the way to Providence, and maybe he'd do it some time, the old man said, if ever the Saints came a-snapping too close at his heels. John Kenny might have started saying that twenty or thirty years ago when it wasn't entirely a jest.
From the window of the room upstairs that he shared with Ben, Reuben stared eastward beyond the Dorchester road, across open land and marsh and water, to the low hills of Dorchester Neck two miles away, gray and brown yet alive with a subdued radiance under the afternoon sun of April. Beyond those harmless hills moved the sunrises, and the stern Atlantic that seemed to be tugging at his brother's heart and giving him no rest.
Driven by his own dark unease of spring, by some dread of human voices and the wrong questions they ask, by shame at the ungracious whim that had prompted him to stay home—after all, if he was not going in to watch the return of Artemis, sighted yesterday playing games off the Cape with a contrary wind, then he had no proper excuse for this half-holiday from study—driven above all by a need for the April day as it might come to him lonely in a golden calm at the edge of wilderness, Reuben slipped downstairs light as a cat, out past the black wet ground of the kitchen garden and down a long slope into the south pasture, then on toward soft-spoken hemlocks.
Reuben had discovered a bodily sureness in these solitary journeys, a trust in his own senses, and a puzzled, reaching love for the life of the unhuman world. Sometimes he stole out of the house at night, with owl and fox and whippoorwill, if the moon was shining to help him; Ben slept sweetly never knowing that. Ben often came with him into the daytime woodland, but to stroll out here with Ben belonged to another category of experience. The world of I-am-alone cannot share an orbit with other planets, as the world and Reuben-self that existed in Ben's presence could exist nowhere else.
He would never be tall like Ben, nor quite as strong. At fifteen that no longer troubled him. His own hard wiry thinness was sufficient; it would carry him, he supposed, wherever he cared to go.
At the lower end of the pasture he climbed a stile into the spicy-smelling hush. A wood road continued on the other side; Reuben soon abandoned it, following landmarks that brought him to one of his better-loved havens, where Ben had often loafed with him.
Over a huge flat-topped boulder a spruce towered to sixty feet, the droop of branches enclosing the rock; one could imagine the hide of a gray monster lurking in the green. The boughs slanted steeply, creating a room with a granite floor and walls of gold-flecked shadow, a gentle and a secret place—old; the spruce must have been already old in the time of King Philip's War. A midget brook passed here. It had gouged a pool at the outer end of the granite block, not deep even in the time of spring rains, but reflections of the spruce gave it an ocean infinity of green.
Wander a few yards down the brook and you owned another world, where the water widened to larger ponds, supporting patches of feather-topped marsh grass here and there. Maples on firmer ground bordered this damp clearing, which by itself became many worlds in the flow of the seasons—the world of deep summer, for example, when you could watch mating dances of the small green dragonflies that never come near houses.
Reuben climbed silently into the sanctuary under the spruce and lay out on the rock to stare into the pool refreshed by the rains of April. He invited to his ears all least disturbances of the enclosing silence—a weak murmur upstream where the trifling water hurried over pebbles, a breath of motion in the needles of the spruce, a bluejay's complaint softened by distance, a cow lowing more than a mile away; a greater mystery, the beat of his own heart in the rib-cage pressed against rock, not quite pain. He saw the face of himself the stranger in the water below, and shut his eyes. When the flesh is quiet, he thought, the mind is also. Why? I alway knew that. The quiet is brief.
Why?...
Because (I think) everything is part of a journey. I am never, I was never still. Perhaps there is no stillness except in death.
Human sounds reached him, a brushing of last year's grass in that clearing downstream, a vague cough. Reuben sat up, annoyed and puzzled.
It could not be anyone with the privilege of bidding him to cease idling. Uncle John was in Boston with Ben. The tutor was sulking in his room—it hurt Mr. Hibbs that a boy granted a half-holiday should elect to spend it as he pleased, and anyway Mr. Gideon Hibbs was not at home in any forest outside the Eclogues of Virgil. Uncle John's gardener and handy man Rob Grimes was accounted for too—Reuben had heard his axe in the woodshed.
If some poacher or Indian were fooling about the back land, Uncle John would wish to know. Reuben slipped from the rock with no sound, and wormed a gradual way through the brush. Someone sneezed. Poachers try not to sneeze; prowling Indians just don't; still Reuben maintained his caution because of a wild-animal pleasure in it. Having stolen by degrees to the edge of the clearing, he observed the stout bowed back and lightly fringed bald head of a man kneeling by a shallow pond, parting the dead grass to stare down into the water. Surely not a poacher examining a trap; the man was familiar somehow.
Reuben identified him, but doubtfully. Acting on an impulse of gentle wickedness, he slid out from the bushes and sat cross-legged with his chin in his hands, all as quietly as a mouse crossing a heap of flour.
Rising at last from his peculiar inspection of the pond water, the man sneezed again. He turned unknowing, and jumped delightfully. He said "God bless me!" and closed his large mouth two or three times while a slow chuckle shook him from fringed head to dingy shoes—a memorably ugly man pitted with smallpox scars from a button chin to a bulging forehead. His clothes were snuff-stained; respectable once, now a second best suited to the woods. His little dark eyes gleamed mirthful and sad, intent. A ribbony nose ended in a flared tip with a double knob. Reuben marveled that having known this face at his bedside, and that not long ago, he could have been confused in remembering it.
"I'm sorry, sir—didn't go for to startle you, Mr. Welland." "Oh, didn't you!"
"It was the wig."
"The wig, sir? Oh, you mean the absence of my wig. I'm in a manner disguised. I understand your synecdoche, or do I mean hypallage?"
"Metonymy," said Reuben.
"Brrr!" said Amadeus Welland. "Mm-yas, of course, 'tis the spotted child, the younger one. How's your brother, Mr. Cory?" "Well," said Reuben, and laughed happily for no plain reason.
Sighing and grunting as the elderly do, the little man sat on the ground, not too ungracefully in spite of stooped plumpness and a modest melon of potbelly. His darkened snuff-stained hands were firm, not very wrinkled; he might be less ancient than he seemed. "Ah, the wig! The structure! I employ it, you understand, for medical purposes. Wondrous therapeutic—I dare venture you and your brother were so frightened by it that you were forced to recover in spite of the worst my simples could do. Yet plainly no one in his right mind could dwell in such a thing, let alone go for a walk in the woods."
"I can see that, sir."
"You can, ha? I bought it in Newport," said Mr. Welland dreamily. "Ten years ago. The moths have been at it a little since then; at that time there were more ribbons in it, and I was younger myself. It doth own one other function beside the medical. Not exactly duplicity nor artifice—let us say, concealment. As a scholar, Mr. Cory, you'll discover how a man of learning must often hide in the bushes, not only from the ignorant, sir, but even more from the almost-wise. Now a man of medicine, if he hath also some pretension to scholarship, is much exposed, sir, much exposed to the winds of mischance, and so must even carry his own dem'd shrubbery about with him, and that's what I do. Honestly, Reuben, a'n't it a hell of a wig?"
"Oh, Mr. Kenny!" said Faith Jenks. "Brier roses? I'll rest content with that till you say a prettier." She studied Ben with silent laughter.
Laughing of course at the pimples. For a year Ben's face had been lightly tormented. Huge wrists jutted; his nose was too small, his mouth too big, the devil with all of it. Since she chose to laugh, Ben hated her; thus occupied, he discovered as one caught in the embrace of ocean that he was in love.
Maybe she had not been laughing. Her own small dainty mouth showed no obvious quirk. Not brier roses. Damask roses, remembered—remembered——
In a dooryard garden at Deerfield.
Why, they would be blooming still! The village burned, and many died, but not the secret life under the snow. She planted them.... At the first urgency of summer sun they would have waked, spreading over scorched fallen timbers in the desolate ground to spill the sweetness from their clear June faces. For the first time Ben thought: I must go back—some day. I must learn whether that is true.
The blue of Faith's coat and dress conspired with the bay and the blue of heaven to make her eyes deeper than any sky of April. She stood taller than Mr. Kenny, a woman grown, full-breasted, poised, maybe no older than Ben in years but in command of all she said and did. His quick glance told him she was in the habit of biting her right thumbnail, and he rebuked himself for noticing it—merely such a flaw as a goddess needs if she's to wear the semblance of common clay.
"Your mother's well, my dear?"
"Ay, Mr. Kenny, but not well enough to be out in this changeable weather. She wished to come but I prevailed on her. Poor Mother is so readily distracted!"
"I know. Ah, forgive me!—Mistress Faith Jenks, Mr. Benjamin Cory, my grand-nephew, more a son. Hoy, and Charity—how's my lady Charity?" This to a brief, blunt block of child who made some breathy noise. Faith was holding out her hand. Ben knew he could not kiss it (as Ru could have done) nor speak at all without sounding like a crow.
She had pity, letting his fingers know the electric softness and taking her hand away. Ben confronted the glare of my lady Charity. About thirteen, grim with crippling shyness, Charity tilted her square face back in a blue bonnet that reflected her sister's in everything but grace. A freckled paw jerked out and dropped before Ben could grasp it, clenching its tiny companion. "'D do," she said, and examined her shoe-tips in a cold quiet of despair.
A third strange face watched Ben—still, brown, impersonal; a Negro girl, therefore a servant, probably a slave, but with no beaten, cringing air such as Ben had noticed in the slaves of Pastor Williams at Deerfield or in the few he had glimpsed in Boston and Roxbury. Her slenderness was clad Puritan-fashion in white and gray, somehow not subdued by the radiance of Faith. She stood apart, unconcerned as the lady Artemis. Charity had taken a few awkward backward steps until the brown girl's long-fingered hand dropped on her shoulder and there remained. Dark eyes moved on to contemplate the open daylight and blue water, disturbing Ben with the sense of a quiet alien and strong.
"Indeed," Faith was saying, "I've heard of you, Mr. Cory, and hoped we might meet sooner. We don't go about much, with my father so much away at sea. You was of Deerfield, I think?"
"Yes." Why, that was no croak! "I feel it to be long ago."
She smiled compassionately; everyone knew the story of Deerfield. "'Deed you and your brother are men of mystery. I fear your noses are buried in big old long books from a day's end to the next."
Mr. Kenny sighed and intervened. "True, Faith, their tutor and I, we make 'em toil like galley slaves. Harvard in the autumn—the both of 'em, I'm proud to say. Might have entered last year, but I wished 'em better prepared, Mr. Leverett of Harvard concurring, seeing they had no classics in childhood." Ben squirmed; it sounded as though having no classics in childhood was rather like being born with one leg.
"Your brother isn't in Boston today to see the Artemis?"
"No, Mistress Faith, he—well...."
"Mr. Reuben," said Uncle John too lightly, "was of a mind to go walking in the woods."
"Ah, the pretty thing!" Faith exclaimed, and Ben gave her credit for divine tactfulness. "Mr. Kenny, why is the bowsprit slanted so low to the water? I never saw the like on another vessel, no never."
"A whim of mine, my dear. I meddled with the builders. But your father hath told me the thought's good—larger spread of jib, and a stronger angle against the tension of the stays. Yet when I wanted it so I merely thought 'twould make a handsomer line to the eye. Mph!—so peradventure art is good for something?"
"Sir...." The lonely blue-eyed man had come lightly from the end of the wharf, his hat held to his breast with no attempt to hide its shabbiness. His shoes were cracked and stained. A rip in the green coat was mended with large seaman's stitches, evidence that no woman tended him, that his feline neatness was his own achievement. He bowed, as Mr. Kenny's wizened mask watched courteously down the nose. "I fear I intrude—is it I'm addressing the owner of the ketch?"
"I am her owner, sir."
"I've not seen a fairer craft in my seafaring years, and they some twenty or more in all manner of vessels, all manner of places too betwixt here and the Indies, that'll be the eastern Indies—Molucca, Ceylon...."
His voice was baritone, resonant and sweet, a power stirring in it like a drumbeat felt in the marrow. A plangent overtone rang in every word. A lifting inflection suggested the speaker loved his words, reluctant to put a period to them. Ben had never heard that in New England speech—once, maybe, in that lost time when Uncle Zebina Pownal came out of nowhere to sing for them.
"Ay, she's fair," said Mr. Kenny, admitting the obvious.
"And if it's you that oversaw the designing, as (forgive my rudeness) I thought I overheard you say, then may I be shaking your hand?"
Mr. Kenny held it out impulsively, defenses down. Ben saw in his great-uncle what he thought of as the "Artemis look"—love me, love my ketch. Pushing aside a transient alarm, Ben himself gave way to one of his gusty moments of allegiance. This blue-eyed man must be admirable and wise. His pale quiet, the odd way his face took little share in the ardor of his voice—why, merely the reasonable caution of a man who must have voyaged everywhere and seen everything on the everlasting seas. One would do well to listen when he spoke, and remember.
"I am John Kenny of Roxbury, sir. The ketch is the Artemis, Peter Jenks captain, her maiden voyage now ending."
"Artemis! O the fair true name for such a lady! Daniel Shawn, sir, your humble servant." No man's servant, and Ben knew it. Presented to the elder daughter of Peter Jenks, captain, Mr. Shawn kissed her fingers, and Ben writhed, not in jealousy but at his own incompetence: that was how it ought to be done, and Faith was clearly pleased. "Artemis!—what other name would be possible?" said Mr. Shawn, and grew intent on brushing his coat lapel, asking casually in the same breath: "Doth she carry letters of marque, Mr. Kenny?"
"That she don't," said John Kenny rather blankly. "Armed she is—you can see the la'board falconet from here—but no letters of marque, sir. I've not a word to say against the privateersmen, in these years of war when the French do beset us so, but for my ships I'll have no part of it, having made mine own small fortune in the hard way, Mr. Shawn—refraining, let us say, from the thought of easy prizes because I know mine own share of human frailty, and proposing so to continue."
"For which I honor you, sir," said Mr. Shawn, and having brushed the lapel to his satisfaction and smiled with wonderful sweetness, he changed the subject. "I've heard of your father, Mistress Jenks, the way I suppose most seaman have in this part of the world, and he noble as any captain under sail, now that's no lie."
Faith blushed, overwhelmed; her right hand wandered to her mouth. Mr. Kenny was visibly wondering whether to steer Charity into another social ordeal. Charity leaned against the brown girl, observing Artemis to the exclusion of all else on earth, particularly Benjamin Cory. Faith turned to Ben, astoundingly, swaying so near that her face under the ribboned calash must tilt up to look at him. She clutched the bonnet, though it was well tied. "Pray allow me to tack into the lee of you, Mr. Cory, to shelter my silly bonnet—your shoulders are broad enough."
Later in white nights Ben thought: She said that, and to me....
Later also Ben found it hard to recall anything else said by Faith or himself—small talk, surely—in those moments of nearness while Artemis, clear of the harbor shipping, moved down on them tranquilly, a great wind-begotten dream realizing herself in the here-and-now.
A round bulky man held a rope at the bow of Artemis. Below him a face cruelly pure and calm, carved from apple-wood a year ago by an old artist of Dorchester who was nearly blind, stared into a world of many homelands. In the momentary enclosing silence, Ben saw a flash of startled recognition between that stout man in the bow and Daniel Shawn; since both looked away immediately, Ben dismissed it as a vagary of his own imagination, or none of his business. The stout man was unknown to Ben, perhaps one of the replacements signed on at Kingston; a greasy, unrevealing face. Ben heard a flurry of shouts from men aboard and men on the dock who knew each other. He also found a face he knew, and waved—the mate, yellow-haired Jan Dyckman, who had visited at Roxbury, brick-solid and big, a shy and gentle soul ashore, moving with a warm confidence in all the ways of his Lutheran God. But Jan did not see Ben's wave or had no time for it, taut at the starboard rail and watching simultaneously every inch of remaining canvas, every ripple between Artemis and the wharf.
"Ahoy, Mistress Faith!" That was a north-wind voice overriding all other commotion, from the bald giant looming aft near the helmsman. Artemis was yet some thirty yards away, gliding, barely disturbing the filthy dockside water. Ben's glance took in the giant—it could only be Peter Jenks—with a wonder that such an iron mountain could have begotten the loveliness of Faith. Even that far away Captain Jenks was more than life-size, and surely knew it. His nose was flattened like a board, set in deep leather creases between small eyes icy blue in the sunlight—courageous arctic eyes without compassion.
Faith jumped at her father's shout, clutching her skirt prettily. "Clarissa! My kerchief—quickly!" Her hand behind her snapped a finger impatiently before the Negro girl gave her a white kerchief; then Faith was running, waving the cloth, expertly careless of ropes and tackle and the roustabouts who lurched out of her path. She knew her way; she was not impeding them, and stepped back properly when it was time for that rope in the bow to leap ashore.
Another snaked from the pier to be caught amidships. The lady Artemis needed no restraining thrust of the fenders. She nudged wet timbers as one arranging a pillow for her head, and fell asleep.
"I would not," said Reuben, "utter any gratuitous multiloquence which could be construed as a detraction, libel or impudicitous derogation of another man's periwig."
"I yield. You know bigger and sillier words than I do."
"Then will you tell me, sir, what on earth you were looking for over there by the pond?"
"Mm-yas," said Mr. Welland, "the pond. Why, I've been longing for years to learn how peeper frogs peep. Don't have much time to ramble—difficult for a doctor to break away, but now and then I do, with the excuse of hunting for herbs. I heard 'em peeping hereabouts, thought at last I might catch 'em at it. No such thing. They hide when I peep at 'em, and devil a peep will they peep. Why's that?"
"Too near them, sir, and not still enough. You should have sat well away from the water, with no motion for at least a quarter-hour."
Deliberately Mr. Welland took snuff from an enameled box, and sneezed, a light explosion with a double after-echo. "Fi-choo-shoo!... Mr. Cory, I take it they have peeped in your presence?"
"Oh yes. The little throats swell up enormous and they shake all over." To soften the blow Reuben added: "I'm sure they would for you, Mr. Welland. Merely a matter of making yourself look like a rock."
"At my age I'm to imitate a boulder—boulder and yet more bold."
"Paronomasia," said Reuben. "The ultimate in wit."
"Boo! You imitated a rock rather well yourself. I never heard a sound. When I first saw you I thought I had to do with one of the Little People."
"Ah! The invisible world!" Daringly Reuben made horns of his fingers and waggled them. He was very happy, no longer much concerned to wonder why.
"Might I ask further, why you don't find it strange that I should spend my declining years endeavoring to watch frogs peep?"
Reuben considered. "I think everything is interesting."
"Oh!" That was a startled sound, without laughter. Mr. Welland looked away from him so long that Reuben's pleasure clouded over. He could have gone too far; said something wrong; happiness and friendship could tumble, an air-castle in ruins. Mr. Welland was holding out the snuffbox, closed. "Try if you can discover the catch. If you can I'll tell you who gave it me."
Reuben studied it, aware he was being tested in some way that went far beyond the trifling problem. The box was of ebony, the sides covered with intricate carving of grape leaves. The enameled picture inset in the cover displayed a naked goat-leg fellow plucking a cluster from a vine. Since pressure on the carving brought no result, Reuben methodically tried lifting the leaves With a thumbnail until one yielded and the box was open.
"Mph!—most persons spend half an hour and give it up. Well, it was given me—worthless keepsake, he said—by Sir Thomas Sydenham, when as a young man stuffed with mine own importance I called upon him at London. He was most kind. Corrected my quantities, I recall, when I ventured a Latin tag in what he tolerantly called my vile colonial accent. He died, I believe, in the year of the revolution, 1689—so you see, Reuben, time and change, and we grow old somehow." Reuben thought: But he is not speaking to himself in the far-off way of the old; he is speaking to me, and for my sake.... "Perhaps you never heard of Sir Thomas?"
"No, sir, I never did."
"He hath been called the English Hippocrates—an exaggeration, but a great man certainly, I think the greatest in medicine since Harvey."
"Harvey?"
"There are gaps in your learning after all. I'll be happy to tell you about Harvey if you like. About Signor Malpighi too, who as it happens discovered the presence of the capillaries by dissecting the lung of a frog. Not one of your frogs of course. Some Swiss or Italian frog, unknown benefactor of science."
"Did you think, sir, I was all vain because I like to make comical noises with big words?"
"No, sir. On reflection—no; I did not think that."
"I've been called—oh, flippant or the like, because it seems I do now and then laugh at the wrong time."
"Who calls you that?"
"Oh!... My tutor for one, but meaneth no harm by it. Actually he's very kind, and I suppose I try him badly, but then by chance I'll pronounce some Latin quantity correctly or come unscathed through the horrid jungle of some Greek verb, and he forgiveth all."
"M. Cory, I have been sitting here fearing that perhaps I had laughed at the wrong times, and that you might regard me as—mm-yas, flippant or the like."
"I do not."
"In that view of the case, perhaps you and I ought to be friends."
"As a matter of fact," said Reuben, "I thought we already were."
South of Boston Neck the road to Roxbury entered a desolate mile between the waters of Gallows Bay on the east and a waste of salt marsh. Here the smell of the sea was all about you; above, a meager crying of gulls in the windy daytime. Near Roxbury the salt flats and Gallows Bay were partly hidden by woods and rocky knolls. Lights were said to wander this mile of road at night, not fireflies nor lanterns of vessels on Gallows Bay, which had honestly earned its name.
Efforts had been made to pave the road during the last sixty or seventy years. Stones rose up and walked. Hence derived grave democratic discussion and heartburning: if you have all the rocks of New England to draw upon, there's still nothing so pleasing as a paving block to support the sills of a barn, especially if it be cut as God might have left it in a state of nature, so that no town father can lay his hand on his heart and swear it came from the particular hole where his horse broke a leg.
Ben Cory watched a soaring of white wings tipped with black as a gull drifted out of sight over the marshes. Out here the white-headed eagles came at times, lesser life falling quiet. Lordly, Uncle John called them, but said they were cowardly pirates too, and told once how he had watched them circle about till other birds rose with hard-won fish, and then torment them into yielding it. Ben wondered as the gull vanished, why he should think of the man Daniel Shawn. He had missed something Uncle John was saying, and clucked to his mare. "Your pardon, sir?"
"I was saying Mr. Jenks had three daughters, Faith, Hope and Charity. Hope died as an infant. Charity's but a young thing...."
"Faith is—charming, I thought."
"She is," said Uncle John with total dryness. "Ben, I wish your opinion of that fat man, that new bosun Tom Ball."
"My opinion?" Flattered and flustered, Ben drew his wits away from the dream of Faith. "He's short of words certainly, Uncle John. He only showed me about the deck while you was engaged with Mr. Dyckman, and I don't recall he said more than half a dozen words, and that in so thick a talk—Devon, isn't it?—I missed much of it. That's not fat, Uncle John, that's mostly brawn, I believe.... I don't like it, sir, when a man stares at me long without winking. They say it's the candid way, but I feel more as if he was defying me to call him a liar."
"Eh, Benjamin, you're somewhat sharp. I don't like him either, but Mr. Jenks calls him a good sailor. Ay, Devon, where my father was born—within sound of the Channel, he used to say, and could speak of the old country pleasantly when he was not laying about him as the Lord's own interpreter and flail...."
"You said Mr. Jenks never visits about ashore?"
"Mph!... Ben, when you're a man grown, should you find yourself a little too fond of drink, I suggest you resist it, even sometimes at cost of being named a poor thing, canting killjoy or whatever. 'Tis a matter of being your own man. Should you find—by your own judgment, boy—that drinking interferes with that, don't drink. Did you like Mr. Shawn?"
"Yes, sir, I did like him, very much. Are you telling me indirectly, Uncle John, that Captain Jenks——?"
"I am." Mr. Kenny halted his gray gelding on a rise of ground. "I like to pause here, Ben, where you see only the roofs and little threads of smoke.... Yes, he's something a slave to it, though never aboard ship. At sea he allows his men the ration and not a drop for himself. But ashore he must fall into another sea, of liquor—drifting, helpless, I don't know what stops him from sinking altogether. Blameth it on the moon and tides—his fancy. He told me once how in the dark times of the moon at sea he goes near mad with need of it but won't yield—then I dare say it'll go hard with every man aboard. The moon's his friend in some manner—he's well enough when she's waxing full, sad and bitten by his need when she waneth, noticed it a thousand times. I told him who Artemis was in the legends of the Greeks, virgin huntress and goddess of the moon. He was pleased, and turned on my ketch a newly loving eye. A troubled man, Benjamin. Knoweth well what is right, but no one ever tells him, no preacher or any other. Having shaken hands with him at last, I dare say you can imagine why few would undertake it."
"My hand still aches.... Sir, do you think that if I—I mean when I go to Harvard, I shall know what I wish to do, that is for a life's work?" So it was spoken, the doubt that had been nagging his days.
"I trust so, Ben." And was that all? Ben wondered—was that all the old man would say? A gust of wind full of the sea smell blew across Ben's shoulder and sent a last year's oak leaf scurrying down the road. The wind's embrace was cold, the leaf a reminder of autumn in the flood of spring. "You know I concur in the wish your father expressed in his last moments: you and Reuben must acquire learning. But then the decision must be with you. If you should decide to take up my affairs when I'm done with 'em, why, I'll be pleased, more perhaps I shouldn't say. Trade, commerce—it's not dull, Ben, so long as one keeps the wit alive with a private philosophy. Our holy friends make great show of despising it, the while it keeps them and the rest of us fed and clothed. It might not suit Reuben—well well, let time work a little on it, boy.... If you should come to see it that way, remember ships are the thing, and there our dirty Boston's got 'em all by the nose. Never be a port in the Americas to match her, never."
Daringly Ben murmured: "What about Newport?"
"Pretty little harbor. I hear they never let anybody piss off the docks—afraid of flooding it, you know. Now New York might come to something one day, if they ever find the wit to use what nature gave 'em. Like you to see New York some time, maybe after the war, the way the river comes down wide and grand past miles of cliffs on the west. Nothing like it in New England nor Old England neither. Clean, wondrous blue—Jenks told me once 'tis good as well water above the tides. He took a sloop of mine up to Albany once, years ago. Well, poor Jenks! He'll be into the second or third tankard by now, scarce giving that slave wench time to lift off his boots. Yes, the troubled men—seekers and dreamers and friends of the moon, a little mad, and minds grown wise before their time like your sweet brother's—I don't pretend to understand 'em, Ben, the way I think you and I understand each other. I suppose they engender a great share of the sorrow in the world. What a place it might be without 'em! In a world without 'em I swear I'd die of boredom before I was hanged."
"She is fair. When we saw her a-building up the river and climbed about on her naked ribs, that was different, Ru. Now she's alive, even at the wharf you feel it. She's only waiting to meet the winds again."
"You'd marry the sea if you could. Come here to the window and look down. Something else is fair. Still light enough if you look sharp. The apple—nay, I mean the little new one, that Rob set out the first year we came here. It's budded, for the first time."
"So it is. Will Rob let 'em ripen this year, I wonder?"
"I dare say not.... So you've met the great Jenks at last."
"Never shake hands with him. Remember the bosun Joe Day? Died at the Indies—smallpox, Mr. Dyckman said. I was fond of Joe Day—made me think of Jesse Plum, the tales he could tell.... What's Kate contriving that smells so good all over the house?"
"Roast goose, O wanderer."
"And what's up with Hibbs? Ha'n't seen him since I got home."
"Sulking. Benjamin, stand forth! You ask me, what of Gideon Hibbs; you ask, oh, where is he? Hibbs Pontifex hath gone to roost, with a book upon his knee."
"Upstairs?"
"Next door."
"All lank and lean?"
"Ay—dreaming of roast goose."
"What planneth he for the morrow's morn, the evil old—uh—papoose?"
"Ovid, my lord."
"Not Ovid still!"
"Ovid, my lord."
"Oh, no!"
"Multum in parvo, fiat lux, pro bono publico. Balls, we've done better, but for a Monday evening it'll pass. Throw me a clean pair of drawers, will you, like a fair angel, Ben? Was Jenks' daughter there?"
"Yes. Both, I mean. The younger's a child. And a stranger introduced himself, a Mr. Daniel Shawn. Excited by Artemis and won Uncle John's heart praising her. A seaman, silver-tongued—honest, I thought."
"What was he after?"
"I don't know that he was after anything, Ru. From his talk he must have been everywhere and seen everything."
"Maybe not everything."
"Oh, Muttonhead!—a manner of speaking."
"A goaty eye for Jenks' fair daughter belike?"
"No. Merely polite to her, like any gentleman."
"An old man then."
"Forty perhaps."
"Ah, Ben, these ancient cods! They're the worst, didn't you know? Consider our Pontifex, how we sometimes hear him moaning in the night. I tell you, he hath a private succubus. Down the chimney cometh she, most punctually, Wednesdays and Saturdays, to grind him all night long between hot ivory legs, grind him even unto the very last gerunds and aorists and ablatives and first person plural of the verb contorquere."
"Ha?"
"Alas, poor Ben!—no Latin? It means to wriggle."
"Well, shame on you!"
"Button your long lip. You can't say that when I've made you laugh."
"No, blast you, I can't. As for Shawn, I think he only wished to know more about Artemis."
"Ay-yah. Still everyone wants for something."
"Granted, O Grandfather! And thou?"
"Trifles. Most of the ocean and the empire of Cathay. The spring moon. The Northwest Passage, the Fountain of Youth, a few acres of Eden. Trifles, but still you see it's true—everyone wants for something, even I."
Chapter Two
"Yet the manifold desires of man," said Mr. Gideon Hibbs, biting a walnut—"and note that within this category I would subsume the concupiscent;"—his long right hand held down a finger of the left—"the natural, wherein I include the need of daily provender and nature's other common demands;"—another finger—"the intellectual, that is the desires of mind operating as it were in vacuo; the spiritual, whereby I understand the desire of man unto God;"—his left thumb waved, not included, and this troubled Mr. Hibbs because he was slightly drunk—"all these desires, I say, are subject to the ineluctable domination of chance, gentlemen, pure chance." He sighed at another walnut, a grayish man not old, in fact rather young by arithmetical measure. He could never have been young in spirit; Reuben supposed that Mr. Hibbs would have admitted this himself, with stern pride, holding that flesh is corruption, that truth can be illuminated only by the cold flame of philosophy.
From threadbare sleeves jutted his hands, pale and bony, clumsy with anything but a goose quill, stained by ink and tobacco, the nails always black—a corruption of the flesh that did not trouble him.
Reuben wondered occasionally if anything did. Mr. Hibbs' pedagogic rages were just that, put on for discipline and academic show. Reuben had sensed this, ever since his and Ben's first sweaty encounters with amo, amas, amat. The rages were as artificial as the lancinating stare of Mr. Hibbs' dark eyes, the stare intended to pin a student to the mat confessing all sins, especially those of omission. He knew Ben felt less secure under the furor academicus. The eyes of Mr. Hibbs might glare bitterly, the large red lips squirm anguished above the spade-shaped jaw, the hands clench as if itching to claw the answer out of a boy like a loose tooth, but Reuben knew the soul of Mr. Hibbs was away from all that on the other side of the moon, disputing with Democritus, Aristotle, Cicero, the Schoolmen, Comenius, even John Calvin, who might have been a sad sort of freshman in that crowd. Living at John Kenny's house with no duty but teaching, Mr. Hibbs had all the time in the world for the boys but not an undivided spirit. The black stare was further softened by his wig, a mousy thing carelessly powdered. The powder grayed his poor clothes, puffing off in a sneezy cloud if anyone patted his back—no one ever did except John Kenny.
"And yet," said Mr. Kenny, "if I understand you, sir, you believe in God. Shall God rule by chance? I am not well grounded in philosophy."
"Oh, the Prime Mover set the wheel a-spinning, and needeth not to observe it, I dare say—heresy of course, for the which I could spend a week or two in the stocks."
"And I with you," John Kenny chuckled, "for at least two thirds of what I say every day within mine own house. God then is synonymous with first cause?"
Ben was gazing into the purple country of a wineglass, and Reuben saw that he had not drunk much, which was proper—or was that his second glass? This was the first time the boys had been invited to linger thus after dinner. Perhaps Uncle John wished to give them an initiatory taste of manhood, or else supposed them too full of roast goose to move.
"Not synonymous, sir, for that would imply that God is only first cause, no more. We must assume he hath many more attributes."
"We may assume it. We can hardly know it," Mr. Kenny suggested, and reached across the table to refresh the tutor's Madeira and splash a bit more in Reuben's glass. "But what is knowledge?"
A sidelong glance told Reuben that black caterpillars had gone crawling up toward Mr. Hibbs' wig; the big red mouth was pursed; the eyes squinted at the borders of philosophy. "We must recognize divers degrees of knowledge. There is mere factual knowledge: I know I hold this glass in my hand; if I drop it the wine will stain the cloth. Knowledge of the attributes, eternal presence of God is a higher knowledge."
"In what manner higher, Mr. Hibbs? More difficult? More important? More full of earthly significance?—if so, to whom?"
"I mean such knowledge cometh to the mind and soul direct, not by way of mere tangible evidence."
"And yet, Mr. Hibbs—this is simply mine own ignorance finding a voice—I don't understand why knowledge becomes higher because tangible evidence is lacking, nor indeed why tangible evidence should be despised. But may we return to the matter of definition?" John Kenny glanced at Reuben while the tutor's head was bowed for the inspection of another walnut; Reuben decided it was not merely possible, it was a fact: Uncle John's eyelid had flickered down and up. "What is knowledge?"
"Knowledge is the perception of truth."
Reuben drank a little, remembering the afternoon. He had spent at least two hours by the pond with Mr. Welland—listening mostly, for once launched the doctor spoke well, like one whose talk had been dammed up a long time: Harvey, Sydenham, a surgeon named Paré, Signor Malpighi again and his little frog, something of a book named Micrographia by a Robert Hooke of England. The time had gone quickly; Mr. Welland was still talking as they crossed the south pasture and climbed the slope, and from the top of it Reuben could see the tiny figures of Ben and Uncle John returning, but the doctor at first was not able to make them out. "My eyes are not what they were," he said, "though maybe I can peer a little way through a stone wall." With that remark Mr. Welland had become somewhat remote, like a man interrupted in conversation by a distant call, though all he did was stand there, his ugly, kindly face turned away from the path of the late lowering sun.
John Kenny asked: "And what is truth?"
"We must recognize divers degrees of truth," said Gideon Hibbs. "There is the empirical, observational truth I mentioned. There is logical truth, demonstrated by proceeding correctly from the premise. There is ethical truth, not demonstrable by observation or logic, deriving from an ideal harmony between the human will and the will of God."
"There I begin to lose you," said John Kenny.
"Ideal, sir, attainable in perfection only by the mind, not in common life because man is the plaything of chance, a conclusion to which I am forced, in defiance of prevailing theology, by contemplation of human frailty and the vicissitudes of life." Mr. Hibbs drank and looked a trifle happier. "Above all there is metaphysical truth, even further beyond the reach of observation and logic. Here indeed the philosopher may find consolation—by submission, if you like, to the incomprehensible."
"But in what manner is mind not a part of common life?"
"Oh? Sir, do you doubt the separateness of soul and body?"
"I confess that sometimes I do." Uncle John looked tired, Reuben saw, as though he might have lost interest in Socratic method, might even prefer to be playing chess. He enjoyed it most with Ben, Reuben knew; when Reuben himself entered the dry brilliant world of the chessboard he found it nearly impossible to temper his own sharp skill, and victory came with too much ease. He wondered if the doctor could be a chess-player. Strange, the remoteness like a sadness that had come over Mr. Welland there at the top of the rise. "If you run, Reuben, you can meet them in front of the house." That had been like a mind reading. "I don't run nowadays, Reuben." He recalled the doctor's brief mirthless smile as they shook hands. "I think I'd admire to see you run. I'll take the path through this other field—it'll bring me out back of my own house.... Run, boy, run!"
He had missed a part of something Uncle John was saying concerning the influence on the human spirit of every change suffered by the flesh. The old man was speaking of youth and age. It was all reasonable and wise, Reuben thought. Uncle John was seldom anything but reasonable and wise. "I think truth may be both a humbler and a sterner thing. I think, Mr. Hibbs, there can never be any truth but a partial truth, subject to change by every new observation."
"But that is...."
"Terrifying? For my part I don't find it so. This may be a matter of one's disposition, I suppose."
And so I ran from Mr. Welland, and because I knew my own speed and was loving the wind around me, I did not look back....
"Beyond such partial truth," said John Kenny, "you enter the region of faith; and by faith, Mr. Hibbs, I think men have moved no mountains. I think in mine old age that men have moved mountains by art and by the sweat of discontent, while faith never stirred one grain of sand."
And Ben had spurred the mare, running up the road to meet him, leaving Uncle John far behind, sweeping off his hat to let the wind at his hair. Reuben recalled his gray eyes wide and curious and sweet, his flushed face somehow surprised, as though Ben had never dreamed the world could be as good to him as it was....
John Kenny was saying something more, about the arrogance of certainty; it was not completed, for someone was knocking.
The man in the green coat stood ghostlike in the dining-room doorway behind the bulk of a bothered Kate Dobson. He should have waited for Kate to announce him. To Reuben he was a shadow of something not quite acceptable, even dimly alarming, tall with his ancient hat held to his breast, sweeping them all in a blue stare. But Uncle John was pleased. "Only a poor matter of business, Mr. Kenny, and had I known you was entertaining guests——"
"But happy to have another, and if business, let it be pleasure too! Off with your coat, man, and take a chair, and drink up!" As Daniel Shawn was protesting but sitting down anyway, Mr. Kenny sent Kate flying for a fresh decanter. "If a man hath an eye for my Artemis, shall I let him go without drinking her health? Mr. Gideon Hibbs, Mr. Daniel Shawn. Ben you've met, sir. And this is Mr. Reuben Cory, my other grand-nephew—nay, my other son."
Standing to reach across the table for a handshake, Reuben thought: God damn it, I don't like him. "I am honored, sir."
If Mr. Shawn was astonished that a pup of fifteen should have the impudence to speak first and with high formality, he hid it well; his hand was firm and kind, his murmured response neutral without amusement. Very likely, Reuben thought, he supposes I know no better; and so I have made a fool of myself once again. But he continued to feel that the coming of Daniel Shawn on this evening of winy philosophy was the approach of a wolf to a pack of harmless dogs.
Ben was pleased too, though Reuben had noticed shyness settling over him like a mist. Kate Dobson was not pleased. As she brought in the wine, her prominent mild eyes openly assessed Mr. Shawn's clothes, and her soft-footed rush from the room was virtually a flounce. Uncle John was asking: "Did you come afoot, sir, all the way to Roxbury, and at night?"
"Oh, I did that, Mr. Kenny, an easy walk."
"I'm pleased you had moonlight." In the windows, reflections of candelabra were steady golden fires. "The dem'd road's a caution, noticed it a thousand times and said so in high places too, but it does no good. I trust you met no inconvenience?"
"None, sir." Good white teeth flashed in a light dangerous smile. "No man troubles me," said Mr. Shawn, and patted his left hip, where he carried a short knife something like Ben's. "And I easy found your house, sir, the way everyone knows of Mr. John Kenny." The flattery was gross. Shawn clearly meant it to be recognized as such, using it to intimate a deeper flattery, a suggestion that he and John Kenny knew how to value the coinage of light conversation and enjoy it as a comic work of art.
"To Artemis!" said Mr. Kenny. "May she venture far!"
"Amen!" Shawn jumped up to drink that toast standing, in one draft, and Ben, Reuben saw, could do no less. He took one swallow himself for courtesy, and sat down, shifting his chair until the delicate flame of a silver wall lamp was behind Ben's head and created around him a golden nimbus that no one but Reuben would see, or seeing, remember.
"I'm happy we spoke at once of the bright lady, Mr. Kenny, for that allows me to state my business and so have done, and not be outstaying a welcome that's more than kind." But once settled in the chair at Ben's right, Mr. Shawn appeared to be in no haste at all. Reuben observed an old scar running in a gray-white thread from the black hair behind Mr. Shawn's left ear, winding through the smallpox scars and losing itself under his collar. Mr. Shawn wore no stock, no wig; simple, clean and neat in a brown jacket and gray shirt and patched breeches, he made Reuben feel foppishly overdressed in his fine silk stock, dabs of lace and other impedimenta of a gentleman that Uncle John liked to see him wear. Mr. Shawn's green coat, tossed on a chair, nakedly displayed its own patches. His large-knuckled hands were clean, his face slick-shaven and scrubbed, a moderate tan combining with natural pallor to give him a look of pitted old ivory, the only grooves two deep ones framing his proud nose and three faint permanent frown-tracks between his heavy black brows. Uncle John was replenishing his glass. "I thank you, sir, but I pray you don't press me to drink overmuch, it's I have a poor head for it, now that's no lie."
"In vino veritas," said Gideon Hibbs, and giggled. Reuben squirmed inwardly as usual at that degeneration of Mr. Hibbs' conversation into Latin snippets, the eroded currency of scholarship. With the sometimes dispassionate malevolence of youth, Reuben had spoken of it to Ben as the harrumphitas hemanhorum Hibbsiana.
Daniel Shawn threw a light, tight smile to the room at large. "Legend says truth is a naked lady dwelling in the bottom of a well, and so up we must drag her and cast a rag upon her lest her beauty be a-dazzling us, or will it be that she's a Gorgon and no beauty?—I can't say. Turn our heads, and faith, don't she go down again to the bottom of the well, the way we've had our labor for nothing? I've heard of no man ever lay with her and lived to tell of it, let alone having any get of her at all."
To the stained crystal of his suddenly empty glass, Reuben said: "Unless it was Socrates, and 'tis very true he died."
Small silence ruled. Reuben heard Mr. Hibbs draw a deep stormy breath, but before anyone could set about demolishing green youth for its impudence (if anyone was a-mind to) Daniel Shawn was tranquilly continuing: "To my business, Mr. Kenny, and I'll have done. I'm here, sir, to inquire if there be an opportunity for me to ship aboard your Artemis on her next outward passage." Caution settled on Mr. Kenny's face like cold. "I must tell you, sir, the way I've fallen enamored of the little sea-witch, I'd count it better than a berth on any full-rigged ship I know. Call it a seaman's fancy. I have mate's papers—captain's for that matter, but no man could replace Mr. Jenks, there'd be never no such thought in me mind. Indeed, Mr. Kenny, were I offered a command at present I think I'd refuse, now that's no lie. I think I'm not of a mind for it, though I have captained a vessel twice in the past and done well enough as the world judges. But if any lesser berth be available with Artemis, I'm ready, sir—ready to offer twenty years' experience of the sea and the best devotion a man can give at all."
John Kenny said with care: "But if you have captain's papers, I can't suppose you'd wish to sign on for small pay and scant authority."
Shawn sighed, smiling again with tight upper lip and steady eyes. "I think, sir, if the vessel were the Artemis, the position of mate would find me content as any man on salt water, now that's no lie. Truth is I love ships, Mr. Kenny; I know a fair one when I see her. Mother of God, in the old days, the ships I'd see standing out from Sligo Bay, and I too young to follow! I'm a Sligo man, Mr. Kenny, born in Dromore forty-one years ago and can't bear the life on the bloody beach. Steady as she goes!—it's I need a deck under me feet or I'm not living."
Mr. Kenny shook his head unhappily. "Jan Dyckman hath sailed as mate with Mr. Jenks a long time now. I can't imagine Mr. Jenks considering any other in the room of him."
"Still," said Shawn, his head on one side, his smile perhaps no more than a flicker of the candles—"still, sir, you are the owner."
"I am the owner," said Mr. Kenny stiffly, "and merely that. With such a captain as Mr. Jenks, I say nothing about the manning of my craft."
"And very just, sir. I was but thinking this Mr. Dyckman might be ready for a command himself, in one of your other vessels—thus an advancement for him, an opportunity for me."
"I see.... At present I own but two others, Mr. Shawn, one a mere sloop. The other is a ship that should now be at Virginia, a fair sturdy vessel, but she won't be homeward-bound for some months—Captain Foster is intending a triangle course, Barbados and then home. Further, I fear Jan Dyckman himself hath no wish for a captain's place. Splendid fellow, but by his own estimation a natural second in command, who tells me his ambition flies no higher. 'Tis true"—John Kenny's head slanted back and he was looking down his nose—"'tis true Artemis will carry a second mate with her usual complement."
"What is that complement, sir, may I ask?"
"She put out last August with fourteen hands. Came home with ten—smallpox and tropic fever. Three of the ten were new men Mr. Jenks signed on at Kingston. Worked her on the homeward passage with three men and a boy to a watch. I dare say the cook was obliged to turn a hand in dirty weather—he's a renegade Frenchman, by the way, and utterly mad."
"Sir, if a cook aboard ship be not mad he must become so, a law of nature. Why, I recall one we had when I captained the sloop Viceroy, King William's time—she was for Naples out of Bristol and a pleasant passage, the most of it. Rot my liver if this cook didn't go overboard off Malta—in a moderate gale, mind you—crying that a pack of Sirens was corrupting the ship's boys and he'd have 'em flayed for it, and all the time wasn't it only the wind in the stays? A Yorkshireman, and broad in the beam with a list to la'board from a broken leg that'd healed somewhat crook. No Sirens that day, and didn't I put about to fish him out of the drink?—the more fool me, for he was na' but a bundle of disaster ever after. His fancy, d'you see, took another turn—O the child he was, the great smiling angry child!—and he'd have it he must train the weevils in our biscuit to be the like of some educated fleas he'd seen, I think it was at the Cambridge Fair, and he all in a frenzy when they wouldn't answer to the names he gave 'em but continued weevils, nothing more. Mother of God, had he wished he could've had fleas a-plenty, Bristol fleas, the best in the world. Well, there was Jemima, Hannibal, Simon, Jasper—many more I forget. His time passed in shaking more of 'em out of the biscuit and bidding 'em increase and multiply in the bottom of a stewpot, the way he saw his fortune made the day we'd raise Land's End once more, but it did so happen, Mr. Kenny, on a brisk golden afternoon, that a cross-wind caught us for a moment, and no blame to vessel or man, over went the stewpot, and someone stepped on Jemima, and here was fourteen stone of redheaded Yorkshireman coming at me with a knife, for he declared the fault was mine. We were obliged to tie him below. For the rest of the voyage the cooking was done by a highland Scot from Inverness, 'tis a mystery of God we didn't all die—no Scottishmen present, I hope?... Well, I think I would not despise the place of second mate if the vessel was your Artemis, now that's no lie. Nowadays a berth is hard to find."
Uncle John had laughed too much, and was wiping his eyes. Ben had hooted unrestrained. Behind his own laughter, Reuben was reflecting that what Mr. Shawn said of maritime employment was quite simply not true. As the war dragged on, one heard that Her Majesty's Navy was only too hungry for any man who could remain upright and heave on a rope. "Sir, sir," said Mr. Kenny, "was there no reviving Jemima?"
"Oh, there was not, seeing it was the cook himself who stepped on her, the blacker the day.... As you can see, Mr. Kenny, I am not at present in prosperity. Perhaps before now I have aimed too high, rejecting opportunities that I ought to have considered."
"Have you a family, sir?"
"A widower, sir, of modest habit, with never no stomach for riot or extravagance. I married young in the old country (God comfort her!) and when my wife died in childbirth thanks to a certain damned English midwife who probably—Oh, I can see it now——" Mr. Shawn stopped, and lifted frowning eyes as if startled by some remote vision beyond the walls; he finished his wine at a gulp. "Your pardon, sir—my wits were wandering. When my wife died and the little one with her—it was long ago—I took to the sea at last, and since then the ships have been wife and child," said Mr. Shawn, and let the silence hang.
"It would be best," said Mr. Kenny, "if you approach Mr. Jenks direct. But since you've put it to me fairly, I'll speak to him also if you wish. I can make no promise at all, Mr. Shawn."
"I understand that, sir, and I thank you." Daniel Shawn's neck was flushed, the old scar throbbing, a lightly breathing snake. "You're the fair man, Mr. Kenny, and if 'tis my good luck to serve in your employ, I'll give a man's best, more I can't say."
Reuben wondered why he should be finding it necessary to compare this man with the doctor Amadeus Welland. They were nothing alike. Why?
"Mr. Shawn, let me fill your glass. Will you stay the night? I'd be pleased to save you the walking home in the dark."
"Oh, I must be going, but a thousand thanks for the thought, and I'm happy the glass is full so I may drink your health, Mr. Kenny, and the continuance of all good fortune to you, sir!"
They all drank Mr. Kenny's health, and Mr. Shawn did not go.
Reuben thought: Well, it's because of what they don't share. As Ben's face is surrounded by that golden light, so Mr. Welland carries about him—honesty. That man Welland could never plot and contrive, never; he could never show a false face, no more than Ben could. But I think friend Shawn is doing exactly that, and I have drunk far too much wine....
No doubt of it: the sweet purple sorcery was stealing away all natural alertness. A certain Irish magic was filling the room and swelling, Reuben himself yielding to enjoyment of it, until it possessed not only the mournful mighty sound of a sea wind but all the driving power of a wind crossing the dark places, the lonely places, the foam-drenched wilderness.
Daniel Shawn was explaining—had been for a long time, Reuben realized—that the tales of mermaids were mythical fancies; that certain profounder mysteries had nothing to do with such froth of dreams. Uncle John appeared unwilling to abandon the fishtail wenches, and countered with classical texts. Some of these, Reuben knew from a glint in Uncle John's eye and a squirming discomfort in Mr. Hibbs, had been invented on the spot for the occasion—John Kenny could be a rough man with a spontaneous Latin hexameter. But Shawn insisted, and was now launched on the story of a supposed mermaid seen by himself and another of his watch on a voyage among the hot somnolent West Indian isles. "Truly the crayter had the like of a woman's bubbies, and nursed a little one at them, and wasn't it meself was thinking I beheld the mermaid, for all she was that mortal ugly and her mouth ran up and down like a caterpillar's?"
"Now," said Gideon Hibbs—"now, after all!"
"I give you my word, sir, do I not?" Daniel Shawn's flare of wrath was swiftly veiled. "Will a man be inventing such a thing? Wasn't it meself that saw that mouth munching a huge great gob of sea grass, the kind that groweth in brackish waters, and saw the lips churning from side to side? That other man started for a harpoon. I stayed him. Ochone!—how could a man be looking on the ugly thing, the mother she was, and not have pity?"
"Pity's a rare uneasy thing," said John Kenny.
"A bald black head round like a cannon ball, devil a bit of nose but only a pair of slits like a common seal." Shawn laughed abruptly. "And now I must ruin my tale, Mr. Kenny, for when I went below one of the crew who'd often sailed those parts told me the thing was called a manatee or sea cow, and had been well known for many years, the way the folk at Campeachy and elsewhere do fancy the meat highly and use the hide of the gentle beast for making whips. Thus I was spared the folly of telling abroad the marvel I had seen. But you understand me, sir?—in this manner, from such particulars glimpsed in a poor light, come many inventions." Reuben could smell Shawn, a muskiness not quite unpleasant; a wild smell. "In all waste places are wonders—in swamps, jungles, mountains, deserts. The greatest of all lies very far west of here, or say east if you like, for it's the other side of the world. Beside that these fancies of storytellers are pap for children. I have never beheld the sea serpent, though I've heard of him times enough, and spoke with those who'd seen him, honest men owning no more imagination than a block of holystone. The Kraken too, perhaps. Yet those mysteries, and all others, are nothing beside the sea's own self, the sea of the west, the Pacific."
Ben turned to Shawn, rapt and flushed, and Reuben knew he was asking for the sake of hearing Shawn speak again: "The Kraken?"
"A titan of many arms, Mr. Cory, mightier than a right whale they say, who will drag down entire ships, or overturn them belike to feed on all aboard the way a cat will take her a nestful of little birds. It may be so. The sea is boundless. Anything might live therein."
"Even mermaids," said John Kenny, but Mr. Shawn was not listening.
"No man knoweth the sea until he hath ventured the western sea, the Pacific. The fat Spanish ships travel it, but I tell you the route they follow is a single thread stretched over a Sahara. I have sailed it too, a very little of it, above and below the Line, in a whaler, once, and I young with no wisdom in me but with open eyes—and I was, say, like an insect crossing the continent of Europe, but I'm a wise insect, sir—Mother of God, I know the meaning of horizons! Pacific nights—deep as any night of the soul, and will you be telling me of a deeper dark than that? Out there only the sea is truth, only the sea, and this is a part of the truth: there be many islands."
"Continents perhaps," said John Kenny, agreeing but somehow without enthusiasm, and Shawn sat back to study him, the blue eyes clouded windows closing away some of the lightning of inner storm.
"What's the Atlantic?—a gray mad stormy puddle. Sea of the Caribbees?—a small hot lagoon, green lumps of land like a lady's emerald necklace on a blue gown—oh, steady as she goes! I'll grant you her breast can heave and toss. If the wind's coming dark and fast down there in the Caribbees I'll strip canvas quick as any man and remember I was brought up religious, for men and ships are small things. But out there on the far side of the world, have I not seen an empty island open to the west, where the high rollers came down and down forever with all the blind leagues of the sea behind them, down and down as heavy and slow and sure as the years beating on a man's youth? Have I not seen Pacific moonrise where no land is, and the gray and silver piled higher than the North Star Polaris?"
Ben woke on Thursday before dawn, disoriented in time, noticing how the days and nights of being in love run together like those disquieted by simpler fevers. He recalled it was a Monday afternoon when he watched Artemis sail home, therefore a Monday evening when he went to bed undeniably drunk, therefore a gray Tuesday morning when Mr. Hibbs, red-eyed and taciturn, gave him and Reuben an assignment of one hundred and twenty lines of the Tristia of Ovid, to be absorbed by Wednesday afternoon, plus (as atonement for Tuesday morning's inattention and general sinfulness) a demand for five copies per boy, in a fair firm hand with no nonsense, no margin of error, of the entire conjugation of the verb [Greek: kephalalgeô], which means to have a headache. So Tuesday and Wednesday coalesced to one inky-dark billow of time, and now before dawn the young apple tree out there that Reuben had spoken of was stirring in a new pale softness. As Ben watched, the sky awoke beyond Dorchester Neck, and the truth of full bloom was confirmed. He thought: I'll see her today.
She was lying touched by the pallor of the morning as he knelt at the window, a breeze on his shoulders mild as a woman's fingers. She was sleeping—in a garden maybe, or under that same apple tree's white foam, her gold-brown hair tumbled over the grass, a curl of it on her forehead above the flush of damask rose. The blue vague garment betrayed her in sleep—no, rather his own daring hand drew it down, leaving bare one breast and the red flower of it. From that, the fantasy moved with reluctance, sluggishly, oppressed by the sense of a thing contrived: sweet yet false. Nevertheless for a moment she shone quite naked, turning in her sleep away from him, a swell of flesh pliant under his hand and hiding the dark desired triangle, the other flower of red. But then she was no longer Faith; she was any woman, with a face unknown.
Reuben stirred and yawned. "Behold the nympholept! Benjamin, what of the night?"
"It a'n't night, Muttonhead."
"Do you attempt to assert that the difference between night and dawn can be detected by the dull besotted perception of the peasantry?"
"I love you too," said Ben.
"Ah! In lieu of morning prayers let us contemplate Pontifex."
"Law, why that, on a spring morning?"
"He hath been subjected to experiment and found wanting."
"How's that?"
"The verb, boy. Consider, it was the doom of Pontifex to read all those twice five copies. Well, sir, in one of 'em, taking not even you into my confidence, I inserted one error, a miserable crawling misplaced accent—a wee louse, do you see, nibbling the fair white integument of a Greek verb. Did he discover, percontate and make manifest this crapulent, this obscene and overweening impudicity? Damn, I forgot concupiscent. Did he find this adventitious louse to be a concupiscent intrusion upon the fulgurant purity of grammatical impeccancy, and crack the hereinbeforementioned louse upon that sable thumbnail? Nah. By the way, where'd the bloody pot get to this time?"
"Under your bed," said Ben, exasperated, for the Cyprian fantasy had not completely dissolved, and it did seem too bad that the last of it must be dismissed by the unequivocal din of urination.
"There!" Reuben sighed. "I have subsumed the concupiscent." He stooped to pat the floor a few times with the flat of his hands, and sprawled back on his bed. "With reference, sir, to that Cicero whose lank shadow falleth across our afternoon: Sunt autem qui dicant foedus esse quoddam sapientius ut ne minos amicos quam se ipsos diligant. Do you understumble me, sir?"
"Please, sir, no, sir."
"I freely render: Some say there's a kind of compact of the wise, to love their friends no less than themselves. You may construe."
"Please, sir, no, sir, I won't, sir."
"You what or that which, sir?"
Ben snatched for his brother's sleep-tangled hair. Reuben caught his hand palm to palm and braced his elbow, stretching out wiry and tense. "Wrastle then," he said, not smiling.
Ben knew that with his feet firm on the floor he could hardly fail to force Reuben's hand back, though the boy did possess uncommon strength in his thin arms. Ben recalled he had won last time; not wishing to win twice running, he allowed his hand to sink slowly, as their eyes locked too, Reuben's grave and dilated. Ben drove the smaller hand up once or twice, catching then a glimpse of panic in Reuben, but Reuben clamped his mouth tight and heaved, the power of his knotting arm increased unreasonably, and Ben was startled to find his own arm wavering down. No need after all to simulate defeat; it was fairly done. Ben slumped on the floor laughing and rubbing his shoulder. He thought of telling Reuben that he meant to go into Boston today, Hibbs or no Hibbs. "Ru, you could strangle a bull."
"Not yet." Reuben lay flat, lifting yesterday's shirt from a chair with his toes, to frown at it horribly. "But seeing you're about to throw me a clean shirt like a good Christian, be careful how you come within reach, for I'd be happy to try my powers on a small calf." Ben threw a pillow at him and then the shirt. "Snuff the air, little Benjamin! What hath Kate wrought, do you know? I know."
"Sausage!"
"True," said Reuben, rising in a whirl of activity, "and though you may seem more dressed than I"—he slipped behind Ben, snatched off his neckcloth and darted away knotting it around his own neck—"I shall be in the land of the sausage before you."
They were late. Mr. Kenny had already breakfasted and gone to Boston. Mr. Hibbs lurked impatiently in the schoolroom, nursing one of the head colds that tormented him with the onset of spring, and Kate Dobson was moving about in a large dreamy morning mood, soft-footed scamperings carrying her billowing body from one to another of a dozen errands—the rising of bread, the simmering of a kettle on the hearth, a speck of dirt to be scrubbed, the demolition of a fly. She bounced everywhere, a huge gray-headed silkworm ever hurrying at her generous spinning, and began talking as the boys entered, with some sentence begun obscurely in the depths of her mind: "... so to myself I said, minute I see 'em I'll ask, is it p-i-e-s or p-e-i-s or what is it, with a pox?—I could declare it had an a in it the way you showed it me, Master Reuben, oh dearie me, the letters all shaped out fair and plain."
"Ah, that," said Reuben. "P-e-a-c-e, Kate."
"Didn't I say it had an a into it? Think of that! Ah, well...."
Ben saw she was close to tears. Kate wept easily at many things trifling and great; this was no trifle. What she referred to was a labor of years, a sampler intended (some day) for the wall of Mr. Kenny's study. For all Ben knew it might have been started before he was born. Kate herself couldn't say when she began it, as she couldn't say for sure how old she was, or what year it was she came as a redemptioner from England. To Kate all the past telescoped in a half-reality, and memories overflowing in her talk could seldom be closely tied to conventional mileposts of time. Ben had seen the incomplete sampler, shyly unfolded from a workbasket at times when Mr. Kenny was away in the city. The border was almost done, she said. From the bottom on either side rose branches, ivy idealized, stitched in springtime greens with immense pains and skill; at the top the branches met, interlocking as leaves in nature do, contending but sharing sunlight. That part, she claimed, was easy—why, you just stitched it: so, and so. But the motto caused her endless grief, since she had never been taught to write or read. She knew the alphabet; with desperate trouble she could fit together elements of it indicating words. Ben wondered how she had found courage for such a project before he and Reuben were present to aid her. But she was still troubled even with their aid. No motto was ever quite good enough on second thought. Occasionally she changed the lovely border too. Once Ben had found her rocking in her sewing chair and weeping because, she said, a brown thread among the leaves was the wrong brown and must be picked out, every stitch, and that by candlelight. Her eyes hurt—weren't as good as they used to be.
"Woman dear," said Reuben, "you've gone and lost the paper."
She blinked in sorrow at the hominy and sausage she set before him. "That I have, and I don't understand how a body can be so heedless. I did, I had it in my basket, and then I vow I must've wrapped something in it, maybe a skein, and put it away somewhere, I don't know where—why, my mind's light, light as a whore's promise, I just don't think good."
Ben reached out to pat her fat floury hand, as Reuben said: "Then we'll draw you a fresh one. A nothing for such scholars as me and my little brother—only, bruit it not abroad that ever I said such a thing. You know, Kate, the sin of vanity in us—sad, sad."
She chuckled, dashing a comfortable tear from a bulging cheek, and bounced away to deal with a fresh emergency. Fragments of yesterday's chicken sat on a side table waiting a destiny in soup, and the lean yellow tomcat, Mr. Eccles, had wandered in nursing a sordid plot, one easily detected and swiftly refuted by a whisk of Kate's apron. He came over to rub Ben's leg rather grimly, knowing well enough that breakfast sausage is not cat-food. "Which motto was it, Kate?—believe I've lost track."
"Oh—le' me think, Master Benjamin—'Let peace in this house be everlasting as the sea'—it was real pretty." She wiped an eye and sighed. "Boys, I was thinking—maybe it's foolish, maybe it a'n't even right I should try such a thing, but I was thinking, what if I was to make that motto something in the Latin? He'd favor it so—wouldn't he?"
"The very thing!" Reuben exclaimed. "Hark 'ee: Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori. That's Virgil, Kate."
"Think of that! That's real Latin, Master Reuben? But—but a'n't it terrible short?"
"Oh, Kate!—greatest things said with fewest words."
"It do sound pretty. What's it mean?"
"Love conquereth all things, let us yield to love."
"You wouldn't play no jape on me, would you?"
"Save us!" Ben knew his brother was genuinely shocked. "Not about the sampler, Kate!"
"I know, dear."
"Only ask Mr. Hibbs whether my translation be right, if you doubt me."
"Nay nay, Reuben, love, I don't at all.... Love conquereth—"
Ben said: "Love conquereth all things."
"Ah me!" She came near, a soft hand on Ben's shoulder, her small sweet mouth like pink petals fallen in bread dough. "Ben, boy, you be a little changed. Something happen, Master Benjamin?—maybe Monday?"
"Monday? Why, Uncle John's Artemis came home from her maiden voyage that day, and a prettier vessel you never—"
"Oh, bother old Artemis! And ha' done with talk of the sea too—ask Mr. John, what's it ever done but make widows, and empty graves in the God's acre?"
Reuben said to his empty plate: "The tale goes, it may have been filled by the tears of Chronos who was before all the gods."
"Ha?—oh, your talk, Master Reuben. But only look at Ben boy there a-blushing! Bound to happen—I knowed it, I knowed it, I know all the signs of what makes the world go 'round, and who should know 'em better? O Ben, oh dearie me, soon you'll be a-moping about with a long face, there'll be a wringin' of hands, you'll go sighing with the springtime in your loins and no living with you at all. Ben dear! Tell Kate. Is she fair, Ben? Is she kind?"
"Now, Kate, truly!"
He will go where I cannot go. Three years past he told me something of his dreams, but I dream never that way, never.
"Why, Ben, not a word! Mumchance. But I know, for a'n't I alway said it was love 't makes the world go 'round? Oh dearie me, they do grow to be men before there's time a spider should build her web over the cradle where they was rocked."
"Can't help it, Kate, the way you stuff Reuben and me with sausage and kindness, we're bound to get big and bad and greasy."
Where he goeth I cannot go, and he will be much loved, as he ought to be, but I ... I think that I....
"Phoo, didn't I marry for love me own self, the more fool me for not listening to wiser heads, however and moreover I don't regret it nor won't to my dying day, though it was a whoreson hard thing to learn the cull was na' but a file, dearie."
"A file, Kate?"
He said: A man of learning must often hide ... even more from the almost-wise. He said: You and I ought to be friends.
"Nay, Ben, it's right you shouldn't know the word, it's only London-town cant and means a common cutpurse, that's all he was, him and his fair talk to me about an inheritance, washed down you might say with the kissing and the sweet looks and the tumbling—marry, could I say no to the likes of him, and meself as hot and limber as a March hare, could I? Well, rest him quiet, he danced for it at Tyburn."
"Oh, I remember. You've spoke of it before, but I'd forgotten the word. Kate, you shouldn't let those old memories rise up and trouble you—not here, and the old country so far away."
It's back from the Cambridge road (he said nothing about coming to visit him), the cottage with green-painted shutters. Something discourteous the way I ran, but he did say....
"Ay, it's far. Repent?—phoo! nor they wouldn't've got him, never, only he drunk hisself blind in a tavern and talked, so you see, dearie, it was the rum that ruint him, and never took a strap to me neither except he was in the drink, and that only once or twice. Repent?—why, didn't he spit on the foot of the gallows tree and cock his head at the sky to see a shower coming, and didn't he say to the ordinary: 'Ha' done canting and go to hanging, man, can't you see it's coming on to rain and must I catch a quinsy for King Charles' sake, God bless him?'"
"Maybe he repented later, Kate—I mean in the last moment when there was no way to say the words."
How much he must know! Why not medicine? Nay, think of it, Ru Cory, why not? WHY NOT?
"Not him. Why, didn't he wave a purse that he'd h'isted from the ordinary's own pocket, that he had—waved it and throwed it to the crowd and cried: 'Here, culls, drink me a remembrancer!' That he did, anyway so a friend told me that was there and seen it all, the which I couldn't be meself, being in childbed on his account—died, the little thing, and best maybe seeing it'd've had no father, and then me for the colonies, I suppose it was a long time ago."
"Well...."
But if I am—if there be some evil, some mark of evil to make others recoil as from a leper—but it can't be so, it can't. Would that man know (could I ask him?) why so often I—why—why——
"But do you know, dearie, I had another friend in the crowd that day to see him die, and she told me the tale different, I can't understand how it could be so different, how that my Jem was leaden-faced, and fought the rope, nor spoke nothing at all but some mumbling about former times, and how his life should be an example—example, with a pox! That wasn't never his way of talk, but—but maybe he did and all. No purse for the crowd, she said, nothing like that."
"I don't think it happened that way, Kate."
Could I kill a wolf again if there was need? I think I could.
"'Deed she said there was but few present to watch it, and the officers in haste to be done with it because the rain was already falling—I don't know, I don't know."
"Kate, from what you say of him, I'm certain it was the way the other friend told you, that he met it bravely, and threw the purse too, not for impudence but only so to hold himself a man to the end."
How long it is now since I was child enough to cry out: God help me!
Chapter Three
The builder had intended a storeroom off the kitchen, with no heat and one narrow window, where Gideon Hibbs in these days wrestled with Ben and Reuben across the rackety battlefield of the classics. When the boys came to Roxbury John Kenny, in a genial phase of turning things upside down, had hired a mason to build a fireplace in this austere chamber, and had purchased a magisterial new desk and high-backed chair for Mr. Hibbs. Then with his own hands he fetched from the attic two small old desks, trusting only Ben to help him worry them downstairs, and grew dreamy at the marred and squeaky things, chuckling over jokes superseded forty-odd years before.
In the house of the Reverend Mr. Elias Kenny of Boston, these desks had sustained the squirmings of John Kenny and his brother George, whose young hands left a network of schoolboy carvings now black with age. The satiny pine held room for Reuben and Ben to add a number of their own: arrows, circles, cabalistic squiggles; on Ben's a rising sun with a questioning eyebrow, on Reuben's a portrait of Mr. Eccles that did scant justice to his second-best ear.
One other chair stood at the rear of the schoolroom, sacred to occasions when Uncle John strolled in to listen, owl-tufts cocked like secondary ears alert for a false quantity. At such times Mr. Hibbs became grave and slow-spoken. Hibbs was not an obsequious man: he merely found it important to satisfy Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury. It was at one of those times that Reuben witnessed Uncle John's discovery of the new carvings, a pale crinkled hand descending to the desk, groping at B—R newly incised. Reuben saw only the hand, fearing to look up lest he find Uncle John sad or annoyed. After all the desk was a chip of history; having served John Kenny when he was a boy of twelve, it must have been made at least as early as 1649, and from a pine tree that would have sprung up in the wilderness before the planting of Plymouth Colony. The blue-veined hand lingered feather-light, restless like that of a blind man encountering something formidably new in the pattern of the known. Then it rose and passed gently through Reuben's hair, and the door of the schoolroom closed.
This Thursday morning spring was assailing the house with lazy reminders, a ripple of breeze at the window Mr. Hibbs had sternly closed, a muted hammering from the shed where Rob Grimes was mending a chicken coop at great leisure; earlier Reuben had heard the lonesome Sundayish clamor of the meeting-house bell nearly a mile away, warning that Thursday was Lecture Day, when decent citizens take thought for their souls.
"Very well, Reuben." Mr. Hibbs sniffed. "Lines twenty-one and twenty-two, and pray note that you are not to stress the caesura in line twenty-two, seeing there is no break in the thought."
"quid fuit, ut tutas agitaret Daedalus alas,
Icarus immensas...."
"What's the matter? Are you considering, Mr. Cory, whether the caesura be intended by the poet to indicate a pause for daydreaming?"
"Icarus immensas nomine signet aquas."
"You have the quantities correct, and may now construe."
"'Why should Daedalus have——'"
"'Should'? 'Should'? I see no subjunctive, Mr. Cory."
"I was construing freely, sir."
"Why?"
"I thought it sounded smoother so, in English."
"Fiddle! Fuit, not being subjunctive, cannot be so translated."
"'Why was it that Daedalus safely moved his wings——'"
"Mr. Cory, one light fugitive moment if you please. Concerning the word tutas: is this an adverb?"
"No, sir."
"If Ovid had wished an adverb he would have written——?"
"Tuto, sir."
"Yet he used this strange word tutas, which is——?"
"An adjective, sir. Tutas, -a, -um, meaning 'safe.'"
"Light breaks." Mr. Hibbs filled his clay pipe, deliberately maddening his tortured nose. "The source, incidentally, of a dreadful English word, 'tutor'—I suppose from some woeful misguided conceit to the effect that a tutor can hold his charges in safety, Master Reuben, from the perils of error—wharrmphsh!—within and without. An adjective, then, and plural, I presume. The case, Mr. Cory?"
"Objective, Mr. Hibbs."
"Could it by any remote chance agree with—hm——"
"It agrees with alas, sir."
"Oh! How we do see eye to eye at times! Tutas alas. I could even imagine it meant 'safe wings,' 'uninjured wings,' something like that, if an adverb had not gone flying past my aging benighted head. Now concerning this word agitaret. Did I hear you translate it as 'moved'?"
"I did, sir."
"Had you considered the word 'agitate'?—excellent, I should have thought, and taken direct from the mother Latin."
"I did, sir, but the present-day meaning seemed unsatisfactory."
"Why?"
Reuben discovered he had pulled down his underlip. Mr. Hibbs had striven for three years to break him of the habit, but Reuben, as now, was often unaware he had done it until it was too late. He let it back gently without the usual comforting pop. "To me," Reuben said, "the word 'agitate' suggested fluttering. I might translate: 'Why was it that Daedalus fluttered safe wings?'" He glanced up, honestly feeling as apologetic as a puppy caught in flagrante with a ravished shoe. "To me, sir, Daedalus was no butterfly."
Ben knocked his Ovid on the floor and scrambled after it. Reuben guessed he was trying to divert the lightning, but Mr. Hibbs paid the uproar no heed at all, staring at Reuben with a twitching nose. You could never quite predict Gideon Hibbs: the next moment might be hell, or sudden sunshine, or merely another sneeze.
It was sunshine. Mr. Hibbs relaxed, a wrestler overcome, and laughed, a large generous bray. "You have a point, Reuben. Oh yes!" He fumbled for a kerchief and blew the inflamed organ mightily. "Well, but I'm not content with so flat a word as 'moved.' Benjamin? Considering the wriggles you perform at your desk (and I declare only a young backside could endure it) you ought to be able to offer some word conveying the sense of a sustained and powerful motion."
Shining with relief, Ben said: "'Plied'?"
"Why, excellent!" Mr. Hibbs tensed in astonishment. "'Why was it Daedalus plied uninjured wings?'—mph, comes out in English as iambic pentameter, bless me if it doesn't. Satisfactory, Reuben?"
"Yes, sir, I like that. 'Why was it Daedalus plied uninjured wings, but Icarus marks with his name the enormous waves?'"
Out of a suspended hush, Mr. Hibbs sighed. "Benjamin, proceed. If possible, without butterflies. Let us leave the butterflies to Reuben."
Reuben thought with care: He means no harm by that, none at all.... His eyes idly compelled the carved B—R to grow immense and blurred, and he listened to Ben's voice:
"nempe quod hic alte, demissius ille volabat;
nam pennas ambo non habuere suas."
"Quantities correct, Benjamin. Construe."
"'Surely it was because Icarus flew high, and Daedalus lower; for both wore wings that were not their own.'"
"Eh, Benjamin, doing uncommon well today. High time of course—I am not prepared to consider this the millennium." Mr. Hibbs could seldom bear to leave a compliment undiluted. "Well, gentlemen, I suggest to you, these particular lines are something more than an exercise in grammar and prosody. I think, no more of the Tristia today. Your grammars if you please—this afternoon it shall be Cicero of course."
"Sir"—startled, Reuben saw his brother rising, not quite knocking over his little desk—"sir, may I ask a favor?"
Mr. Hibbs' lank features froze, but not completely. "Yes, my boy?"
"Last night, sir, I wrote out a translation of the lines in De Finibus that you assigned us for this afternoon. I—wished to know if I could do so without aid. I mean, sir—Ru hath helped me often at other times, being swifter at these things, so I—so I didn't tell him of it. And if it be satisfactory, Mr. Hibbs, may I go to Boston this afternoon?"
Mr. Hibbs stared at the paper Ben handed him, like a man hit by a chunk of firewood. "Done without aid, ha?"
"It was, sir. I even waited till Ru was asleep, for fear I'd give up and ask him for help after all."
Reuben gazed deeply into the swirling black midgets that had been the text of Ovid; he instructed himself: It doesn't matter. It does not matter. Seeing that he will go—
"No objection," Mr. Hibbs was saying vacantly—"no objection to the two of you helping each other: I expect it and you profit by it, but I can see, I understand, Benjamin, I—uh—commend your industry and the sentiment that must have prompted it." His voice trailed away under the threat of another sneeze, and Reuben knew that he must speak.
"It's quite true, Mr. Hibbs. I knew nothing of it till just now." Was that good enough? Did I snarl, or squeak?...
"Of course. This translation is—not bad, Benjamin. Some errors, but nothing that cannot be caught up—uh—tomorrow. I'm assuming your great-uncle hath nothing against it, or you would mention it, being"—the sneeze arrived and passed on—"being an honorable boy. Yes, you may have the afternoon. No precedent, of course."
"I understand that, sir, and thank you."
There was grammar, there was logic, there were Greek verbs, there was in the air a warm premonition of luncheon. Mr. Hibbs tucked his books under his arm and marched upstairs, where he would allow himself a five-minute meditation before the meal. He was willing to explain this exercise without embarrassment. It was not the same as prayer, but a contemplation of nothing, a device for clearing his mind of trivia in the hope of perceiving a moment of truth.... "Ru, why don't you come too? You could easy catch up the work if he gives you the afternoon, and he would—for all his barking you know you can twist him any way you please."
"No, bub," said Reuben lightly—but he was afraid to look up from his desk at the puzzled kindness he knew he would see. "There'll be a tag end of the afternoon when Pontifex hath done his worst, and I—wish to do something else."
"Something else?"
"Oh, I—nothing too important."
Ben looked hurt. "About the Cicero—haven't I leaned on thee too much, Ru? I never did think to wound thee, doing that."
"I'm not wounded! I"—careful, Ru Cory!—"I commend your industry."
"Ru!"
"I'm sorry. About this afternoon—you remember Mr. Welland?"
"Welland? Oh, the doctor?"
"Yes, I—he knows so much—I met him by chance the other day, when you was in Boston——"
It was no use. What had seemed clear a little while ago, a lamp in a parting of the mist, was now once more submerged in fog, and Reuben lost his way in a tangle of half-exasperated words, trying to reassure Ben that a wish to see Mr. Welland had nothing whatever to do with being ill.
Older and neater than neighboring houses, the Jenks house was shielded from them by a coach house, and on the other side by a small fenced-in garden. Such aloofness would not save it if flames like those of 1679 or '91 ever raged into this western quarter of the city, where many still owned the forbidden wood-framed chimneys and hoped for the best. Fires in the past had usually started near the docks. That might be the reason why Captain Jenks wished to keep the breadth of the town between him and the ships that were his daily bread.
Approaching the house, Ben had been sharply aware of second-floor windows, feeling eyes in a way remarkably like fright if only it weren't absurd to be frightened at calling on a girl. Now he held back his hand from the knocker, studying the garden with unstable dignity, suppressing a hope that nobody was at home. He admired the grape arbor, enlivened already by a white and brown of buds, and noted here and there the brave glow of daffodils. Flagstone walks suggested a trust in permanence.
He remembered other doorways, how they had stood between him and the unknown. Three years ago one had opened, himself and Reuben standing in rags on the threshold and unable to speak at all to the face with owl-tufts, for John Kenny had answered the door himself, looking down his nose. "To what have I the honor—oh, my soul! Your mother's look, the both of you—come in out of the cold!" Not until hours later, when they were washed and fed and settled in the room where they now lived, did John Kenny speak of his sister's letter announcing their tragic death in the jaws of the beast, a passing hard example of the infinite wisdom of God. He had answered the letter, he said, with the proper sentiments. Very much later, weeks later, Mr. Kenny's own conscience moved him to write another letter even more stately, explaining that the boys appeared to be abundantly alive and would remain with him until of man's years. This letter was never answered by Rachel Cory; after three years, it seemed unlikely that it ever would be. That doorway had opened on years of change, as all years are, but Ben held a private notion that the century really turned then, in March of 1704: for himself and Reuben an end to flame and trouble except for whatever stirred within—and this only natural, since any boy or man is a volcano with a thin crust and knows it.
Ben sounded the knocker. Now he must remember to take off his hat after the door opened, not before—supposing it ever did.
It opened. In Puritan gray and white, she of the brown face was regarding him with amiable recognition. Ben had started to claw his hat at the first rattle of the latch; he checked that, and was now able to remove it, not gracefully but at least without dropping it on her shoes. All this the slave girl observed with calm, secure in cool gravity, a well-trained servant waiting for him to speak, but there could be no doubt about that flash of welcome. "Mistress Faith Jenks—is she at home?" He spoke so softly he could hardly hear the noise himself.
"I think so, sir." Again a sparkle shared, as if she had said aloud: "Of course she is, Ben Cory of Deerfield, but I must make a show of going to find out." In her actually spoken words Ben heard a puzzling foreign quality: the th was almost a t. "Will you come in, Mr. Cory, the while I inquire?" The foreign stress altered his name to something like Coree. But she did remember him, name and all.
Clarissa showed him through the entry—he knocked over no furniture—into a parlor dim with heavy drapes at the windows such as Ben had never seen. Mr. Kenny liked his windows casually plain to the world. Clarissa moved to the drapes with the grace of a wild being incapable of clumsiness. She said: "Let's have more light."
"Thank you," Ben said. She glanced at him quickly, startled maybe by the thanks, then flung the cloth open and lingered briefly, a golden hand raised to the drapery, the round of her cheek lovable in the sun.
Ben realized he was rudely staring, in a sudden loss of blindness. He automatically damned himself for shameful thoughts—he came here to call respectfully on Faith Jenks!—not to yearn and lust after a slave wench who doubtless owned not even a last name. In his confusion he could no longer look at Clarissa. He heard her murmur some pleasant word about sitting down and making himself at ease. She was gone, and the room cold.
Clarissa's hand—now Ben could not even scold himself. He could not escape the sweetness of a golden hand, pink-palmed, shining in sunlight as a part of sunlight.
Seated and short of breath he tried furtively to clean an over-looked fingernail with a thumbnail, an operation tinged with futility. On the wall a sampler confronted him, not very well made—Kate would have sniffed—asserting: And thine ears shall hear a voice behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. Isaiah, xxx; 21. Ben Cory ventured a modest alteration in the angle of his chair.
He remembered he did not know the religion of the Jenks family; had stupidly failed to inquire about it of Uncle John. What if Faith were strongly devout?—it was likely. What if she discovered with shock that he had not seen the inside of a meeting-house since coming to Roxbury?... He fretted at the fingernail, borrowing trouble. Could a man dissemble, hiding essential doubts from a woman if he loved her? Shabby bargain: for my pretense, your love. He gave up the fingernail as a lost cause, and begged the moral dilemma to go away a while.
Slowly, as it may dawn on a wanderer in the forest that he is under examination from a thicket by the feral unconciliating eyes of a Something—bear, catamount, Indian, he doesn't know, doesn't exactly wish to know—so it dawned on Ben that he was being studied from the hallway, in perfect silence, by a square lump of girl and a smaller lump of yellowish dog.
Following her inclinations, the mother of Charity's dog might have conceived and born a spaniel, but she must have been tempted by the Devil in the shape of a terrier. The snuff-colored result had been amended by years of overeating into a hairy sausage too close to the floor. His silky ears were tolerable spaniel, his eyes all spaniel in foolish sadness, blurred in the iris like some old human eyes. When Ben smiled, a wag disturbed the squirrely tail; he shambled up to analyze the smell of Ben's feet and pronounce it fair. Charity nodded. "He worships you. I foresaw it plain. Most uncommon for Sultan to worship anyone."
Ben studied Sultan in some alarm. He was lying on Ben's shoes, true, but it looked more like sleep than worship. "Often he growls with menace"—Charity approached, awkward in a shapeless brown frock that did her no good—"the which he was prepared to do when we ambushed you."
"I'd've gone straight up in the air. A perfect ambush."
Charity planted her feet far apart and hid her hands behind her back. "Did you play Inj'an when you was young?"
"Oh, I did, Mistress Charity, my brother and I. Used to sneak off to the woods where we were forbidden to go, which was wrong of us."
"Why?"
"The woods were dangerous—real Inj'ans."
"I've seen real ones—not wild, though." She came nearer, not by walking but by a side-to-side evolution of spread feet, carrying her like a statue on small wheels. "Christian Indians, talked English all piggedy-gulp."
"I remember an old Indian at Deerfield, supposed to be a Christian. A Pocumtuck. Wore a cast-off bodice for a breechclout, and was alway——" Ben remembered the failing of Captain Jenks—"was alway a little foolish."
"Faith is dressing her hair different, the which you're obliged to notice or she'll be in a taking, the which I think is poo."
"I'll be sure to notice it, Mistress Charity."
"Be you"—Charity jerked her head; upstairs Ben could hear a muted ripple of women's voices—"in love with her?"
Ben evaded. "Charity, I've met her but the once."
No good. "I thought a person alway knew."
"Oh—maybe they do and I'm just foolish."
"I guess you are, but very wonderful."
Maneuvered thus against a lee shore with the broadside raking him from bow to stern, Ben mumbled: "'Deed I'm not."
"Not poo," said Charity, sinking him....
"Do you go often to church, Mistress Charity?"
"We're Church of England."
"Oh, so was my mother."
"Then a'n't you too?"
"Well—my father was not a member of the congregation at Deerfield, and my Uncle John is not a churchgoer, nor—nor am I."
"Um. Thought everyone was obliged to go."
"My Uncle John says it was so, years past. Now, if everyone went there wouldn't be meeting-houses to hold 'em.... Do you like going?"
"Mr. Binyon was very wonderful."
"He is—no longer with you?"
Charity shook her head and sighed. "I do treasure his memory. He thundered, as with the voice of many waters."
"He—uh—died?"
"Nay, he went back to England. Later they said his steps went down unto the—that is, he joined—well, somebody. I don't just know. Mr. Mitching is not wonderful. He whuffles. In fact he is...."
"Poo?"
Charity came quite close, and seemed perilously near to smiling. "You said that—but I'll never tell. Nay, I do hold in my heart many things that Mr. Binyon—thundered—but mustn't speak of him, and yet I do sometimes, because everyone says I own the nature of a heedless brat."
"I don't say so."
"You are different. Mr. Binyon spoke as with the voice of angels. Somebody said he was forty—he didn't look so terrible old.... Were all your people killed at Deerfield, Mr. Cory?"
"My father and mother. My brother escaped, with me. He's fifteen now, and I'm seventeen. And you?"
"Thirteen in May. A sad time—nobody will ever listen."
"You don't mean you're going to be thirteen forever?"
"Do not be poo...."
"He's a much better student than I, Reuben is."
"I can read, by the way.... Was your mother very beautiful?"
"Why—yes, Charity, she was. Everyone should be able to read."
"I thought so because you are beautiful."
"Now, Charity! You ought not——"
"I know. Alway, everything wrong."
"Not that, but—oh, never mind.... What do you like to read?"
"Not romances. Faith reads those, by the way."
"I've read but a few." In Mr. Kenny's helter-skelter library, Ben had had a glimpse of Aphra Behn and her long-winded imitators; he had rather enjoyed the swashbuckling of Oroonoko. "Our tutor keeps us so hard pressed with the classics we can't read much else."
"Um ... Mr. Cory, is it true that swallows spend the winter at the bottom of frozen ponds and streams all naked of any feathers?"
"Nay, I've heard that but don't believe it. They must go south like so many others and return in the spring."
"Um. All the same I drew a picture of some of them under the water all naked of any feathers, and another on the brink—he hath just risen and put his feathers on again." She gulped and stuck out a blunt jaw. "I draw many pictures, when I ought to be sewing. I like cooking if I can cook what I like."
"But sewing is poo?"
"You too would think so, had you been obliged to do it. Would you wish to behold the picture I made of swallows under the water all naked of any feathers and one on the brink?"
"Yes, I would, Charity."
She whirled like a doll on a revolving pole and marched away. Sultan moaned and followed, a slave to duty with a backward glance of apology.
Ben heard other footsteps and rose, too soon, and bowed—too soon, so that he was bent in the middle when Faith entered, grave and shining and young, preceded by the bulk of Madam Prudence Jenks, who clearly did not expect a hand to be kissed or shaken but held both pale things curled below the twin billows of her bosom and entered the room thus, rather like an angel looking for breakfast, and allowed Faith to help her into a chair, and loomed in it, rather like an angel disappointed but willing to wait. "'Tis most agreeable of you, Mr. Carey, to call upon us in our simple afflicted seclusion."
Uncle John hadn't mentioned that the Jenks family was secluded, afflicted, or simple. The drowned gaze of Madam Jenks suggested she had risen from a rest of ages under water, for the purpose (imposed on her by others) of viewing Benjamin Cory; if he proved not too detestably in need of correction, she might submerge. Ben mumbled how happy he was to meet her. For all their damp opacity, her prominent eyes were not at all blind.
Faith's gold-brown hair lay in soft spirals above her ears; on the coils rested a cap, no such cap as Puritan custom approved but a trifle of frivolous lace—the Mathers would have hated it as one of the stigmata of popery. Her dress today was dead-leaf brown. To Ben it looked uncomplicated and demure, its very plainness encouraging the eye to rejoice in what it held. Surely she could never become gross and overblown, the damask fading to an underwater bleach, dugs swollen to down pillows!
"How charmingly you've done your hair, Mistress Faith!"
"Oh, la, thank you, sir—I merely toss it together so to have it out of the way." (And thank you, Charity!) Hands chastely folded, Faith watched him with unmistakable radiance; as Ben dared to meet her eyes she blinked both of them. Ben's heart floated over shining fields. He must have said the right thing. In fact, as matters looked now he could perfectly well sit down; it might even be expected of him.
With larger sternness Madam Jenks repeated: "Most kind of you to call, Mr. Carey, seeing we have not been much about since our loss, the which one must suffer with fortitude required of us by the Lord in his infinite mercy, very kind of you." A parchment contraption appeared magically in her hand; she fanned the pallid orb of her face in a motion grave and hypnotic.
Faith patted her mother's arm where folds of baby-creases narrowed to a tiny wrist. "Mama, I think Mr. Cory never met Uncle James." Faith's charming double wink instructed Ben not to be even slightly dismayed by sudden Uncle James: she would see him through.
A red enameled comb projected from Madam Jenks' tight-bound hair like the comb of a hen, bobbing so unstably that Ben's anxiety climbed notch after notch. "He did not know James?" Madam Jenks shook her head, but nothing happened. "A pity, seeing he was ever a worthy influence to young and old and would have profited much by knowing him, but God disposes." Pronouns, Ben noted, counted for no more than ripples, to be brushed aside by the lady under full sail. Solidly abeam of him, cutting his wind and threatening to broach him just when he was trying to claw off to windward, she seemed to be conveying a message: that Benjamin Cory or Carey must have found it extraordinary difficult to maintain the Christian virtues with no assistance from Uncle James.
"My father's brother-in-law," Faith interpreted. "He died last year, Mr. Cory. Mamma thought you might have met him."
"Hadn't the honor, ma'am. I'm sorry to learn of your affliction."
"He resteth in the Lord," said the fat woman, and beamed. "Lived in Cambridge. I trust your grandfather is well?"
"Yes, ma'am, very well these days." (What was the use?)
"I join you, Mr. Carey, in praising, for that mercy, the Dispenser of All Things." Madam Jenks went on to pronounce the weather changeable; Ben agreed; Faith expressed intelligent neutrality. Small silence spread like a blot of ink.... "I understand you intend going to the college this year, Mr. Carey?"
"Yes, ma'am, my brother and I."
"Preparing for the ministry, I presume?"
"Neither of us would appear to have the call, Madam Jenks."
"Indeed.... Do you enjoy the Boston air?"
"I don't think I've ever heard it, ma'am."
"Your pardon, sir?"
"Nay, I—beg your pardon—I must have misunderstood."
"My inquiry was in reference to the Boston air. Do you enjoy it?"
"Oh, very much...."
By some transition which Ben heard but didn't understand—the instant of kaleidoscopic shift was blurred for him by a gleam of merriment in Faith—Madam Jenks was comparing cats and dogs. "'Tis true a cat is a tidy beast and of value if she be a good mouser, but one can feel no affection for them."
"Why," said Ben, "our big yellow cat——"
"They are treacherous," said Madam Jenks. The comb was rising. "Now a dog is a faithful animal instant ever to his master's needs, for it would appear the Lord hath prepared him for the service of man, and I am trying, Faith, to recall the name of a small dog Mr. Jenks owned, you must remember: I mean the one that was two before Sultan, or was it three?—with a white ear."
"You must be thinking of Prince, Mama."
"No, my dear, seeing that Prince was the one that fell down the well, and Goodman Jennison spent the better part of a forenoon attempting to rescue the poor brute and had no white ear to be sure."
"Rags?"
"Faith, Rags was black, and was given to us by Mr. Riggs when his good wife was taken to the Lord, and was obliged for business reasons to go to Newport for some weeks, and certainly had no white ear, and was indeed rather ill-natured, in fact we were obliged to give him away, since he did not return from Newport until some damage had already been done to Goody Jennison's herb garden, the which I regret."
Ben wondered how long Charity had been standing in the hallway, a paper clasped to her square breast and Sultan lying on her shoes. She might have been waiting for Ben to smile, since when he did she dislodged the dog with a backward step and brought him the paper, ignoring her elders.
"My word, Charity!" Faith spoke kindly. "Mr. Cory doesn't wish to look at pictures."
"He told me he did," said Charity flatly, and laid the paper on Ben's knee, leaning close. "This be the one with feathers restored."
"Oh, I see." Confusedly, Ben saw more than that. It had never occurred to him that lines of ink on paper could move and sing. A stream glittered with fragmented ice. Ben could feel the vulnerable pride of the swallow twitching a pert forked tail, tilting a round head toward distant cloud. And how should Charity have made him actually hear the slow yielding of a brook to the coming of spring? Those naked things huddled under the water—swallows maybe, or squirming babies, ambiguous, blind. The eye clung to them, not in laughter.
"Charity," said Madam Jenks, "I believe Mr. Carey would prefer to look at pictures another time."
Charity tried to ignore that. In nearness she was all little-girl softness and warmth, electric. Little?—thirteen.
"Charity," said Madam Jenks, "go and aid Clarissa with the refreshments. You should have remembered it before."
Ben blurted: "Charity, this is beautiful."
"Charity," said Madam Jenks.
Charity inhaled carefully. "Very well, Mama, I will leave the room."
The red comb popped. Ben had been half-prepared for that, and for the deferential scramble he now performed. Under cover of the commotion Charity vanished with the picture, Sultan gloomily following.
"Thankful heart!" The comb restored, Madam Jenks fanned herself. "Ah well, a difficult time of life I suppose. You have no idea, Mr. Carey, the hours of grief and dismay, I have sought guidance on my knees, the which she'll be the death of me yet considering the palpitations of my heart, nevertheless when the Lord calls me to my long home I shall certainly go."
"Mama!" Faith murmured. "I'm sure in a few years she'll learn poise and manners. 'Tis only a passing thing. Why, when I was her age I'm sure I was difficult too."
"Nay, my darling, never intractable, never strange, alway a consolation to me. Faith is my great comfort, Mr. Carey, you've no idea."
"I'm sorry she plagued you, Mr. Cory."
"But—truly she didn't. Anyway, that picture—"
"Art," said Madam Jenks sadly. "When I think how Mr. Jenks and I have striven to teach her womanly ways, and all to no purpose, and then such dreadful passion if she be crossed in the lightest particular, even in these trivial childish notions of art, the which she could not have got it from Mr. Jenks or myself, good heavens!"
Charity said from the doorway: "I heard that." Sultan had given up trying to sleep; he leaned against her leg and whined.
"Oh, Charity, Charity—I suppose you never even went near the kitchen to help Clarissa."
Charity's square face had gone dull red to the eyelids. "She said she had no need of me. Mama, I brought that picture to Mr. Cory because he did ask to see it."
The red comb popped. Ben gathered it up again, but could not immediately return it, for Madam Jenks needed all her powers for speech. "I should have supposed, Charity, that at your years you might have acquired some trace of manners if not of gratitude, the which I do not ask although a child of thirteen is certainly capable, and never no unjust correction nor harsh words if not wholly yielded up to depravity, the which——"
"Mama, I am becoming exceedingly wrathful."
"Charity," said Madam Jenks, "we will not have one of your Times. I forbid it. Go to your room, after all the effort your father and I have made, and that continually."
"Don't you bring Papa into it and him lying up there dead to the world!"
"Charity!" That was Faith, rising, then kneeling quickly by her mother, whose round face had gone gray as ash.
"I will go away forever," said Charity in a sudden loud rage of tears. "Even as Mr. Binyon. I tell you my steps will go down unto the Whore of Babylon!"
"Reuben, I've thought occasionally that the game hath something in common with the course of living. The opening—that's a preparation like youth, and I alway thought, if a chess player might truly understand the opening no other player could defeat him—a'n't that so? Still, it is too complex, the possibilities too near to infinite, for any mind to hold 'em all, and so the best of players will inevitably fumble the opening, at least a little, missing some bright opportunities, the result a compromise with what might have been. Then the middle game—action, struggle, changes of fortune, more opportunities lost, and a few fairly grasped at the just moment."
"I believe I like that, Mr. Welland. And the end game?"
"The end game, if one may arrive at it—some die young, you know, some from a Fool's Mate, or blind chance may overset the board—but if one may arrive—oh dear! Oh dear me! That knight, through my poor wall of pawns—dare say it's all up with me. I will try this. What next?"
"This, sir. You left a hole for my Bishop too."
"So, for my sins, I did. Brrr!... Well, this."
"Check!"
"Blast!... If one may arrive at the end game—as I certainly can't here, my friend—'tis not unlike old age, a time demanding some coolness and precision and the summary of the ending, which is no simple matter of victory or defeat or draw, I think."
"I like the simile, but I'm not sure living is a game."
"It is not, Reuben. I'm pleased you find the flaw. It will remind you that any simile is a mischancy nag to ride. Ride him easy, perhaps for entertainment only, and be ready to jump off before he blunders into the ditch on the left which is marked reductio ad absurdum. If I said, however, that living is a journey, would that be a simile?"
"No, sir, I call that a fair description, no flight of rhetoric."
"Mm-yas.... Let's see what remains for me here. I will try what the poor Pawn can do, creeping into the breach, but I fear little David hath here no slingshot."
"Well.... Well, I'm afraid he did leave it at home, Mr. Welland, for this is checkmate."
"Ow!"
"Ben would say I had scuttled him, nautical language being ever on his lips these days. He plays carelessly—in chess, I mean. And in living, with the carelessness of generosity. But he'll win his end game."
"So much of what you say this afternoon ends with Ben! He's very close to your heart, is he not?"
"Oh, we—were alway close."
"And went through much trouble together, I know, which it would seem hath strengthened the tie, but with those of a different nature it might have done the opposite. I had two brothers, Reuben. We drifted apart, as they say—one lives now in England, the other died some years ago. After childhood we were—oh, let us say like friends, but with strangely little to say to one another. Cherish what you have—devotion is not quite the commonest thing in the world."
"This noon, sir, I tried to tell him something. It should have been a simple thing to say, but I lost myself in a most wonderful tangle of misunderstanding—yes, and finally gave it up like a fool, though later I thought of a dozen different ways I might have said it plainly."
"Mm-yas—a little strange. You speak clearly to me, as clearly as anyone I can recall meeting, of any age."
"Well—well, I told him I intended coming here, and he at once supposed that I thought I was ill, and then in reassuring him that it was nothing like that, I somehow lost track of what I had meant to say, which was—which was, sir, that one of my reasons in coming was to tell you that I wish I might study medicine. Or at least hear whatever you might tell me of such an ambition."
"Oh.... That was only one reason, Reuben?"
"Only one of—of many."
"Continue, Reuben."
"I'm confused about many things."
"So am I. But it's a good reason, seeing two candles are a trifle brighter than one."
"And you said to me that you and I ought to be friends."
Chapter Four
Alone outside, dizzy from the rapidly quashed insurrection of Charity Jenks, Ben heard a meeting-house bell remote and jangling-sweet, reminder of Lecture Day, and did his best to assume that appearance of godly gravity which Reuben sometimes described as the likeness of a boiled onion.
Clarissa had been the superior force employed in putting down the rebellion, Ben wasn't quite sure how. The brown girl was just suddenly there, swift and cool, and Charity was both comforted and outflanked, with no reinforcements, not even from the Whore of Babylon—still it seemed to Ben that the honors of war were mighty close to even. After that, Ben could concentrate on restoring the red comb and, under a diminishing surge of pronouns, make polite excuses for departure, refreshments forgotten. He lingered on the doorstep, a startled youth saying softly: "Phoo!" Then he weighed anchor, made sail, and stood on at about three knots, close-hauled.
Next time, of course, everything would go smoothly. He might even be allowed to speak with Faith alone. Meanwhile, the memory of her double wink helped him to repair the fabric of sentiment....
Where to? Uncle John would have left for home; riding, too, and Ben was afoot, for yesterday his mare had gone slightly lame. Ben tried to recall if he had promised to be home by supper-time; he thought not. With the better part of a generous monthly allowance in his breeches, Ben thought: Why return at once? Soon of course, but....
He accepted casual turnings, coming out unexpectedly on Treamount Street near Queen—which led to the Town House, and later became King Street, wandering toward the dock where the lady Artemis lay sleeping. Under the declining sun the city took on a grayness like antiquity.
Ben knew it was not old. Uncle John once called it new and raw—and took the boys into his study to show them a tray of coins, the metal greenish, almost shapeless. "The antiquary asked but a trifle: few value them. This tetradrachm of Athens—you can find the owl of Pallas if your eyes are as good as mine used to be—why, Sophocles could have used it for wine or bread. Consider though, gentlemen, how many things must be vastly older than coins of the classic age; for example, the hills of New England."
The gray city was without silence, as a river cannot be wholly silent. Did true silence ever come to the open sea?—say, in that time when the ship Providence in her passage to Recife lay becalmed? No lightest air, Uncle John said, no ripple; sometimes a long heaving rise and fall; sometimes a burst of silver as a flying fish broke the mirror quiet; sometimes a black triangle of fin, cruising. The sharks made no commotion of haste. Ship sounds, a few—a creaking when a swell raised the ship in her dreambound stillness and let her fall. Human sounds, including prayer. Knife brawls, Uncle John said, in the middle period of the calm....
Most of the shops near the Town House were closed. Ben lingered at a bookstall, his eye caught by a row of titles on the bottom shelf of an outdoor rack, his mind disturbed by the sudden partial clarification of a memory. That noon Reuben had certainly been trying to tell him something. Not that he was ill—Ru had really been exasperated at that notion—but it did have to do with Mr. Welland. Ben importuned his memory for his brother's words. "He knows so much ... to study ... if I might...."
A call? All of a sudden Ru wished to study medicine? Ben squatted before the books—certainly medical, and mostly Latin—and the guess acquired confidence until Ben was fretting at his own stupidity: the boy could hardly have meant anything else.
"Harvard, sir?" asked the bookseller from the doorway, a squatty man who must have been nobly redheaded in his prime.
"Not yet. This autumn, probably." (Why did I say that?—no probably about it, when Uncle John says I shall, and I can't disappoint him.)
"I know the look, sir. Closing soon, but don't be hurried, look about.... Student of medicine?"
"Not I, sir, but my brother is a learned man of divers interests." Intending it as a jest for private enjoyment, Ben felt no impulse to chuckle at the pompous utterance. Not even a lie—oh, not a man maybe, if one must be precise about chronology; but not exactly a boy either.
"Ah!... All sixpence on that shelf except the one from Oxford. For that I must have two shillings—'t a'n't badly worn, you see."
Immediately desiring it, Ben sniffed. It was in English, not Latin—Anatomy of Human Bodies, published in 1698, only nine years ago. Ben turned the pages. The flayed and dissected subjects in the copper engravings wore a look both rigidly embarrassed and amused. How unlike Charity's naked swallows! And yet how like them too, for these artists, with the coolness of great skill, were certainly trying to convey——("What is truth?" said John Kenny.) Ben sniffed again. "Some pages gone."
"I know. Two shillings is cheap all the same."
"Why, damme, suppose my brother wishes to know the very things told of in these lost pages?"
"Must even look elsewhere. However, merely because I like your face—oh, what if I do die in the almshouse?—buy it for two shillings and you may add a sixpence book for nothing, and I'll tie the both of 'em in a piece of string dissected, sir, from the very rope that hanged Johnny Quelch."
"Done!" Ben grabbed the next volume at random—Neurologia Universalis, by Raymond de Vieussens. It looked fat. "And tie 'em in any string, or do you take me for a mooncalf?"
"Anything but that, old friend! Can't tempt you with Johnny?"
"Why, man, Quelch swung there till he rotted and the rope too, and what would I want of his furniture?"
"Only what they say, you know—bit of hanging rope—wonderful fine tonic for the vessels of generation."
"They say that, do they now?"
"Ah, they do, but at your age why should you need it?" He winked, and gurgled, and scratched his armpit, and tied the books in a common string. "I venture you wouldn't believe the number of old men have gone away from here, sir, skipping, sir, with a hank of the rope that hanged Johnny. I must have given away a league of it. You don't mind, I hope, if I talk a certain amount of shit?"
"Thrive on it," said Ben, and snapped a finger at his hatbrim affectionately, and walked away with his parcel, curiously happy.
On King Street the water-front smells thickened. Ben turned into Fish Street where they became a miasma, but dominant always was the salt cleanness of the sea. Here a few sodden faces appraised Ben's good clothes and youthful slimness, as if debating how much the garments might fetch, supposing he were dragged down an alley, coshed, and stripped. Ben missed his knife, which he seldom wore nowadays, admitting that it would never have done to wear it for his call at the Jenks house. No one offered him any trouble; that might have been different at a later hour, when the widely separated lamps would do no more than emphasize the blackness.
Artemis rested high in the water, unloading done, her new cargo not yet aboard, her empty rigging lonely against the late sky. Debating whether to go up the plank, oppressed by a shyness of inexperience, Ben heard some stir of leisured voices below the forward hatch. "... opportunity, for a man like yourself...." The words received some grumbled answer. Ben wandered away disconsolate to perch on a mooring-post and argue that there was no reason at all why he shouldn't go aboard. The last of the sunlight dissolved in a thickening of cloud-wrack on the horizon; a small southerly breeze was shifting to the eastern quarter when an ancient tricorne hat appeared over the side—Mr. Shawn about to step ashore, frowning a moment at sight of Ben, but relaxing at once and smiling, coming to sink in an easy squat by the mooring-post, careless of the old green coat that settled around his feet. "I'm after passing the time with the watchman, wishing I could make the man talk of something but fish. O to listen to the long Gloucester face of him, and he with scarce a sight of Gloucester the twenty years past by his own telling!" Shawn's knife gouged a splinter from the planking and went to whittling under big knowing hands. "Will it be a truce to studies, Mr. Cory?"
"A short one, sir. Mr. Hibbs gave me the afternoon."
One end of the sliver grew to a delicate fishtail. "Boy—look at that bowsprit line. Mother of God, will your mind's eye see her under a fair wind?—a following wind, say, to belly that fores'l, to make her lean toward the faraway like the goddess she is, man? Do you see it?"
"I think I do. I've never been under sail, Mr. Shawn."
"You will, one day."
"It seems not to be my great-uncle's wish."
"Then maybe not till it's you with the full years of a man, but you'll be going." Shawn frowned at the shape growing under his fingers as if he faced a strong light but would not turn away. "Maybe it'll destroy you, maybe not, but whatever time you'll be going, and you that young, why, Beneen—may I call you so?—you'll see places I'll never live to see at all, now that's no lie."
"May I ask, have you spoken to Mr. Jenks, about that matter you mentioned to my great-uncle?"
"Faith, I've not had opportunity." Shawn smiled at his sliver, where now grew a rounded head and the suggestion of a face, and his knife defined deep curves of female waist and hips. "Indisposed he hath been, and not receiving visitors." Shawn drooped an eyelid. "From the little black wench I understood the condition might continue to prevail."
To Ben that seemed not funny but unkind. "Uncle John told me the Captain never drinks at sea."
Ben knew he was being studied from under lowered brows. "I meant no disparagement. May I ask what years you have itself?"
"I am seventeen, sir—last February."
"And I thinking you nearer twenty." Shawn whittled with tiny careful strokes. "Parents not living?"
"They were both killed in the French attack on Deerfield."
"Forgive my blundering! I remember hearing about Deerfield, in London. 1704 surely, and I navigator of a Dutch brig in the spring of that year, homeward bound out of the Moluccas for Amsterdam, where I left her and so to London, and was the long time cooling my heels waiting a passage for these colonies, with a thought of settling here—a'n't it the laughable way of a man never to know himself at all? I'll never settle, nowhere. In less than a month I was hunting another berth, and do be still hunting. I'll never settle anywhere till I die, and won't that be under the salt water where nothing marks the place a man's vanity ended?... Killed by the savages?"
"My mother was. It was a French officer shot my father."
"And such is war," said Shawn; the mermaid sagged in his hand. "Wars, wars, and all the time the world scarce explored! War was never no profit to a living soul, Beneen, unless it might be a king or a priest." Mr. Shawn spat off the wharf. Ben was confused, that in the moment when Shawn spoke out against the cruelties of mankind his face should be showing the color of some kind of hatred.
"Well, sir, we can hardly permit the French Louis to become master of all Europe, so to harry us and drive us out of this land too, as his forces in Canada have attempted continually."
The Irishman shrugged, watching the bay. "Canada, the way I hear, is a handful of frightened papists in a wilderness. As for the Sun King Louis, I saw him once. Six years past, before the war was renewed—the Treaty of Ryswick accomplished nothing, you'll understand, a patching-up, a pause for the licking of wounds, and so you may say 'tis all one war, and I happening to be in Paris when his solar bloody Majesty made a gracious appearance unto the multitude, I beheld a trembling dried-up monkey in velvet. That minikin shivering old man, that homunculus, that thing, master of Europe and the West? Don't they tell he's not even master of his own bowels? Faith, when he dies his empire will be crumbling like a child's mud castle in the rain as others have done before, and England would do better to wait for it, but not so, the armies and navies must be employed and good men die to no purpose, anyway that's the opinion of one mad Irishman," said Shawn, and smiled with sudden brilliance. A twist of the knife gave the mermaid a pretty navel; he held her away for admiration. "O the anatomical enigmas of the mermaid!—hey? I wonder could there be word of her in Physiologus?... Will you be in haste to return home?"
"No great haste." But with the words, Ben realized he ought to be. The sun was behind the rooftops, the wind sharp easterly.
"Would you dine with me, Ben?—that is," he asked again, "may I call you so and no offense?"
"Of course, Mr. Shawn."
"That's kind. I dread a lonely evening, now that's no lie."
Ben was startled, having meant only to agree to the use of his first name, for which Mr. Shawn hardly needed permission. Well—might not Uncle John suppose he had been invited to dine at the Jenks house, and so not be troubled? It would mean walking that ugly mile of the Roxbury road after dark, but there would be a moon later, if the deepening clouds did not interfere. Mr. Shawn was already speaking of a tavern on Ship Street. "The Lion they call it, nothing so fine, but I fear, Beneen, I am not dressed for a finer place. Hi!—that wind's pure easterly, and will that be meaning rain by morning in this part of the world?"
"Sometimes," Ben said, and discovered he was cold.
"Let us go...."
The Lion tavern consisted of one long narrow room, filled with the reek of malt, sweat, clay pipes, rummy breath, wood smoke. A line of small tables on one side was divided by a poorly drawing fireplace; on the other side of the room a bar ran from the kitchen door to a grimy window, and the smeary glass denied all memory of daylight. Pine knots sputtered above the fireplace; a lantern on the bar added more smoke but no light worth the name. Shawn chose a table within spitting distance of the hearth, ignoring two shabby customers who were exchanging an aimless rambling conversation at the bar.
At the table farthest to the rear, dark as the smoke and like a part of it, a thin man with a black patch on one eye sat by himself, smiling. Before him stood a dirty trencher with the remains of supper, and a pewter mug. He sprawled with elbows hooked on the back of his chair, arms dangling, so quiet he might have been asleep, but the one good eye was open wide and one does not sleep with a frozen smile. When the eye moved to examine Ben and Shawn with no sign of interest, the rest of his face took no part in the act.
An ancient waiter who knew Shawn by name was mumbling a good evening, flicking a rag at the table, his warty face darkened like a ham hung a long time on a rafter. Shawn seemed quite at home; after some unease, Ben found his own lungs could adjust to the haze.
Shawn approached the roast beef, which was not bad, like a man with a week's hunger. Ben finished his first mug of ale quickly, for it helped him avoid coughing; the influence of it softened the sordidness of this place; as the mug was refilled, Ben wondered why anything here should have troubled him—honest working-man's tavern, and Daniel Shawn the prince of good fellows. As for the one-eyed half-corpse, one needn't look....
Shawn's manners, he noticed, were not quite those of Mr. Kenny's house. Holding down the meat with his spoon, Shawn cut it in curiously small pieces, and often used the knife to carry them to his mouth, instead of his fingers. It looked dangerous, for the knife was sharp. Afterward Shawn took pains to clean his fingers on a kerchief from his pocket. Privately consulting his wallet for reassurance, Ben ordered a third round of ale. Mr. Shawn was touched and pleased.
He drank Ben's health. He told two or three bawdy anecdotes, large voice intimately lowered; Ben laughed in delight and forgot them at once, which annoyed him. He discovered he was lifting his mug and drinking to the hope that Mr. Shawn would secure a berth with Artemis.
"O the warm heart of youth!" said Shawn, and looked away. "But Beneen, you must not feel obliged to speak of that to your great-uncle."
"But of course I will!" Softness, Ben thought—he is without it. Even now, when Mr. Shawn was manifestly touched and pleased, the brilliance of his look, his friendship, made Ben think of the spurting of light from the diamond thumb-ring Uncle John occasionally wore, or the stark gleam of sun on snow. Wondering whether the sea took all softness from a man, wondering also as he drank whether such an event ought to be called good or bad, Ben understood that Shawn was saying something more he ought to hear and remember.
"Isn't it the strange thing how from all the ruck, all the thousands, millions of humankind, explorers are so few? Why, you may name all the great ones on the fingers of one hand."
"So few as that?"
"Cabot, Columbus, Magellan, maybe Drake, maybe the both hands. And all the South Pacific lies there unseen, untraveled—nothing but a waste of water? I'll not believe that, when there's room for a continent greater than this one, or a thousand islands larger than mine own motherland."
It was music, and what little music he had heard had always troubled Ben, as a voice whose words could never be wholly translated. For all the pure pleasure, that had been so in those distant hours with Uncle Zebina Pownal. "I suppose, Mr. Shawn, some day every least corner of the world will be explored."
"Ha?... Not in my time nor yours. Now that troubles me, Beneen. It's the clear plain thing what you say, but d'you know I never had the thought myself? No more horizons—O the sad earth!... Man dear, I'm wishing you'd not said that."
"I suppose they who live in that day will be otherwise concerned."
"Most are now, the way explorers are few...."
The dirty trencher had been removed from in front of the one-eyed man, and his mug refilled. He must have drunk from it, for a bit of foam clung near his bleak smile and was drying there, as if someone had spat on a statue. Ben hitched his chair sideways, the better to avoid looking at him, and glanced at the bar, knowing the ale had made him foolishly drowsy.
Two newcomers had arrived. Ben was obliged to stare, then understood he should have recognized them in an instant without need of thought. ("'Tis a matter of being your own man....") That was Jan Dyckman over there, big and blond and mild, drinking rum with the round-headed greasy bosun Tom Ball. Ben leaned across the table in a generous glow. "Do you know Mr. Dyckman?"
Shawn shook his head, deep in revery. "By sight only."
"I could present you. Maybe a word from him would be of use?"
Shawn shook his head again and murmured: "The thought is kind, but look again, the way the time's inauspicious. Mr. Dyckman is the worse for drink, Beneen. Some other time."
Ben looked again, astonished, to find Jan Dyckman gazing directly at him without recognition, eyes rigid and damp. The eyes moved jerkily away and with dignity viewed a coin that Mr. Dyckman would have liked to raise from a wet spot on the bar. He must have been drinking elsewhere, to be so far gone. Abruptly Shawn was asking: "Have you ever had a woman?"
"Why, no, I—no, Mr. Shawn."
"And don't I remember that time of life, the ache of it? Ah, steady as she goes!—the fear too, boy, but devil any need of that. I'll take you to a house, and you agreeing."
"I—don't know. I suppose I ought to start soon for home."
Shawn seemed not to hear. "It's orderly is the place I'm thinking of, above a cordwainer's on Fish Street and next door to a grog shop, the which is convenient. Four girls and the madam—O the fine flow of conversation in her cups! She's that rambling you wouldn't know the thing she'd say. I'd have you hear how she was betrayed by an earl in London town, the way I'm thinking she was never no closer to England than a comfortable pile of sacking, maybe forninst a warehouse on one of the wharfs out yonder, but it's the fair fine tale." Ben fidgeted. "As for the rest, Beneen, a stallion will need but a moment to cover a willing mare, and in such a house they are willing. I recall a half-ugly wench who would be doing anything you like at all." Shawn laid a finger along his old-ivory pockmarked nose and smiled diamond-like. "I had her once—wasn't it like sinking into a warm dumpling fresh from the oven? One of the others is handsome but cowlike—I'm a-mind to try her, though I fear she'll be watching a spot on the ceiling and do no more for a man's entertainment than if he was a wind at the door."
Ben pressed damp hands on the table to check a shaking in them, knowing with exasperation that Shawn must have seen it. Vague sounds at the bar gave him an excuse to turn away. Tom Ball and Jan Dyckman were leaving, Dyckman moving like a giant wooden doll, every step a separate achievement. When at length Ben turned back it seemed to him—but everything now was confused, the ale in him mumbling I-will-I-will-not—it seemed to him that Daniel Shawn was settling in his chair as if he too had just swung about, or risen perhaps, resuming his former position in the same moment when the one-eyed scarecrow stood up (not drunk at all) and stalked in the wake of Ball and Dyckman out of the tavern.
As he passed Ben's table the thin man shot one downward glance. To Ben in the cold-hot worry of I-will-I-will-not it was like being jabbed by an icicle, and he could not even summon his wits to think about it, for Shawn was saying kindly: "It's the fresh air you need, Beneen, and I'm thinking of the old saying, a man's not quite a man till he's tried that bit of a doorway. So shall we go?"
Reuben left the cottage with the green shutters before the sun had entered the smudge of horizon clouds. He took the path across the back fields, his muscles lazy with the spring, his mind blazing.
Mr. Welland had not appeared surprised that Reuben should wish to study his art. He had not probed for motives; had not even inquired whether such ambition harmonized with Mr. Kenny's plans; had offered no large generalities of grave counsel. Alertness was the word: as though the doctor had caught something more than Reuben's words, and must listen sharply within his own universe to interpret the message.
Reuben had lived through a heavy time while Mr. Welland gazed at the completed chess game, his monkey face a stillness. Then—"Yes," said Mr. Welland, "you and I must be friends. Yet I have never taught...."
The doctor spent much time laying the chessmen away in their plain box, the stillness remaining, his lips pursed, a dim frown coming and going. He carried the box to a drawer of a battered cabinet, then stood before the single bookcase in his surgery, stoop-shouldered, elderly, pinching his small chin with thumb and forefinger. "Mm-yas—Vesalius. Not the most recent but still the best." He spread the tall book open on his desk. With the appearance of impatience he nodded for Reuben to come to him.
"This is a man," said Amadeus Welland. "You've glimpsed him, clad in garments, and in a skin—itself an organ of first importance, but forget it for the moment and look on him here, flayed. You can imagine, I suppose, what these are—these flowing, overlapping bands?"
"Muscles, surely?"
"Yes. Place your left hand by your right armpit, here, now draw your right arm leftward; what bunches under your fingers is this, here in the drawing, and the name of it is Pectoralis major, and you may find some little trouble in remembering it."
"I will try to remember it."
"I am glad you said 'try.' I have spent fifty-three years striving to overcome that vanity wherewith all men are born. You'll also try, and succeed, in remembering the names of all the other muscles in this drawing, and in this one where the fella turns you his flayed back, and in all these other drawings further on. You will reflect that muscles, while of major importance, are not more important than all the organs that live below them in their manifold occasions—since these also you must remember, all of them, their names, their functions so far as we know them, the many changes that will affect them in youth and age, sickness and health. Here, for example, is the diagram of the bony frame that bears us. When my own studies began I had first to learn these bones—all of them, naturally, their names, position, function whether in action or repose—mm-yas, as you will. I do recall my teacher once struck me across the face with a dry bone called the radius—this one—because I called it the ulna, for the which I later praised him—with reservations."
"Reservations, sir?"
"It was possible for him," said Mr. Welland lightly, and took snuff. "It would not be possible for me to strike—a student. Fi-choo-shoo! And here, sir, is a representation of the human heart...."
When Reuben next glanced at the clock in Mr. Welland's surgery, another hour had passed. "There will be times," said Mr. Welland, removing a gray cat from a cushion on a three-legged stool by the western window, where she had slept through the lesson, so that he might sit on the stool himself with the late sun behind his shoulder—"times, I guess, when your eyes grow tired in candlelight; other times when you'd much prefer to go outside and play—as you must do fairly often, but not of course at times when you're unable to remember, for example, all the occasions when laudanum may be given and those when it may not. And so on, Reuben, and so on and so on—I've merely mentioned a few things that come first to mind," said Mr. Welland, and rubbed his eyes. Reuben could not see his face very clearly against the light....
Crossing the back fields, Reuben passed through a clump of trees, and from the other side could look across a better-known field to the roof of Mr. Kenny's house. He leaned against a beech, discovering that he was hungry, that it would be enjoyable to pester Kate for something unauthorized in advance of supper. The wind had shifted behind him, now easterly; the broad hard body of the beech was a friend.
There was too much: Reuben knew he could not immediately bring order to any such welter of new impressions and discoveries. Hungry, yes, but let that wait; and the questions about himself that he had timorously half-intended to ask Mr. Welland—let them wait too. Too much for now—like a runner exhausted, he must rest, and was even reluctant to go on to the house. Better for the moment only to stand here in the failing daylight, friendly with the beech and needing (for the moment!) no other friend.
Rising from that stool, disturbing the cat again and taking pencil and paper at his desk, Mr. Welland had made a few light loving strokes.
"You draw with great skill, sir."
"Thank you—practice. And this woman's breast I have drawn—beautiful, you would say?"
"Yes, it is."
"Yes, I should think so, to anyone, although I fear my poor sketch claims only accuracy and not art. But 'tis beautiful, as you say, the thing itself—maketh one to think of the lover's kiss, or of a child's mouth here drinking life." He began another drawing. "This is what I have seen not once but too many times, when this organ is afflicted with certain kinds of destroying tumor." Reuben watched, shaken and sickened but refusing to turn away until the doctor sat back from his desk, murmuring: "You understand, Mr. Cory, I am merely trying to frighten and demoralize you with selected scraps of truth."
"I killed a wolf once," said Reuben Cory, refusing to look away.
"Tell me of that."
Reuben told of it, reluctant to meet the doctor's look because of what the man had said a while ago about vanity, but finding no great difficulty in the telling. After all it was not brag. It had happened.
"I shall speak to Mr. Kenny," said Amadeus Welland. "Perhaps an apprenticeship? Or better a year or so of preparation, to determine for yourself if this be really what you wish, in such time as may be allowed from your other studies—which are not to be neglected, Reuben, not ever, you understand? Show me a man of medicine who hath found himself too busy for other fields of learning, and you will have shown me an educated damned fool."
"I can't——"
"Reuben, if thanks be appropriate, let them wait. I may have done thee no service. I have only pointed out one or two signposts on a most heartbreaking journey. But if that is the way you will go—I am fifty-three, Reuben, not very successful and not at all loved here in Roxbury—if that is the way you will go, I'll go with you as far as I may."
Ben Cory ducked his head to clear the doorframe, unused even yet to being rather tall, following Daniel Shawn with the precarious poise of a man of the world. The room in many ways resembled a cavern, its air stale-scented and much used, with bat-rustlings from other chambers. The shriveled woman squeezed his damp hands, twittering, her pink cheeks like summer apples as they look after a winter in the cellar, powdery and dull within but retaining a characteristic cloying sweetness. "Any friend of yours, Mr. Shawn—ooh, look at the great gray eyes of him!" Mistress Gundy patted the pleat of her lips every moment or two, maybe enjoying a silent burp. "What do I call you, dearie?" She trotted away with small bobbing steps, to plump into an armchair and smile and sigh. "Cat's got his tongue, la. So he loseth nothing else, no harm done, ha, Mr. Shawn? What do I call the pretty young gentleman that's lost his pretty tongue, Mr. Shawn? Won't have anything lost in my place, and me trying so hard to keep everything agreeable, ha, Mr. Shawn?"
"Just Benjamin," said Shawn, and straddled a chair, watching the old woman with somber upturned eyes, a darkness in him. Ben thought, with alcoholic irrelevance, that if Shawn were to reach out and squash poor Mistress Gundy with a twist of a sailor's thumb, she would pop like any defenseless bug, but none of them need be astonished, Mistress Gundy least of all. But at one time she had been a child, a growing maid.... "Just Benjamin will do," said Shawn, and spat in the fireplace.
"Oh, marry will he, I'm sure." Mistress Gundy giggled and remained genteel.
"Anything new here, Nanny?"
"A'n't it alway new, Mr. Shawn?"
"That it is not, and never was unless maybe for Adam, the poor sod, and for a boy the first time but not the second. Nanny, I'm wanting Laura for the boy. For meself I don't care—anything that'll bear me weight a moment."
"Mister Shawn, such a manner of conversation! Will you not mend, sir?" He only looked at her. "Well, Master Just Benjamin, dearie, Laura it shall be, and she so fresh and lovely, I'm sure, you'll be most content, I'm sure."
Ben cleared his throat, mindful of Shawn's rambling advice in the evening street. "Would you wish something to drink, Mistress Gundy, that we might have sent up from next door?"
"Nay, I knew he'd find it, and with pleasant speech!" She cut her eyes at Shawn to make that a reproach, but he was remote, observing only the embers, or the South Pacific. "Well, dearie, 'tis early on in the evening for it, but since you speak of it and so pleasantly, a trifle to wet the whistle would not go amiss." She patted her lips. "For my part, sir, ever since I resided in London I have been partial to a bit of hot buttered rum of a chilly evening, to settle the rifting-up and keep out the cold. It's the Boston air, sir. Never do I grow accustomed to it, that I never."
"Yes," said Ben.
"I'll send the servant," said Mistress Gundy, and rose, about to potter away.
"Do you send him," said Shawn to the embers, "but bring in the wenches before he returns, Nanny, else you'll be rambling on from here to hereafter and we biting the curbing of the stall, God damn it, with nothing to mount."
"Mr. Shawn, sir, one day your tongue'll turn and bite you, sir."
"Then I'll have thee kiss the place, old woman." She sidled for the doorway, out of reach of his lazy hand. "But wait till I bleed."
"I marvel the sweet young gentleman ever took up with you, sir, you that come in with a smile and stay with a curse."
"Took up with me to see a bit of the world, Nanny, the way the world's a troublesome thing for a boy to see at all and I'm part of it. Come give us a kiss!"
"You leave me tell you this: you mark one of my poor girls on the face just once, just once, Mr. Shawn——"
"And you'll have law on me belike?"
"Though it be the ruin o' me I'll say it: I think you're a wicked man, Mr. Shawn."
"But not on the face is well enough?"
"Mr. Shawn!"
"Come now, give us a kiss and be friends!"
Ben said involuntarily: "Don't, Mr. Shawn! Leave her alone!"
Shawn locked stares with him a moment, smiling, then spread his hands and folded them again on the chair back and dropped his jaw on them, watching the embers, alone on an island. Behind his back Mistress Gundy was beckoning, and Shawn paid no heed as Ben stepped into the hallway with her. "I don't suppose he means too much by his talk, Mistress Gundy."
"Eh? Known him long?"
"Not long, not very well.... I was astonished he should speak so."
She was sniffling, patting her lips. "Let it go." In spite of the small gust of tears she was alert and brisk. "Be you paying or him?"
"I am. How—how much?"
"Ho, and if he's not, how comes he to lay about him so?" She broke off, laughing indulgently. "Never thee mind, Master Just Benjamin. Two such lovely girls! Well now, if you're a-mind to buy us a wee trifle of rum—so pleasant with a dab of butter, don't you think?—and the girls...."
Ben re-entered the parlor with enlarged wisdom and a shrunken wallet. The books for Reuben, lying in a chair, comforted him: at least some of his money had been well spent.
"Don't allow her to rob you, a devil's name," said Shawn drowsily. "No highwayman liveth but could learn jolly tricks of a bawd."
Glancing down at the alien profile, wondering in passing whether he even liked Daniel Shawn, Ben felt disinclined to mention that the robbery, if that was the name for it, had already taken place. He jingled the few pence and farthings remaining, and waited, himself alone on an island within a cavern.
She entered abruptly with good-natured bounce and giggle, plump and moon-faced, smelling of rose-water and sweat. As she paused in the doorway her transparent smock offered Ben a silhouette of cushiony thighs, by her intent maybe, and then she was coming to him directly with nothing for Shawn but a glance that might or might not have held recognition. "There's the sweet cod," she said, and cupped Ben's chin in her hands, and was on his lap, heavy and squirming, elastic, moist and warm.
In Deerfield, "whore" was only a word, seldom used except in back-of-the-barn profanity or Bible readings. It had never occurred to Ben, but did now as Laura twitched his shirt open and rubbed a knowing silky hand over his nipples, that a whore might be a human being, and friendly.
Another girl, stately and yellow-haired, sat in dignity across the room from Shawn—surely not cowlike as he had said but quite beautiful in her stillness, conveying an impression that she was not really present. A woman on an island. Shawn had remained in his idle sprawl, studying the queenly repose of her like a man who might yawn any moment. "Be you pleased with me?" Laura whispered, and nibbled Ben's ear.
"Of course." With some enterprise he found a smooth kneecap and sent his hand exploring, since she seemed to expect it; and then he thought: Too much of that damned ale—or maybe I'm ill—and now we must even have buttered rum!
All the same, it was unmistakable relief when Mistress Gundy pottered back, ahead of a gangling servant with the drinks. "Well, I'm sure," said the little madam—"to the Queen, God bless her!"
Laura bounced off Ben's lap at the call of patriotism. The tall quiet girl was on her feet, and Shawn too. But as Ben staggered, finding his leg half asleep, and drank dutifully, he was aware of a sudden annoyance in Daniel Shawn, and saw how with the mug at his lips the man was hardly tilting it at all. To Ben it was obscure, a thing he might tell himself he had not seen. This stifling moment, with fat Laura's arm hugging his loins, held no fair opportunity to think about it. But surely for all his strange, sometimes cruel speech and wild ways, Mr. Shawn was not disloyal—surely nobody ever refused to drink the health of Queen Anne!
Ben coughed as the cheap rum bored down his gullet. He saw Shawn grab the wrist of the tall girl and stride out of the room with her, not a word for courtesy. She had not even finished her drink.
"A hard man," said Mistress Gundy, comfortably stirring her mug. "Well, I told him. Just let him mark one of my girls, just once...."
"He won't, Mother," said Laura. "Why, that time——" A sharp glance from the old woman checked her. It held more than sharpness; they were exchanging some wry understanding, and Ben was oppressed at feeling himself a patronized, tiresome child. Laura tugged amiably at his arm. "Come to my room, love?" He followed her jiggling rear down a whispering hallway to a smaller cavern of stale roses. She had brought along the remains of his buttered rum. "Old bawd'd finish it, did you leave it there. A'n't she a caution, love?"
"Mm." Ben gulped a little more of it, finding it not so bad. Here the bed was virtually everything, but Laura was fond of dolls; a dozen of them sat about in comical attitudes, and Ben would have liked to say something about them. "Help me drink it, won't you? I had enough."
"Nay, I had too, and too much." She patted her stomach and yawned. With the casualness of habit, she pulled her smock up to her middle and dropped on the bed, fat thighs comfortably wide.
Ben shoved his drink aside. In daydream, yes—he had pictured such mindless complaisance in a woman who never quite owned a face. The reality was no more voluptuous than a belch or a kick under the ribs. Yet Laura was neither gross nor unclean—indeed, pretty in her overblown way, and certainly friendly. Repelled and hypnotized, he stumbled toward her, meeting, across the bulk of her pink flesh, a drowsy smile that suppressed another yawn. "What's the matter, love? Be you afeared of me?"
"Of course not."
"Ah—sweet cod—my little goat—whatever's the matter, love?" Her voice was thick and slow, the noise of a wave, her giggle the idle foam on a reaching wave. "Don't you know nothing, little goat?"
Ben fought with his clothes. For an instant in the candlelight the hair was golden, not dark, the pallid skin a damask rose. Then it was fat Laura again, nobody else—writhing, arching her heaviness, moaning, big arms reaching for him in practised simulation of hunger as Ben groped, struggled, and spent at the instant of contact with no pleasure, no excitement but that of fear and no relief but that of exhaustion.
Laura cursed casually under her breath, but as she sat up she was not noticeably angry—more amused, maybe a little concerned. "First time, dearie?" Ben nodded in misery. "Ho, never mind! You're very young."
"God damn, I'm seventeen."
"Hey! No cursing and swearing, boy!—I can't abide it.... Did something happen maybe? You know—spill salt at supper? Something?" She was serious, lightly worried. Ben shook his head. "Why, there!" She pointed at his jacket tossed on a chair, a bit of his kerchief dangling from a pocket. "Swoonds, that's bad luck as ever was," she said, and rolled off the bed to push the kerchief out of sight. "No bloody wonder!"
Ben knew she would take great offense if he laughed. Anyway the darkness of a new fear was killing laughter. She sat by a little square of wall-mirror to put her hair to rights. Ben ordered his clothes, finding his legs too large, blurred, disobedient. Maybe the last of that buttered rum would steady him. He gulped it down. "I'm sorry," said Ben.
"Hoo, it's a nothing, boy, happens all the time. Come again some day," she said, and could not resist a small parting cruelty: "When you're old enough."
The darkness of the new fear followed him out of the room, and the name of it was Pox.
Mistress Gundy sat as before with her rum, or somebody's rum, and nodded to Ben, waving her puckered hand in some cryptic courtesy. Her eyes were swimming—sad or hilarious or both. Somewhere down the hallway a woman was whimpering rhythmically. "Top of the evening, young man. I'm bloody mellow." Mistress Gundy patted her lips. "Going so soon? Parcel's yonder, needn't make out I'm keeping a den of thieves."
"Thank you. Had no such thought."
"No dallying with Venus? Up and off like a little bull? I'm bloody mellow or I wouldn't speak so free, but I say a bit of broad speech never hurt no one, la, besides, I lived on a farm when I was a little maid. Lord, the Surrey countryside, and I'll never see it again!" She wept comfortably, and burped. "A'n't you waiting for your friend?"
"I must be going. Tell him I couldn't wait."
"Tsha!" She drank, her little finger thrust out for gentility. "Come again, do. I feel sorry for you. My weakness." She held up her free hand earnestly to detain him. "Understand? I feel like a mother to you, but you—you—you——"
"I must be going."
"That's right, boy, turn away from an old whore. You—you—have—not—got the least notion wha's like to be old and lorn and forsaken, every man's bloo' hand raised against you. Have you? Colonial. You never saw no earl, not in this Godforsaken land, marry you never. Why, one of the particular maids to 'is lady I was, and he got it in a linen-closet, now that's no lie as your nasty-spoken Irish friend would say. Understand?—the very self-same sheets 'er ladyship slep' on, the mere smell of lavender can still set me a-thinking of it, and her playing cards only two rooms away, if I'd so much as whimpered he might've been caught what they call flagrant delicious, and you think I'd do any such of a thing, loyal as I was? It shows your God-damned bloody ignorance, all the same there was a time you wouldn't've turned away."
Ben fled downstairs. The smells in the blackness of Fish Street were fresher. He thought, as in prayer: No harm done. None at all, unless he had caught the pox. Probably you couldn't, just from that much.
He dropped Reuben's books, his clumsiness a warning that he was drunk, his head grown to a foggy region of rising and roaring waves. He searched patiently for the parcel, since nothing could be done or considered till he found it. Stooping caused a rush of blood to his head, a tenor of collapse. He squatted, groping with clawed fingers, found the blessed hardness of the books and gathered them up. He knew a shrewd way to deal with this problem: he unfastened his belt, slid the end of it under the string of the parcel, and buckled it fast. Now the books bit his hipbone, but all was well—he would not lose them, and the not unwelcome discomfort would keep him sober on the long journey. The moon had not risen, or was covered by cloud. He supposed it was still early in the evening, but something had happened to his time sense.
Maybe, he thought, I have grown old and am too stupid to know it. Maybe the sun will discover me with white hair. Dried like a summer apple and no teeth. Bent on a stick, poor old Ben Cory. "Yaphoo!"
Yes, I heard that. That was me—old Cory, old Ben Cory, know him? A public shame in the middle of the street, but who'll notice old Ben Cory in the dark?
He advanced with precision on a street-lantern that showed him dingy house-fronts and the filthy gutter in the middle of the road, where a stray dog watched him sullenly, then slunk away, demoniac and lonely. Ben observed quietly that there were no pigs: his excellent judgment had chosen a time to walk on Fish Street when no pigs wallowed in it: alleluia. Of course only a fool would go to shouting "Yaphoo!" in such a place as if he were drunk, and he quite unarmed, carrying no money now to be sure, but dressed like one who had it. "I notice here," he said, "a fortuitous yet welcome opportunity." Stepping to the channel in the middle of the street, he relieved himself, with embarrassment. Untidy, but evidently in this part of town everyone did it. Startled, he thought: Oh, fine! Oh, wonderful!—now I could, while back there.... "Yaphoo!" There we go again! The rest of his comment came out as a harmlessly soft muttering: "... 'sn't anybody remember poor old Ben Coree, late of Deerfield?"
Someone, somewhere, not long ago, had pronounced his name in that odd foreign way. It would be pleasant to remember about that, for it had something to do with sunlight. Meanwhile, his breeches decently buttoned, he was making excellent progress toward another lamp, Reuben's books were safe, and he was utterly sober, gruesomely sober, sober as Mr. Cotton Mather. "Sober as all the mamn Dathers," said Ben, and stumbled on something soft and screamed a little. Just a dead cat. Now if he might walk on in this patient way, past the grim windows and their occasional furtive gleam, he would arrive at another wholly dark section where a man, offending no one, might run a finger down his throat, lighten ship, and proceed.
He made it.
His stomach empty, he noted that in spite of perfect sobriety he was still tremendously drunk, whereat he laughed, but wriggling companion shadows to left and right of him did not. No: they were heavy-cold, banishing all warmth of amusement; imaginary but nasty, having the creeping urgency of sick dreams. He knew them to be imaginary in the light of that pale flame of reason which stayed alive in him under a long rising and subsidence of the waves, and here he asked himself acutely: how may one diminish the force of an imaginary creation, when naming it imaginary availeth not? Shall we assert, brethren, with overweening impudicity, that the imagination, by its own act of creation, hath given unto the shadow a substance akin to that which occupieth the carnal, corporeal yaphoo?
Cannily they remained behind him, receding, if he dared turn his head, with contemptuous ease. He knew them, though: open-eyed but dead, trivial heads with nothing left of the body but a flabby band of hide such as might be left by the sliding drag of an axe. Double Indians—why? Why, because the body happens to possess a right side and a left. "Mother, I have but to remember the look of Union Street and Dock Square and Cornhill, and shall unquestionably know the Town House when I arrive at it, being in no sense too foxed for such, but deliver my mind from that page of Cicero, seeing I hurt him, heedless, heedless continually...."
The lump in his stomach swallowed that speech, bloating. How can you cancel a hurt when there's no way to turn back the clock?
You can't.
It happened. It's over.
"Nempe quod hic alte demissius ille volabat——" Ben retched, but the lump would not come up, and he lost interest in weeping. He supposed he ought to consider this plaguy longing to talk like a drunken man, above all to explain, thwarted by the absence of anyone who might listen. But wasn't that someone lounging by the faint lantern which ought to mark the opening of Union Street? Two in fact, two women, not imaginary. He observed them with great intelligence, their shawls and full skirts—one tall, one short; alone in this region at night, certainly whores in search of business, but never mind. They were animated, and as he approached, Ben found he could explain things in an undertone which need not disturb them.
"Hoy!" Ben thought that was the tall girl; certainly she was the one who delivered that birdy whistle. "Looking for something?"
"Regret," said Ben. "Spent ball, just had some. Otherwise pleased and proud, my word on it."
Both laughed obligingly. The tall girl said: "Phew! Drunk as a lord and him na' but a boy. Feel sorry for 'm, I do."
"Someone else said that a while ago." Ben spoke stiffly, wounded. "No occasion for it. Not worthy of sorrow in sight of God or man."
"Drunk as a lord and running on like a canting parson. It wants 'a wipe its little nose. How they hangin', m' lud?"
But the small plump girl had stepped into Ben's path, and Ben could see her smile was amiable, swimming and shifting in the cold light. She was young, he thought, and pretty. "Sorry. Another time."
"Ay, but sha'n't I walk a bit way with you? You're rotten drunk, boy, and dressed so fine, someone'll rob you."
"No money. Few farthings left."
"A stoodent, Lottie. Look at them books. Oh, do fetch 'em out, m' lud. Read a girl bloody something, do!"
But plump Lottie said: "Leave me walk on a way with you, if you be going by Cornhill." Not waiting for consent, she had his arm, ignoring some under-the-breath comment from her companion, which Ben also preferred to overlook. "That's my way too. Come on—I won't bite you, boy."
"He can read the books," said the tall girl—"between times, like."
"You're kind," Ben said. "I've often marveled how kind people can be, I mean when one's not expecting it. My mother and father were killed at Deerfield. I am, as you say, drunk and not speaking plain."
Lottie was keeping step somehow with his long rambling legs, the other girl forgotten though she had sent after them a little miauling cry. Ben tried to shorten his pace; the legs were riotously disobedient; he could no longer think of them as trustworthy comrades; this was sad. "Drunk as a pig," she said, and giggled warmly. "But you got a sweet face."
"It's merely a kind of good nature," said Ben judicially, disturbed by the sin of vanity. "One can be too good-natured, now that's no lie."
"I'm good-natured too."
"You think a man and woman ought to marry if they have serious 'ligious differences?"
"Ha? I don't know. Walk easy-don't give in to it, boy.... You're to be married?"
"Not fitting. Do you believe in God?"
"Hoy, don't talk so loud! You're drunk."
"Yes.... Can you make up for a hurt when there's no way to turn back the clock?"
"Now it don't do no good to cry. Come on. You can walk."
"Of course I can walk. You don't understand. It can't be done, that's the answer. It happened. It happened in the wilderness. It's over. Goes away from you the way the spring goes and the summer too. You think I could cry when I saw my people killed? God damn it, if we wept for every sufficient reason we'd've all drowned long ago. What did you say, Lottie?"
"Nothing, boy. Come on."
"No, you said something about marrying. Did you not?" He lurched against her and gasped an apology for clumsiness. "That's not even been spoke of, I suppose I'm too young, but she—now pray understand, what I don't understand is this: how a man could love a woman so much and nevertheless go and—go and——"
He stopped, embarrassed, realizing that she was undoubtedly a whore, and therefore he could not, without unkindness—through intricate labor of thought he heard her remark: "You'll learn...." The street was a forest, a wilderness where Ben could feel the power of snow on branches suffering for the coming of spring, and in this jungle he was now marvelously ready for the act of love, and had no money. "Come along, love, come along. You live here in Boston?"
"Nay, Roxbury." He watched the pale flame of reason surviving the onslaught of another wave. Was this forest under the sea? A wilderness not of snow-burdened hemlock but of oozing weed, monstrous, ancient. Here monsters lazily glided above dead ships and men unburied, a wilderness where no spring had ever dawned since the beginning of the world. "I don't know where he is, Lottie. The men from Hatfield buried all the dead they could find—later in the day, you understand, after the French were driven out, but I don't know where he lieth or my mother. I'll go back some day, but only if my brother wishes to go with me. Thou hast dove's eyes."
"What?"
"Thou art fair, my love."
"You are drunk. I'll see you to Newbury Street if you like—that's your way to Roxbury."
"Most kind. Oh, I wish——"
"You're drunk, and no money—remember? I'm good-natured too, but not that good-natured. Now see can you walk without my hand."
"Of course I can," said Ben with resentment. "Was I not doing so when we met?"
"Not too bloody well," she said, and laughed so cheerfully that he was obliged to join in it, knowing that for a while she still walked on beside him. At a later time, in the sedate quiet of Newbury Street, she was gone. Ben looked back and could still see her, turning a corner, more clearly visible than when she had been near to him. In gentle wonder Ben observed she was slightly hunchbacked, and not young, perhaps not much like the image his mind had drawn of her, that image no more substantial than the shadow of a bird in passage above the leaves in a wilderness of spring.
John Kenny said: "You might as well, Mr. Hibbs. I dare say he was invited to dine at the Jenks', but he'll have no lantern, and I don't like it. Take Rob Grimes with you. Of course, Reuben, you may go with them." Mr. Kenny winced at the pain in his foot which was his common evening companion. "He won't have been invited to stay the night—a house guest would set poor Madam Jenks all of a doodah."
"It's my fault," said Gideon Hibbs.
Mr. Kenny grunted in pain and impatience. "Do you also take that brace of pistols, mine and the one that was George's, they're in my bedroom cabinet. Won't need them, but no harm in carrying them."
Reuben turned from the window, the brightness of the dining room beating down on his mask. "I'll fetch them, sir, and I think I'll wear Ben's knife, seeing he left it behind."
Mr. Kenny relaxed enough to chuckle. "Heh, a small army!—I pity any malefactors in your path. Nay, 'tis only sensible. Well, go as far as the fort anyway. The road's lighted well enough on the Boston side, but I pray you take care passing the Neck. If my God-damned foot wasn't so horrid bad tonight—well, get along, gentlemen! Must you stay for my senile chattering?"
Gnarled, small, ancient and unexcited, Rob Grimes marched in front with the lantern, a pistol jammed in his belt absurd and piratical. Mr. Hibbs carried the other under his flapping great-coat. Eased by physical activity, Reuben's own anxiety lessened: Ben was probably in no trouble, Ben with his wilderness eyes and other senses, and would be sure to relish the comic value of this escort. Presently Reuben was dubiously enjoying the gaunt majesty of Gideon Hibbs in a three-cornered hat, and elaborating comments for Ben's later entertainment.
Mr. Hibbs was not amused. Reuben could feel in him the intense mirthless zeal of a sedentary soul obliged to take the responsibility for something athletic. Maybe, Reuben speculated, a walk in the dark on the Roxbury road did approach the borders of philosophy. He sniffed the east wind, its wild smell of sea-wrack and approaching rain. His hand touched Ben's beloved knife and fell away.
"Said nothing to you, Reuben, about remaining late?"
Mr. Hibbs had asked that twice already. "No, sir."
"'F I may make so bold"—the thick voice of Rob Grimes floated back on a beery chuckle—"some doxy be a-bouncing under him this 'ere moment. Boy's had the look of a stud colt come a year now—blarst it to Jesus, you can't 'old 'em beyant a certain age."
"None of that!" said Mr. Hibbs, who for courtesy would never have spoken so to Grimes in the presence of Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury. Rob grunted, uncrushed. "Reuben, hath Benjamin spoke any word to you lately to suggest a disturbance or over-concern with—hm—with——"
"With the mounting of smocks? No, sir."
"Reuben, I await your apology. I remind you that your favored position doth neither protect nor justify you in assuming the conversation of a roustabout. From evil speech evil conduct. I am waiting."
"I'm sorry, sir," said Reuben, and discovered distractedly that he was, a little. Shocking Mr. Hibbs was too cheap a victory. "I'm truly sorry, Mr. Hibbs. I do speak heedless, and will try to mend."
The great shadow of Gideon Hibbs grunted forgiveness. It almost always did. Uncle John, Reuben thought, is another who forgives much, and why did I never think of that before? It seemed to him that Uncle John, frail and gouty and gray, was somehow closely with them here in the dark. Some day, he thought, I shall be old—well, the devil with that! Why think now of poor old Reuben Cory?
Because Ben will go where I cannot? Because an old man must regret the flowers he never touched, mornings when he never saw the sun?
But if it is to be medicine—why, then I shall be going where he will not. "If I said, however, that living is a journey"—oh, Mr. Welland, what else could it be, and every morning a misty crossroads?
"Reuben—could Benjamin by chance have overindulged in liquor?"
"I doubt it, sir. Last Monday he did and so did I, but away from home I believe Ben would be careful."
Rob Grimes snorted. Clearing his pug nose, maybe.
"You do reassure me somewhat."
Rob Grimes was calling back: "Mind a puddle here! Och—too bad! Best go about, gentlemen!"
Reuben had already seen what lay under the glow of Rob's lantern, the horrible bulge of the puffed belly, the straightened legs, the obscene pool of blood at the nostrils. "Still warm," said Rob, kneeling, running a hand down the miserable neck, in pity or perhaps only regret at the waste of something useful. "Not of Roxbury," he said. "Know every-each nag in the village. A chapman's likely, some louse-eaten chapman bound he'd drag the last half-mile out of the poor old fart. Shit, look at them ribs! A'n't had a fair meal in months."
"Reuben! What ails thee, boy?"
"Nothing," said Reuben, vomiting.
"Well"—Rob Grimes was ignoring the commotion—"well, the knackers'll be along for 'm in the morning." The old man strode on a short way to wait, his squat back shutting the lantern light from the corpse as he studied the windy night.
"Let me be!" said Reuben, wincing at the sympathy of Mr. Hibbs' arm. "I can't help it. It's the blood, that's all."
"So? Why, only the other day you cut your hand, and bound it up yourself, no-way troubled."
"That was my blood."
"Mm. But——"
"Let me be! Will you go on, Rob?"
Grimes walked on, maintaining silence for which Reuben loved him. Reuben hurried, wanting to draw nearer that moving island of light.
"Sometimes," said Mr. Hibbs gently, "I imagine I can sense it, when you have fallen to thinking of Deerfield."
"I try not to think of it overmuch."
"That's best of course." Mr. Hibbs sighed, as one whose overture of kindness has been rejected, and Reuben was ashamed. "As you know, I call myself a Seeker, the name I borrow from Mr. Roger Williams whose memory I revere; many would not even call me a good Christian. But I would venture to suggest, Reuben, that God is with you, his ways past finding out."
"You are very kind, sir." And Reuben thought in a continuing astonishment: As a matter of fact, he is.... He wished Rob Grimes would set a stronger pace, but his best intelligence told him that the old man's sturdy plodding was actually not slow, considering the darkness, the need for sheltering the lantern and sending its light from side to side so that they might watch both the right and the left of the road. Maybe they were lost, the three of them, and always had been lost, lost but following some difficult thread of purpose in this windy dark. In a kindlier night they could have found the Great Bear slanting toward the North Star. In a kindlier night there would have been no cause to fear, as in this wilderness Reuben knew he was afraid.
"In my own life," said Hibbs, "I have not seen much of violence. I cannot pretend to know how it was for you three years ago, except I know it to be a thing beyond words of comfort. Nevertheless allow me to say, Reuben, that your life, yours and Benjamin's, is yet at the spring."
Rob Grimes called: "Something ahead! I heard——"
The noise floated to them faintly, puzzling in the wind, a hallooing with an insane note of cheerfulness. Reuben felt a scattering coldness across his cheek—rain, or sea-scud torn by the east wind from the surface of Gallows Bay. Grimes mumbled: "Can't hear it now——"
"Hush!" said Reuben savagely. Then: "It's to the left."
"You mean the marshes, boy?"
"Yes. Give me the light, old man!" Grimes yielded it without a murmur, and Reuben ran, unthinking, sure-footed, avoiding the hummocks and the marshy hollows, shouting: "Where are you? Where are you?" Then he could see his brother fifty feet away, upright in grotesque dignity on a small sodden peninsula of land not much broader than the spread of his feet. Between him and Reuben was a muttering of wind-tormented marsh water, and a smooth patch of featureless gray unaffected by the wind. Ben took a wavering step. "Don't move, you damn fool! Look down!"
"'M a damn fool," said Ben agreeably, and swayed back from the quicksand, grinning at Reuben's light. "Fact 'm drunk."
Reuben laughed. "That I know. Don't move your feet. Stay as you are till I come to you." Laughing still, he picked his way along the edge of the water and the foulness, to the narrow strip of solid ground that Ben's luck had found for him in the dark. "Pee-yew!" said Reuben, and clutched a handful of Ben's shirt. "With such a breath why walk? Why not float, friend?"
"Was trying to. Was trying to find Polaris. Too dark. Besides I'm in a 'culiar condition."
"Lean on me. Firm ground here."
"Wherever thou art."
"I shall remember that, and thou wilt forget it."
"I forget nothing, Reuben. I was trying to find Polaris."
"Well, a'n't it the nature of the children of Adam to hunt for the North Star on a cloudy night?"
"Very sound. One of thine evenings. Yaphoo!"
"All evenings are mine. But don't weep."
"I'm laughing, boy. A'n't I? Oh, Ru, I was so confused. I thought—I certainly thought——"
"What, Ben?"
"I thought it was wilderness."
"That wouldn't make thee afeared. That wouldn't make thee weep."
"I thought everything was wilderness."
"Well, what if it is?"
Chapter Five
In the sunlight on Reuben's bed sat two male images, the smaller one all orange-gold, the larger cross-legged and brighter than rippling gold and ivory, with brown hair, and a heartless voice saying: "This I was waiting to observe. Note, Mr. Eccles, the motions of the creature's head, how they creak. Are these actual sounds of pain, or only noises of some mechanism which creates an illusion of animation?"
"Alas!" said Ben. "I am not fit to rise and murder you—yet."
"It speaks. Note that, Eccles. Note the bleared eyes, how obscene! Will you go to the kitchen and fetch a pot of coffee for it?" Mr. Eccles yawned and filed his yellow paws. "Unfeeling animal! Have you no pity? Must I wait on the needs of this moaning monster?"
"Some day when you feel like dawn on the battlefield, I'll stand on your stomach and read aloud every word of Magnalia Christi Americana."
"You heard that, Eccles?—how it appeals to my humanity and in the same breath threatens my life? I must act." Ben watched the golden image rise, slip on a dressing-gown, and stand over him in the enormous light. "Puh, what a breath even now!" said Reuben, and stooped suddenly to kiss his forehead, and vanished out of the room.
Moving his head with care, Ben met the contemplation of Mr. Eccles, who had nothing to offer. Uncle John was accustomed to explain that the cat derived his name from a merchant Levi Eccles of Plymouth who looked and behaved just like him. But to the boys privately, after he had come to know them a little, the old man admitted this was an ex post facto invention. He took them into his study and opened his much-worn Bible; over Reuben's shoulder Ben had read familiar words: For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. Ecclesiastes iii: 19.
Reuben was displaying a different mood altogether when he returned with a pot of the blessed stuff—quiet and no longer much amused, or at least not showing it. "Drink deep, sufferer, and tell all—if you wish."
The coffee was a benediction; so long as The Head did not move suddenly, all might be well. "Oh, I ran into Mr. Shawn at Uncle John's wharf—O my God! Uncle John! Why, he must have thought——"
Reuben shook his head casually. "Beyond a broad statement to the effect that boys will be boys, for the which he claimed no great measure of originality, I saw no sign of severe displeasure. When he insisted on helping me remove your smelly boots, he—chuckled: this I affirm. You may get a few instructions this morning, but without pain. Proceed."
"Oh—a few drinks with Shawn—dinner at a tavern—I don't seem to remember all of it." But he did.
Reuben studied his finger tip that was scratching Mr. Eccles' chin. "You brought home some books. Over there on your dresser."
"They're for you."
"What!" Reuben was a long time at the dresser, his back turned, his hands on the books not turning the pages. "Ben—how did you know?"
"I guessed right, then?"
"Yes! Yes, but I—why, I only gabbled. I don't see how——"
"You did. Came to me later, what you must mean. Is it a call?"
Eyes wet, face shining and troubled and amazed, Reuben turned to him and started once or twice to speak, then said only: "Yes."
"You can—oh, damn my head!—you can be certain?"
"I'm—certain. I did go to see Mr. Welland again yesterday. He spoke of an apprenticeship."
"Oh.... Well—well, good, if it's what you wish. What about Harvard, Ru?"
"I don't know." Reuben sat on the floor by Ben's bed, a motion of effortless grace that made Ben's head throb to watch it. "I must speak to Uncle John of course. Maybe I can go to the college and study with Mr. Welland at the same time. There'll be the summers."
Ben groped at it uneasily, with some small confusion of envy. "Pills—pills and sick people and——"
Reuben shook his head. "It's not like that, Ben. I mean, that is only one part of it, and for the rest—I can't explain it because I don't know enough, but of a sudden, after a long time of not knowing what I desired, there is this, and I do seem to be certain."
"But for myself, I've not found it."
"You will," said Reuben quickly. "It'll come to you, as it has—as I know it has to me." He reached for Ben's empty cup and poured a drink for himself, sitting cross-legged, intent, a small man with a boy's face. "Ben, I think—so far as I can explain it, I think it's a desire to know."
"To know?"
"About human creatures. How they're made, why they feel, think, suffer, act as they do. I wish...." His face tightened in distress, and Ben, with some insight, knew it was merely the distress of a search for communication among inadequate slippery words.
"But medicine—that's healing the sick. That's going about——"
"It's that, and that I accept, that I desire too, but it's more, Ben, it's study. Mr. Welland says a doctor must remain a student or die on his feet. And the study is not only sickness, remedies, surgery, the study is human beings—men, women, children, in all their ways—and that I desire." He smiled suddenly, vulnerably, holding up his little finger. "There are creatures so tiny—Mr. Welland showed me a book, the Micrographia—so tiny there might be hundreds, nay thousands of them there on the space of my little fingernail. Too small to see without the lens, but living things, Ben—separate living beings, no fancy at all but the discovery of sober men—and he says, Mr. Welland says, why mayn't these animalculae have something to do with the mysteries of disease? They've been found everywhere—pond water, earth, the surface of the skin. Why mayn't they enter us sometimes, causing the ills we can't explain? It's a speculation, Mr. Welland says—he found it not in the books, only had the thought, and now and then (he said himself) from such thoughts come discoveries. I must—know," said Reuben. He jumped up and crossed the room swiftly to examine the books again. "One thing I know: you wasn't drunk when you bought these."
"No, I didn't drink until supper at the tavern, and then later."
"Later?"
"Well, Mr. Shawn took me to a—place. A house, Ru—one of those."
"Oh?..." Ben wondered why he had been moved to speak of it at all: there was no need. But even now, aware of something tight and painful in Reuben's silence, he felt and suppressed a continuing impulse to brag, to invent for Reuben a story of what never happened. "Was it—any good, Ben?"
"I can't say it was. I think I'd had too much ale, and then something more there—buttered rum. That was my undoing." His laughter sounded to himself feeble and unwelcome.
"You mean nothing happened?"
"Nothing much.... No, damn it, nothing—I spilled at the gates. I think maybe I didn't really wish to go. Mr. Shawn——"
Reuben's words raced and ran together: "Well, the devil fly off with your friend Shawn, and couldn't the son of a bitch stand by you and you so drunk? Do you know you was stepping direct for that quicksand?"
"I—was?"
"We might have gone down in it."
"Well—wait, Ru! It was no fault of Shawn. I left him at the house. He was still with his wench when I was ready to go, and some-way I didn't wish to see him then, so I came off alone."
"Oh." His face still averted, his thin hands motionless on the books, Reuben muttered: "Sorry, Ben. The cork popped out of the bottle and I spattered. My regrets." He started getting dressed, and Ben knew his chatter was mainly for his own benefit: "Beware the lightning after breakfast—Pontifex is not wholly pleased with our Benjamin, and will be summoning the cohorts of Ovid, his Tristia; Ramus, his Logic; Cicero, his honorificabilitudinitatibus."
"Ow-ooh!"
"What—coach wheels?"
"I thought that was my head."
"No," said Reuben, and flung open the window. "Something's afoot."
"If on wheels, how should it be—ow! Shut that arctic window, you bloody worm!" But as Ben tried to creep under the covers, Reuben hauled a corner of them over his shoulder and marched to the door with it, his good humor restored, peeling Ben raw to the April breeze. He wadded the bedclothes into a spherical snarl out of Ben's reach, heaved that into the closet, barked in some satisfaction, and ran downstairs. Ben could plainly make out the squeak and rattle of coach wheels from the driveway before the house. He leaped for his clothes—unwisely, considering his head—and paused to reflect on the uses of sobriety.
The fat horses were lathered, blowing in relief at the halt. From the parlor window Reuben saw the girl alight before the coachman's hand could aid her, a square small maiden in a hurry. As Kate Dobson opened the door he heard fright, determination and embarrassment in the throaty voice: "I must speak with Mr. Kenny—'tis most urgent."
Kate was fluttering. "He's at breakfast, my dear."
Reuben intervened, startled as she abruptly swung to him, a miniature whirlwind with sea-blue eyes. Some blurred yellowish phenomenon passed her feet—a dog apparently, not relevant unless Mr. Eccles should choose that moment to come downstairs. "I'll take you to him," Reuben said, and Kate relaxed at the authority of a man in the house.
"You are Mr. Cory's brother."
"Madam, the charge is well founded."
"This," said Charity, "is no time for schoolboy levity."
"Ow-ooh!" said Reuben, and stood to attention by the dining-room doorway as Charity passed, and the dog. In a woolgathering way, the animal acknowledged Reuben's feet, but had no time for them. It was mere carelessness, not sin, that made Reuben leave the door open as he followed Charity with all the meekness of Sultan.
Pleased and then alarmed, Mr. Kenny jumped up, winced at his bad foot and clutched the table-edge. "Charity, my dear, what lucky wind——"
"Sir, Faith said I'd best be the one to bring word, seeing Mama is prostrated and—and so—so I——" she lapsed into stuttering confusion and stamped her foot in rage at her own behavior.
"Breathe slow, my dear," said the old man, no longer smiling. "Count to four, my dear, then to eight by twos. Now: two, four, six——"
"Eight, ten, twelve," said Charity, and shuddered. "Pray don't be prostrated, Mr. Kenny, the way Mama said you was sure to be. I'd not know what to do."
"Now sit thee down," said John Kenny. "I shall undertake not to be prostrated, and a'n't thy bonnet-strings a little tight?"
Standing by her chair, Reuben briefly recalled the sensation of living as a pigmy in a world of giants. "Mama saith, never no such thing happened here in all her time. My father—he—well, when they brought the news he heard something and came downstairs, but he—but he...."
Reuben noticed her fists pressing on the table. On impulse he lifted one of them. "Allow me," said Reuben, urging the fingers to open and relax. They did so, as Charity stared up at him in a trance of observation. He patted the hand and set it back on the table. "I think, Charity, my Uncle John would prefer not to have bad news broken gently. Am I right, sir? Better to hear it quick and plain?"
"Much better." John Kenny spoke absently, watching him and not Charity, who would have accomplished her errand then, Reuben guessed, but hell broke loose.
Reuben glimpsed the preliminary tableau—Sultan in the doorway, frozen in unbelieving horror at a ball of golden evil which advanced on stiff legs directly toward his nose. Reuben had time to lay a private wager entirely in favor of Mr. Eccles, but was too late for anything else—the golden ball rose up straight, reversed itself in mid-air, and dropped on Sultan's back with the ineluctable certainty of the Puritan Hell.
"Oh!" Charity cried. "Oh, the horrid beast!" She jumped up on her chair, maybe to see better. "Sultan, stop it!"
Sultan would have loved to, if he could. John Kenny swung up his aging feet as the storm swept by.
Reuben followed.
"Sultan!" Charity wailed. "Come here this instant! Sultan, shame! Abusing that poor cat!"
Mr. Kenny lifted his feet again.
Reuben followed.
A chair toppled over. If Sultan had nourished any hopes at all, they had centered around that chair. He might, like Milton's Lucifer, have had none—Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell.... Reuben followed, dimly aware of his brother in the doorway and Kate Dobson behind him, both shouting encouragement. Uncle John seemed rather happy too, but was preparing to lift his feet a third time. Reuben observed that everyone, in fact, was laughing except himself, and he would too if he could only gain a little.... At last he was able to swoop down and grasp the loose skin of a rigid yellow neck. He hoisted it; Sultan shot away from under it. A good deal of Sultan's hair came up on the claws, but the essential dog was then able to flee under Charity's chair and leave all the rest to the judgment of history.
Reuben secured Mr. Eccles' threshing hind legs and bore him to the kitchen door. Ben dived to open it for him, doubled over and hooting but aware of the flashing forepaws.
"Ben!" said Mr. Kenny—"Ben, you a'n't got sea-room. You, Reuben, I mean Mr. Cory, do you tack a mite to la'board—la'board, sir! There—now, Ben, now you can cross his bow."
"'Sbody!" said Kate. "I wouldn't trade 'im for a mastiff!"
"Best not leave him alone out there, Kate," said Mr. Kenny. "You hear that?" Reuben had flung Mr. Eccles into the kitchen and closed the door just in time, but he could be heard marching up and down, blaspheming. "He's lonely, the little thing."
Kate bounced away whooping. Mr. Kenny wiped his eyes and finished a buttered bun. "I suppose," said Reuben, "it happens to the best of dogs."
"Why," said Charity, "he was overtaken by surprise."
"Of course he was," said Mr. Kenny. "Come, Sultan! Come here, boy, good boy!" Mr. Kenny chirped, but though Sultan was willing to explain everything in a long undertone, he was not at the moment coming anywhere, for anyone.
Charity exploded in fresh cries. "I can't stop laughing!" she wept, and dropped her head on the table. "I can't stop it!" Mr. Kenny bent over her, concerned; her laughter had gone shrill and sick. "Dreadful news, and I—I can't stop laughing! Help!"
For Reuben, the worst of Mr. Eccles' dangerous writhing had not obscured a second's glimpse of Charity in the moment when she discovered that Ben was in the room. Under cover of her wailing laughter he muttered in Ben's ear: "Can't you see she loves you? Do something!"
He knew Ben did not quite understand nor believe it, but Ben took an uncertain step toward the chair where Charity struggled with the demons of her laughter, and that was enough. Charity flung herself at him. Reuben saw his brother's arms close around her with a natural kindness, and heard him say: "Now, now! What's the matter, Mistress Charity?"
"Cousin Jan—Mr. Dyckman." She spoke quietly into Ben's shirt, all laughter spent.
"Dyckman?" John Kenny came to them, and touched her shoulder lightly, as if it might burn him. "What of Mr. Dyckman, my dear?"
"He is dead."
"Dead! But——"
Her cheek over Ben's heart, Charity was able now to deliver plainly and bleakly the words she must have rehearsed a dozen times during the journey in the coach. "The men of the watch discovered him in an alley off Ship Street a little before dawn. Faith bade me take the coach, seeing you might wish to return in it with me. Our servant Clarissa is seeing to the house while Faith cares for Mama, so—none to send but me."
"Of course, my dear," said Mr. Kenny vacantly. "I'll go with thee at once." Mr. Hibbs had come down for breakfast, but stood apart gloomily, apparently not presuming to hope that anyone would explain matters to him. "I'll go with thee, and—and my two sons."
"I was to say, sir, that the Constable Mr. Derry hath undertook to be at your office at the warehouse this forenoon, and will summon back the men of the Select Watch if you wish to question them."
"Mr. Derry?—the watch? What art thou saying, Charity? Mr. Dyckman was murdered?"
"I alway do everything wrong!" Charity mourned, but Ben patted her shoulder and she quieted again. "Yes, and they said, sir, his wallet was gone—some footpad of the water front, but Mama will have it that it was the French. She will have it that Frenchmen are a-prowl in the streets of our neighborhood seeking opportunity to murder my father and herself. Could—could it be so?"
"It could not," said Mr. Kenny, and managed a wavering laugh. "Your mother is fanciful."
"She speaks of selling our Clarissa, and away from Boston, for that Clarissa was bred and born in Guadeloupe."
John Kenny snorted; Reuben hoped he was recovering his firmness. "I trust Mr. Jenks will forbid any such thing—meaning no disrespect to your mother, Charity."
Charity sighed, burrowing her nose deeper. Reuben supposed that for her the worst was over. She went on in a brittle but steady monotone: "Cousin Jan—Mr. Dyckman was—they said he was yet alive when he was found, and must have been lying there untended for many hours, for blood was dry on his garments."
"Alive? Could he speak then?"
"He told the watch his name. And then begged that he might speak with my father, and said somewhat more of justice being done, and they said he commended his soul unto God, and there was some other word, but not clear, and when they would lift him to carry him the blood came up in his mouth, they said, and he choked, and died. He was stabbed, they said, stabbed in the back, stabbed in a dozen places."
Constable Malachi Derry, a sad man with excellent muscle disguised by a concave chest, a willowy neck and a jaw like a pick-axe, commonly described himself as slow to wrath, but he could be angry, and Ben saw that he was now, as he drooped on a three-legged stool in Mr. Kenny's office and tried to find space for surplus leg where the uncompromising feet of Captain Peter Jenks allowed not another inch of it and would not budge. Mr. Derry was a ship chandler by trade. Chosen for the thankless position of constable, he had done his level New England best to wriggle out of it, until informed by Governor Dudley himself that he would serve, or else pay a fine of not less than ten pounds, possibly more. Faced with that, Mr. Derry did the next best thing—tried to be a good constable.
It came hard, leaving him scant time for his rightful labors. He must waste hours in the courts, bustle about serving warrants, seeing to the daytime peace of his district, while the chandlery went to ruin. On the Sabbath, engaged in preventing others from ungodliness, how could he find proper time to look to his own soul? The supplementary emoluments, in view of the damage to his trade, were dem'd low. Besides, the work was dangerous. Still trying to find room for his legs, he rumbled on to a peroration: "I was compelled, Mr. Kenny, to say this morning to Madam Dyckman herself, poor woman: 'We do what we may, more we cannot.' I have heard Judge Sewall himself declare that disorder increaseth continually, but doth the power of my office increase also? Not at all, sir, the while this very air of the water front, as it were, spawns evildoers, the cutthroat, the footpad, the blasphemer, the piratically inclined—mostly foreigners, you understand."
"I understand," said John Kenny, "that you hold out small hope of discovering the ruffian who hath murdered the mate of my ketch Artemis and so taken from me and my captain a good friend."
Captain Jenks slammed his fist down on his knee and said nothing. To Ben this morning he was almost unrecognizable as the same man who had come ashore in a flood of sunlight. His whole broad face was darkly flushed, the red skin raddled with a thousand lines. When his thick hands were not jumping like those of an old man with the palsy, a fine tremor possessed them. Bags hung like flabby udders below his bloodshot blue eyes, and the eyes were cold with wrath and confusion: a man goaded by much pain, unable to understand the source of it; a stricken leviathan unable to see the harpoon that has pierced it.
"That's true," said Mr. Derry—"small hope, I fear. You understand, sir, a cobblestone takes no footprint, a knife-blade leaves no signature. We know he was scurvily set upon, robbed, slain. But are you aware, sir, there may be as many as two or three hundred evil livers in and about the city who might have done this, and for no reason but the scent of whatever money or goods he had upon him?"
"Well..." Mr. Kenny rested his head on his shriveled hands. Reuben had drawn up a chair to sit by him at the desk, unbidden except by a silent glance that Ben had seen. Lounging across the room, Ben felt the coolness of the light, always dusty in this small office, pouring over their faces, the old man and the boy, the sick man and the well-meaning officer of the law. The stirring of pain within himself was so vague he could not know whether it was a foolish jealousy because Uncle John had sent that message to Reuben and not to him, or merely that unreasonable stab of loneliness which may assail any person at certain times. "Well," said Mr. Kenny, "I see no profit in summoning the watch. I take it, Mr. Derry, you've told us everything Mr. Dyckman was able to say before he died?"
"I think so, sir. Sadly little, seeing he was in the last extremity. He spoke his name, he begged to be taken to Captain Jenks. All of the men, sir, heard him say: 'God's will be done!' And as they were endeavoring to lift him, Mr. Dyckman did speak some word of his wife and children, but the men could scarce hear it, and that was all."
Ben fidgeted. He knew he should have spoken during the journey from Roxbury; Charity's distracted presence had restrained him. When they left her at home and the Captain took her place in the coach, certainly he ought to have spoken. Captain Jenks had made a difficult and vaguely courageous thing of the journey from the house steps to the coach, winning each step like an old man, his face rigid, red and terrible. Waiting in the coach and looking the other way, Uncle John had murmured to Ben: "Don't offer your hand to aid him into the seat." And once the Captain was installed there, Ben had barely room to breathe, let alone speak. But now in the slightly less crowded office he managed to blurt out: "Uncle John...."
The old man looked up at him dimly, and Reuben searched him with a gaze of intentness like a sword. Malachi Derry wheeled about to observe him with that kind of tight patience that operates like a thumb in the eye. Captain Jenks alone paid him no attention; earlier he had acknowledged Ben's existence with a grunt, Reuben's not at all.
"Yes, Ben?" said Uncle John.
"I saw Mr. Dyckman yesterday evening. I ought to have spoke sooner, but didn't wish to distress little Charity further." They simply waited; even Captain Jenks was looking at him now, his attention caught perhaps by Charity's name. "I met Mr. Shawn by chance, and he seemed to wish my company, so we went to dine at—I think the Lion is the name of it, a tavern on Ship Street."
"Well, young man," said Mr. Derry, "I know the place, the which——"
Jenks interrupted as if Derry were a plaguy noise in the street: "Shawn? Who a devil's name is Shawn?"
Mr. Kenny said rather sharply: "I know him, Peter. Let the boy tell it. Why—you met Mr. Shawn yourself, I remember, the afternoon you came ashore. He was with us at the wharf."
"Oh, that—yah." Jenks rubbed his face wearily and subsided.
"Go on, Ben."
"Well, sir, only that Mr. Dyckman came to that tavern while we were there, and was drinking rum with the new bosun Tom Ball, and—had evidently been drinking already for some time. He was very foxed."
"Jan Dyckman? Are you certain, Ben?"
"Of course, sir. Mr. Shawn noticed it too. I had the thought he might wish me to introduce him to Mr. Dyckman, but Mr. Shawn said nay, let it be another time, for Mr. Dyckman was not himself. In fact, Uncle John, he looked directly at me without recognition, though he knows me well enough. Knew me, I suppose I must say."
Captain Jenks was staring down into his hands as if wondering why they were empty. To them he said ponderously: "Jan seldom drank, and when he did could always hold his liquor like a man. Shit, I don't believe it."
"Peter, my boy Benjamin is not an inventor of tales."
"Tell him," said Jenks—Ben might have been in Roxbury—"tell him to spend more time with the futtering books, and less with silver-tongued bloody idlers and Irish at that."
"Mr. Jenks"—that was Reuben, an ugly softness such as Ben had never before heard in his light adolescent baritone—"you are doing an injustice, to my brother certainly, and perhaps to Mr. Shawn."
Jenks turned slowly to examine him, as one who wished to ask: Who a devil's name are you? Beside Reuben's cold furious face was the waiting quiet of Mr. Kenny. The Captain's wrath appeared to fade, a fire he could not be troubled to sustain. "D'you tell me the same, John?"
"I do."
"Then I am sorry, and will retract what I said, and hope no offense was taken."
"None, sir," said Ben quickly, inwardly very greatly offended; but Peter Jenks was Faith's father, and was at present (as Uncle John would have said) not his own man.
Mr. Derry, evidently fatigued from the labor of saying nothing, now mildly and respectfully asked: "Had you more to tell, Mr. Cory?"
"There was one thing," said Ben, but stopped at a knocking on the office door, and after a nod from Uncle John opened it.
Daniel Shawn was very clean, fresh, brisk. He smiled at Ben, not with any smirk of conspiracy or other reminder of the night, but openly and amiably. "Good morning, Ben—but it's not the good morning, now that's no lie." He turned at once to Mr. Kenny. "Sir, don't be slow to tell me if I intrude. I heard, sir—the water front is talking of nothing else the day. I wished to say, if there be anything I might do, I owe you some service, Mr. Kenny, if only for your kindness and hospitality the other night, and you may call on me for anything it's in my power to do at all."
"That's kind," said Mr. Kenny vaguely.
Mr. Derry got his legs loose at last, and moved to lean against the door, by that rambling action somehow making them all his prisoners of the moment. The room had been crowded before—Captain Jenks made any closed space seem so; now, with Daniel Shawn lean and large in his green coat, and Mr. Derry obscurely grown in stature, the little place was stifling as a shut box. "Who are you, sir?"
"Daniel Shawn, seaman. And you?"
"I am Malachi Derry, and Constable. Your name was mentioned but now, Mr. Shawn. I understand you dined yesterday evening with Mr. Cory here, at the Lion Tavern on Ship Street?"
"Oh, I did that," said Mr. Shawn lightly. "And later, Mr. Kenny, I feared maybe I had presumed, but sir, the boy and I were both at a loose end, you might say, and most pleasant conversation we had, and no harm in it, I hope?"
"Oh, none," said John Kenny, groping at something in his mind. "I wish Ben might have let me know, but that's unreasonable of me, for I don't know how he could, seeing I left early for Roxbury. Ben, you had something more to tell?"
"Yes, and I'm glad Mr. Shawn is here, for he'll remember it too. There was a man seated at the back of the tavern when Mr. Shawn and I went in, a total stranger, a one-eyed man I'd know again if I saw him, no matter how far away, and—oh, it can't be important, only a feeling I had——"
"Now I will judge of that," said Malachi Derry, and came alive, leaning away from the door with the sudden monstrous tension of a cat who has just sighted a wriggle in the grass. "A one-eyed man?"
"Ay, a black patch, over the left eye. And the only reason I mention him, sir, is that when Mr. Dyckman and Ball left the place, this man rose at once and followed them out, but until then he had been sitting idle with the flies gathered on his empty trencher, and when I first saw him I had a feeling that he was—oh, waiting for something."
Captain Jenks shook his head in grim disgust.
"The left eye, Mr. Cory? You are certain?"
"Yes, Mr. Derry, the left eye. He was—not the common sort. I'd know him again, anywhere. Shabby clothes, black, patched. Tall, thin, a gray diagonal scar across the back of his right hand, and on his face a mad fixed smile such as I never saw on any man before."
"Oh, come!" said Captain Jenks. "May we not have the precise height of this hobgoblin, in inches and fractions?"
John Kenny said carefully: "Mr. Derry, I have sometimes walked with Ben in the woods. Though an old man, I did not know until then how much the human eye can grasp." Ben warmed within; he saw Reuben smile as if the small triumph were his own. "You may take it, Mr. Derry, it was the left eye, and with this pencil—catch, Ben!—he can draw you an accurate sketch of the diagonal scar."
"No need," said Mr. Derry softly, examining the ceiling, a little relaxed. "I happen to know of mine own knowledge, the description is just." His gaze wandered here and there, and settled on Daniel Shawn. "Did you also see this man?"
Shawn considered with gravity. "I think I noticed some such person when we entered. I recall I sat facing the front of the tavern. I didn't notice him leaving, but if it's Beneen says he left soon after Mr. Dyckman, then sure he did."
"But," said Ben—"oh, I remember. When he passed our table, Mr. Shawn, you'd just then leaned to the fireplace, and likely never saw him. One other thing I remember, Mr. Derry—nay, but it was only a feeling of mine, and of no importance——"
"Tell me anyway," said the Constable.
"Why, only that when he passed our table, he looked at me, just one quick look from his one eye, and—I can't explain this, Mr. Derry. He did nothing, you understand, only glanced at me and likely with no thought for me at all, and yet I felt as if he'd spat in my face."
"Ay, that," said Constable Derry as if he found nothing strange in it at all, and Ben looked down at the little pencil in his fingers, wondering why Daniel Shawn should suddenly be angry with him. Not anger perhaps; only something probingly cold and measuring in the large blue eyes. It could not really be so, Ben thought. Or if it was so, then it meant that Shawn was hurt or offended because Ben had run away without waiting for him from Mistress Gundy's house....
Reuben watched the glittery ink-blots of Mr. Derry's little brown eyes; heavy brows above them danced for Reuben's troubled amusement like busy moths. "Another name was mentioned—a new bosun, Tom Ball—will that mean bosun of your ketch Artemis, Mr. Kenny? And could you or the Captain tell me anything of him?"
"I've met him only to shake hands. Peter?"
"Good sailor," said Captain Jenks thickly. "Obeys orders, works hard, keeps his mouth shut—more'n that I never ask of my men."
Except, Reuben thought, their souls and their lives. But how can a captain demand less than that even if he would? Reuben tried to put the thought away, and succeeded, because now every nerve of observation in him had grown taut to the edge of agony, and the focal point was not Captain Jenks. Something in this crowded room was wrong as a rattlesnake in a flower bed. It became a severe effort not to look toward the blue eyes of Daniel Shawn. Reuben forced his attention back to what the Constable was saying—something more about Tom Ball, maybe not important. "Another thing, Mr. Kenny, and I'll be on my way. Have you ever heard tell of one named Jack Marsh, or some say it should be Judah Marsh, or Judas?"
"Why, that name—it doth echo somewhere....
"Think back, sir, ten or eleven years. Eleven it is—'96. An occasion when a certain Captain Avery, or Every, alias Bridgeman and sometimes called Long Ben, was allowed to enter Boston, and that openly, to dicker for the sale of his plunder gotten under the black flag. To the great scandal, I must say, of any man who can tell a privateer from a gallows-bird, but so it was, Mr. Stoughton being acting Governor."
Mr. Kenny peered down his nose with the lopsided half of a smile, perhaps suspecting Mr. Derry of humorous intent in linking holy Stoughton with dreadful Avery. Malachi Derry appeared quite innocent. "Mph, yes, and m'lord Bellomont as Governor had his Captain Kidd, yes yes. Of course, Mr. Derry, I remember Avery, as who would not?"
"We suffered much odious brawling in the town by Avery's men."
"I recall it."
"One of them, known then as Judah or Judas Marsh, did have his left eye gouged out in a brush with—umph—some of the ruder element." A glint in the brown eyes suggested he might not be wholly innocent after all. "It happened near my establishment, though I didn't witness it."
"And I recall the roustabout who blinded him was flogged, and Marsh—(but wasn't it March, Mr. Derry?)—nursed the wound at the Alms House as an idle, drunken and disorderly person."
"And escaped."
"Oh?—that I'd forgotten. So many have done so, and we still continue to use the Alms House, damn the thing, because the House of Correction is not in fit posture to restrain ailing rats. And by the way, Constable, if the Meeting shall ever instruct the Selectmen and Justices in this particular, I predict nothing will come of it. Go on, pray."
"Amen, sir. Yes, Marsh escaped after Captain Avery had gone his way. Later Marsh was seen, oh, here and there—Plymouth, Salem Village—alway with an evil reputation. And disappeared—for good, it was thought—about the time we began to hear tell of John Quelch. A month ago I received intelligence from a worthy man of my acquaintance at Gloucester, who is a justice of the peace and a man of substance." Mr. Derry swelled comfortably and brushed lint from his jacket, applying the pressure of a genial silence.
John Kenny said reminiscently: "I was obliged to serve a year once as constable, at Roxbury—mph—must confess that lieth further in the past than 1696. Onerous occupation." He smiled like a December thaw. Mr. Derry looked politely attentive and slightly sulky. Mr. Kenny sighed and obliged: "You heard, from your friend at Gloucester—?"
"I heard that this man Marsh—sometimes his name did appear as March, it's all one—had been hanging about there recent, seeking a berth with one of the fishing vessels, but because of his foul conversation and ugly habit, none would have him. My informant advised me that Marsh had left, possibly for Boston, and recommended I be watchful, seeing trouble follows this man as stink follows a polecat. Marsh, I hear, is quick with a knife, and nowadays they do call him Smiling Jack. I believe, sir, that thanks to this timely aid from Mr. Cory, we may be able to conclude the grievous happening of last night by persuading Mister Marsh to dance without benefit of a floor."
"Still, what do we know, man?" Mr. Kenny bleakly asked. "Item, he left the tavern when Dyckman did. Any man might have done so for any of a dozen innocent reasons."
Mr. Derry smiled slowly, reached in the air for an imaginary throat, twisted it, wiped his hand lingeringly on his breeches. "Mr. Kenny, if Marsh be found anywhere in the town, I can detain and question him. Why, I dare say he'll be found before Mr. Dyckman must be buried. He shall be brought before the body, and does any man doubt the wounds will bleed?"
"May I be there!" said Captain Jenks to his tremendous hands.
Reuben felt a new sort of sternness in his great-uncle as the small old man leaned far over the desk. "Peter." He waited until the Captain turned to look at him. "Peter, I will not delay the sailing of Artemis. When she hath her cargo and her complement, and the tide is right, she'll go, sir, and landside justice no concern of hers."
"Well, John—-" Captain Jenks sighed cavernously. "Well, John...." For the dozenth time he rubbed at his flushed face as if cobwebs clung to it; his gaze wandered until it met Constable Derry's, and then he spoke more or less as to a friend: "Find him soon, Constable."
Daniel Shawn had stepped to the window, a little behind Mr. Kenny. Reuben could see him, his gaunt and handsome face staring away through the smeary glass. "It's the hard thing such a man as Mr. Dyckman should die, and for what? The poor scrap of money he may have had with him—what's money beside a man's life, Mother of God?"
Nobody answered him. To the Captain Mr. Derry said: "I expect to find him soon enough, and you have the right to be present when he's examined. You understand, sir, there'll be no interference with the law, no cheating of the gallows, for except I be strangely deluded, the man will hang." Malachi Derry bowed to the room at large and moved to the door on the balls of his feet.
"And that no great loss, I suppose," said Mr. Kenny. A tumbling of disorderly papers on the desk had threatened to submerge his gold-headed cane. He rescued it and rubbed the handle, that was shaped into an elfin woman's leg and thigh, against the dry sagging skin beneath his jaw. "But Jan will still be dead."
Stooping for a passage of the doorway, Mr. Derry paused to stare in disapproval. "Mr. Kenny, surely you, sir, will not display a froward heart before the will of the Lord? We are insects before his footstool: we do what we may, more we cannot. Is it for us to question the judgment? Did not your friend himself commend his soul to God? He said: 'God's will be done!' Amen."
"I am sure he said it." Mr. Kenny gazed at the Constable politely. "Mr. Dyckman was a Lutheran, by the way. If you find Marsh, and if his guilt be proven on him, I shall not protest his being hanged, or hanged, drawn and quartered since that ever pleaseth the multitude, and left on the handiest gallows Boston can provide, as a plain apodeixis"—Mr. Derry winced and looked largely wise—"a veritable indicium of human justice. Good morning, Mr. Derry."
Reuben heard through the opened door into the warehouse the boom of rolling barrels, thud of boxes, metallic clang of large voices echoing back from barren walls. Artemis was filling her hold with a cargo of salt cod for Bridgetown in Barbados. Word of the death had occasioned a pause in the clamor earlier in the morning; a short one: commerce and the seasons don't wait. The warehouse, Reuben thought, was a roaring djinn, the ships its only masters; it could pause in its thundering activity if someone died, as a giant might hesitate at the squeak of something under his foot, but not for long. Within him a cool voice remarked that a simile was a mischancy nag to ride—ride him easy.... He saw Ben lean down, returning that pencil to the desk, and Ben was evidently doing battle with some private unease. It was necessary, Reuben reflected with some coolness of his own, to talk with Ben as soon as they could be alone together, if only to learn what it was about yesterday evening that Ben had not told.... Outside, Mr. Derry's voice rumbled: "Yes, Mr. Eames, he's within, but engaged."
"He will have time for me." The voice was dry. The man entered the office without knocking, his dour face reminding Reuben of that portrait seen long ago in Grandmother Cory's parlor: no specific likeness to Grandfather Matthew in the lean sadness of Mr. Simon Eames, except for the tight closing of the gash below the nose, the mouth of a man who expected life to taste bitter and could not allow his expectation to be wrong.
The wealth of Mr. Eames was all ocean-born; he could have bought out Mr. Kenny twice over. Unfortunately he hated water and was said by the naughty-minded to turn seasick at the touch of a washrag. He might have sat quiet in his countinghouse and let the pounds and shillings come to him; he need not even have turned his pale eyes on the sometimes lively water of the Bay. But human nature is consistent as a lost puppy in a typhoon: whenever one of his ships came in, Mr. Eames invariably gritted his large teeth and had himself rowed out across the demoniac element. He must have this moment returned from such an ordeal. He was quite green. "Mr. Kenny, sir, if you have a moment?"
"Certainly, Mr. Eames. I saw your Regina was in on the tide this morning. Had she a fair passage?"
"Middling, they tell me. The Lord maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters. No, I thank you, I never drink," he said as Mr. Kenny fumbled at a drawer of his desk. Mr. Eames sniffed, glancing in distaste at the bowed head of Captain Jenks, which had not lifted to acknowledge his presence. "I regret, Mr. Kenny, it is my grievous Christian duty to be the bearer of ill news, in the which one must seek to discover the infinite wisdom of Providence, the Dispenser of all mercies." Reuben sickened with understanding: the ship Regina was in the Virginia trade, and so was Uncle John's ship Iris; any moment now this pious carrion crow would come to the end of the preliminaries he was enjoying so much, and declare a disaster in plain words. Meanwhile the man was talking, and talking, and had not yet begun, and Daniel Shawn had swung away from the window to thrust his hands in the pockets of his green coat and gaze down at the sad speaker as one might watch a yapping dog. Reuben thought: What's it to Shawn? Why should he step forward so, where Uncle John must be aware of him, and put on a plain show of anger at the bringer of bad news? "... as in all mischances and vicissitudes it is necessary to submit, Mr. Kenny, even to offer up gracious supplications...."
"Mr. Eames," said John Kenny, and the noise ended. Simon Eames was not accustomed to interruptions; he probably found them ill-bred. He stood patiently, expecting blasphemy. "Mr. Eames, I have not much time, not here at my warehouse this morning and perhaps not in the world. As for God's providence and disposition of the burdens men bear, may I leave such questions to God himself, rather than have them expounded unto me by men who, I suppose, share my humility as well as my mortality?"
"John Kenny, you had ever a somewhat naughty spirit."
"That may be so. Will you speak your news?"
Flushed, Mr. Eames drew a few deep breaths. Reuben sickly, inconsequently remembered another face, nothing at all like the face of Mr. Eames, a bronze painted face in a darkly reddened room. He had spat on it. In spite of the observations anyone must make, it had never become fully credible to Reuben that a human creature could find pleasure in the pain of others. His mind acknowledged the evidence, his heart refused it, and he wished weakly that magic could lift him out of this chilly crowded room into some place—the spring woods, for choice—where Mr. Welland would answer questions with mirth and kindness. "Mr. Kenny, your ship Iris, Captain Samuel Foster commanding, put out of Norfolk a fortnight before the departure thence of my ship Regina. I have this intelligence from Captain Bart of the Regina, with whom I was but now speaking. The Iris sailed on the third day of April to be precise, for Barbados, at least that was the destination announced by Captain Foster."
"Yes, it was Captain Foster's intention to make Barbados."
"The Regina sailed on the sixteenth day of April, arriving here this morning after a slow passage, having encountered contrary winds as the Lord willed. On her second day out of Norfolk, the seventeenth day of April, the weather being overcast and a dirty sea running, my Captain Bart hath told me, the Regina overtook the longboat of the ship Iris."
"The—longboat," said Captain Jenks, and got laboriously to his feet, massive arms swinging, quite helpless.
Mr. Eames ignored him. "Three men were in it, Mr. Kenny, rather two men and a boy, the boy's name being Bartram Wilks, of Dedham, a lad of about sixteen years...."
"I remember him. Will you continue?"
"All three were wounded and famished, the Lord having seen fit to visit them with the vials of his wrath. The boy Wilks and one of the men were brought aboard. The other man—the sea running high and as God disposeth—burst his head against the strakes and sank immediate. The man brought aboard perished later, having overeaten though suffering from pistol wounds, but the boy Wilks lived two days."
His gaze not once abandoning Mr. Eames, Daniel Shawn had taken from his pocket a bright copper coin and was rubbing his broad thumb across it, turning it deftly to rub the other side, an action evidently so habitual it needed no guidance of his eyes. A farthing, Reuben thought, but not colonial. When for a moment the thumb and forefinger held the coin motionless by the finely milled rim, Reuben could make out a robed figure kneeling by a floating crown, and the legend FLOREAT REX. The pale eyes of Simon Eames were caught by the brightness and he let the silence drag. Shawn asked of no one in particular: "Had Mr. Dyckman wife and children?"
"Eh?" Mr. Kenny turned to him, startled. "He had, sir. A wife and two little girls survive him."
"Oh, hanging's too gentle," said Shawn, rubbing the coin, his eyelids lowered on a blueness like that of two bright mirrors turned to a blue sky. "Is there a blacker thing than murder in the Decalogue? Isn't it the destroying of the one thing we know we possess? Forgive me, sir—I should not be talking, belike I should not be here in your time of trouble, but I—sir, I feel it. I can't explain—steady as she goes, can I not! for didn't I see a friend murdered in a knife brawl on the brig Terschelling, and for nothing, a thing done in the time it'd take you to breathe twice, the time it took me, sir, to run from companionway to la'board rail and no chance, no chance to aid him at all, and then his blood blackening in the deck seams hour by hour, the way no holystone would ever rub it out?" Mr. Shawn seemed blankly startled to discover the farthing in his fingers, and put it away. "Mr. Kenny, they're saying about the docks that the poor soul was yet living when he was found. Could he not speak at all, to damn the man who'd done the thing?"
"Little enough," said Mr. Kenny slowly. "Little enough, Mr. Shawn.... Will you continue, Mr. Eames?"
"Ha? Oh.... I believe I was about to say, Wilks lived two days, and then died of an infection of his wounds, cutlass wounds, though Captain Bart tended the boy in his own cabin, bled him, did whatever he might, but—having lived long enough on this wretched earth to give Captain Bart the tidings and to prepare his soul for its going unto the Father of all mercies, the boy died, being a lad of decent conversation evidently raised in fear of the Lord, for Captain Bart saith he did make a most touching confession of faith, indeed exemplary, and may have been of the elect, we may hope...."
"Will you continue?"
"Why, as it was told by Wilks, your ship Iris was set upon by a fast sloop which came out of the starboard quarter at dawn on the eighth day of April, the Iris being then at about latitude thirty, having made very little southing because of scant and fitful winds, also a sudden leak near the water line—but Captain Foster, it seems, preferred to beat out the passage to Barbados with extra toil at the pumps rather than put back to Norfolk, the Lord having so moved his heart to his own sad destruction."
"What?" said Jenks. "What? What did you say?"
"Why—he was lost, Mr. Jenks, with the others. On the eighth of April the weather was fair, the sea moderate. The sloop ran up a French flag and may have been a privateer. The boy Wilks, however, said that the men who boarded the Iris appeared to be plain pirates, and their general conduct of the affair would so indicate. Yet they allowed Wilks and four others, all wounded and of no mind to go on the account, to take the longboat, so to make the continental shore if they might or the Bermudas—thus carrying out the plain intent of Providence that the intelligence should come to us for a warning and a judgment. They could not row with much effect, yet the Lord sent them a southwesterly, early for the season, and by his infinite mercy they did cross the course of the Regina as I have said, after nine days afloat with a trifle of water and biscuit, during which time two of the men died of their wounds, having accomplished their part in God's purpose."
"Sam Foster," Jenks said. "Sam was a sailor of King William's time. How did he die, Mr. Eames? Will you tell me how he died?"
"It would appear he placed the Iris in posture to resist as best he might, but was overwhelmed. A shot at close quarters swept away the mainmast. The pirates grappled, swarmed aboard superior in numbers and weapons. They were stripping the ship of all they wished to carry aboard the sloop, when the longboat was put overside. Wilks and the others saw her burned to the water, the sloop bearing off south by southeast."
Daniel Shawn grunted. "They will have been from the Bahamas, Mr. Kenny—wolves, sir, wolves, and with the flags of a dozen nations in the locker to suit the occasion."
"Eh? Yes, I suppose. Mr. Eames, did any go alive on the sloop?"
At least, Reuben observed, the old man was letting him keep a hand on his arm, seemed even to welcome it, and must know that Ben was on his other side. John Kenny was not predictable, his manner tending to put love in its place—an acquaintance respected, possibly feared a little, and not permitted any too forward liberties.
"The boy Wilks thought not, Mr. Kenny, but was not certain. One of the cutlass blows had destroyed his right eye."
Captain Jenks panted: "Mr. Eames—I asked you—be there any word how Sam Foster died?"
"With a seaman's fortitude apparently, although not, alas, in a state of grace. He was struck down soon after the enemy boarded. Wilks saw him lying in his blood and cursing them, but did not see the moment of his death, whether he then turned his thought to the Lord."
"Well, Mr. Eames," said John Kenny, "you have accomplished your errand, and I thank you for the trouble you have taken to bring me word. I beg you also, commend me to your good Captain Bart. I will speak with him when I may."
"I keep thinking in what sorry fashion I came home on this road last night."
"Forget that, Ben."
"I can't, quite. I feel as though I'd given him another burden when already he hath too much to bear—well, you did say, didn't you, that he wasn't too troubled about my—my——"
"Wasn't at all. Would you have everyone perfect, devil any lapse from virtue, and yourself a saint in ivory?"
"Oh, I know.... I swear I ought not to be going to Harvard. You must go, but damn it, I'm no scholar. Uncle John himself wishes me to go into trade with him some day. I say, if I do, it ought to be now."
"I disagree."
"Ay, you too.... Ru, a few weeks ago Uncle John told me—only in passing, because then it was nothing to trouble him—that he had debts waiting on the profit the ship Iris was to have brought him. Most of the debt is from the building of Artemis, and her maiden voyage won't have fetched enough to satisfy it. It could happen, Ru, the creditors will be on top of him like a pack of wolves."
"I—didn't know that."
"You do now. Look: wouldn't it be unwise to send Artemis to be gone for months on the Barbados triangle, when she's all he owns—she and the little sloop Hebe at Newport that can't give much account of herself?"
"What would you have him do?"
"I think Artemis should make short voyages—should take that salt cod, for instance, maybe no further than New York, back at once for more, until the debt is cleared. I suppose the harshest of 'em would give him that much time. And then I think that when the debt is cleared, he ought to get a few more little fast vessels like Hebe for the coastal trade, for heaven knows that's the bread and butter of this colony, and let the long ventures wait a few years."
"Then tell him so, Ben."
"I?... Commerce should be building, not gambling, a'n't that so? Well, I think Uncle John believes that, but is moved to gamble all the same. The great ventures draw his heart—and why not, seeing that in the past he's won them? Only, now...."
"You might as well say it: now he's old, and in trouble, and the times themselves are changing, so everyone seems to think. Tell him how you see it. I say tell him, little brother."
"Can't you be sensible, Muttonhead?"
"Sensible—mm-yas. Well, tell him, maybe not that last morsel of your wisdom, but tell him at least about the little companions for Hebe, and short voyages for Artemis."
"I'm to instruct a man of seventy, when he won't even hear to my signing on to learn a bit of seamanship and so be of use to him?"
"You could tell him anything. You only need speak in a plain voice and never let anyone stop you from smiling in your own peculiar manner. I say this fully understumbling that in this moment I stand to you in loco Gideonis Hibborum."
"Oh, God damn it, Ru, whenever I'm dead in earnest you're laughing on a mountaintop—yes, and when I think something comical you're a little old man a thousand years old."
"Only a thousand? As best I can discover from perusal of ancient records, I was born during the government of Pericles of Athens, circa five hundred years before the birth of Christ. Plutarch doesn't specifically mention me—that's the slipshod scholarship of his times for you, obliging a man to read between the lines. It so happens I was not laughing when I urged you to tell that to Uncle John. And now, what was it about yesterday evening at the tavern that you didn't tell the Constable?"
"The—Constable——"
"Yes, Ben, and yes. One-eyed man. Lion Tavern. Some part of that untold was hurting thee. What was it? Note that I stand here in the road, my bare face hung decently in front of my brains, not laughing."
"Good God! Was I so——"
"No one in that room has my eyes and ears."
"I see.... Will you undertake not to speak of it to anyone?"
"Of course, if you charge me so."
"I do. It was simply a fleeting impression I had, that while I had turned to see Ball and Dyckman leaving the tavern, Shawn also had done—something or other. Looked back, I thought, where that one-eyed man was sitting, just before he rose and followed them out. Now understand, Ru: I was drank already. It was nothing more than a fancy."
"But I know your eyes."
"No no! I was drunk, and did not truly see it anyway. Even if true, why should it mean anything? Why should it stick in my mind?"
"That of course is the question."
"Now what do you mean?"
"What is it in Shawn that should make the thought trouble you?... What in fact do you know about Mr. Shawn?"
"Why—why, he is a man of pleasant conversation—mostly. Of—of poetic spirit, wouldn't you say? Possessed of some learning too. He hath read Physiologus."
"That is learning? And now again you're holding something back, but I am no Malachi Derry."
"'Deed you're not, but what are you? Why do you press me so? Like a judge?"
"Not to judge you, certainly. You've seen something in Shawn to disturb you. I wish to know what it was, because—because I'm frightened, Ben; because what touches thee touches me...."
"Something at that—house. He spoke quite cruelly to the women there, poor sluts, as if he hated them, and for no cause. I don't know—I know you don't like him, Ru, I can feel it. Let's not speak of him."
"Very well. Let's go on. Pontifex awaits, I'm sure. Let's walk on—you know, decently, like Christian worthies debating how best to diddle a neighbor over a line fence and yet remain in a state of grace."
"Pagan Athenian!"
"Of course."
"I recall a time, when thou wast—"
"The boy's dead. Poor snotnose, he died near Springfield in the Massachusetts, in the reign of Queen Anne. Tell me something, Ben, and don't be angry—remember how Mother used to call me Puppy?"
"Of course. And Father called thee Sir Inquiry."
"Ha? So he did...."
"Why should I be angry?"
"She called me that, I think, because I am—I am over-demonstrative, heart on my sleeve and can't help it, Ben, it's my way, my way. I only meant to ask—does it trouble thee, that I like to put my arm over thy shoulder, sometimes kiss thy cheek? Because——"
"Now why in the world should it trouble me? A'n't thou my own brother, Athenian?"
"I am."
"And didn't I carry thee down the stairs at Deerfield, a small boy in a great daze at the burning and thinking it his own fault for a failure to pray—remember that?"
"He doth ask me, whether I remember it."
"I only meant, thy notion of being at fault for failing to pray." But it may be mine own fault that he's an even greater infidel than I—what did I ever do but encourage his doubting, when perhaps—when—where is the way where light dwelleth?
"I know, Ben. Yes, I remember it." And if there be no Spice Islands, where shall I go?
Chapter Six
On Saturday began a long lisping April rain. Mr. Hibbs pointed out that anyhow the boys' half-holiday had been used up on the Friday forenoon, and although this happened because of disaster, in logic that made no difference: the spring and summer would be all too short if Ben and Reuben were to be ready for Harvard in September. Mr. Hibbs said too that man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble; in other words they'd better quit the commotion and go to work.
Mr. Kenny spent all of that day in Boston, returning late and weary in a twitching mood. It was one of the evenings, more frequent of late, when he insisted that no one but Ben or Reuben understood how to lift the boot off his gouty foot. Ben did that, as Kate stood by in tears, and from shadow at the side of the fireplace Reuben watched the old man with the bemused intentness of one who has only recently discovered that the study of human beings may begin at home. Reuben Cory had hardly spoken all day, except as the lessons required it of him....
When the boot was safely removed and the foot installed on a cushion, Ben ventured to ask whether any more had been learned concerning the death of Jan Dyckman. "Nor is like to be!" John Kenny snarled. "The law hath the brain of a gnat, meaning no dem'd disrespect to Mr. Derry, blast him! Cease crying, Kate! I'll not be in my grave for another ten or twenty years, and should you weep even then, dear, I'll rise to ha'nt you, I swear it—now there's a good girl." Since she could not check the flow, Kate bounced away to build a hot toddy, and later beckoned from the doorway for Ben to come and take it to him, lest her continued sniffling should offend.
Marsh had not been found; no sign of him, no hint of where he might have lodged. The waiter and bartender at the Lion Tavern professed total ignorance of such a man. "They'll be lying," said Reuben from his shadow, and John Kenny shifted his head in discomfort until he was in better posture to look at Reuben down his nose. "Lying, Reuben, or unobservant or forgetful. I incline somewhat to your view. It would seem that Mr. Derry, after one day of sniffing about like an old blind ferret with a cold in the nose, is prepared to write off the happening as an act of God."
When the toddy was consumed, and Mr. Kenny's clay pipe drawing properly, and the lashing mutter of rain at the windows had become no longer a nagging but a comfortable sound, Ben stirred the logs to stronger flame and said, stuttering only slightly: "Uncle John, is there any market for salt cod in New York?"
Long and drowsily, John Kenny contemplated a mild, large-eyed boy's face, high at the forehead, the jaw square but rounded at the chin, and the benediction upon it of firelight not unlike a lamp within. Toward such a lamp one might spread cold hands to warm them. "Mph! Might be."
Reuben smiled to himself and slipped out of the room, and so did not hear it when Ben inquired whether Mr. Shawn was to be considered in the room of Jan Dyckman. "Why, Ben—as a matter of fact I must give that some further thought," said John Kenny.
Later Ben said: "Uncle John, if Artemis should make a quick run, no further than New York and return, might I not—I mean, sir, I'd be gone only a few weeks, and could learn——"
"Now don't press me about that. I must give it more thought. Did we not go to Cambridge not long ago and discuss your situation with Mr. Leverett himself? Did he not examine you in beginner's Greek and in Latin, and find that even with the summer's work you may be scarce ready for the first year's studies?"
"But suppose, sir—Ru is ready, as Mr. Leverett said, and certainly he ought to begin in September—but suppose I were to wait another year? Then I might go with Artemis now—might I not?—and earn something, and continue studies afterward, in the winter, and next summer when Ru could aid me, and so...."
"Ben, you would sail as a ship's boy. If you endured the hardships, and satisfied Mr. Jenks in matters of heavy labor and obedience, the which is no easy thing to do, you might fairly soon achieve the proud condition of an ordinary seaman. They have a saying: 'Six days shalt thou labor as hard as thou art able; the seventh, holystone the main deck and chip the chain cable.' They say also: 'No law off soundings'—and I'm afraid that's true, though I guess the law according to Peter Jenks is just enough in its own harsh way. They have even another saying—I suppose it was repeated by the men who followed John Quelch a few years ago and were hanged with him at Copp's Hill: 'Better a short gasp on a tricing line than a long hunger, short pay and the bloody scurvy.'"
"But at least, Uncle John, there would not be the expense of my keep here, and I would be——"
"What? You're troubled that I should spend my substance on mine own—my—like a son—why, Ben, the old have little enough they can do except give. I pray you allow me to do that much."
"And I pray you, Uncle John, understand me! I did not mean it like that. I meant—if I sailed, I'd be learning things that might make me of some use to you in the business."
"Oh? So?... Well, you know that's near my heart. A few days ago you was undecided. We spoke of it, coming home from seeing Artemis return—did we not?"
"Yes, Uncle John."
"And I feared I was nursing an old man's vanity. Urging on you something that might be unwelcome.... Mind you, Ben, I am not your master and no one shall be. I will not say to you, go there, do this, as I might to the common sort. Somehow, of late years, I don't much fancy the meaning they give to the word 'gentleman' in England. Joseph Cory was a farmer, and a better gentleman than any milord in London. Yes, in this land the word doth seem to be earning a new definition, or maybe it did alway own it, but title-dazed Europe is in no posture to comprehend such a thing. You are a gentleman's son, Ben. I say there's an aristocracy which hath nothing at all to do with wealth or position, nor with ancestry neither except as a parent's good qualities do often appear in the children. I mean the aristocracy of the good mind with the good heart—you will not find that very often on earth, Benjamin. You are a gentleman, and no one may order you about, only guide a little, so far as love and friendship may do it, while you—while you are yet a boy."
Ben felt the fire in his cheeks, and dreaded stammering. "Well, sir, might it not be that sailing with Artemis would help me decide, or at least understand better, what I wish to do?"
"It—might.... Mind, I've not said yea or nay. Don't press me more on it now. It may be two weeks yet before Artemis is ready to go. Mr. Banning of Gloucester is delaying me. His dem'd price is too dear, noticed it a thousand times. Uh—don't you think so?"
If Reuben had been in the room he would have known how Ben, in the face of all common sense, was very nearly taking that to mean yes. He would have seen how the inner lamp steadied and brightened in a manner hardly reasonable when the overt topic was nothing more ecstatic than the current value of salt codfish. Why, the old man had not even said that Artemis would put out for New York instead of Barbados....
On Sunday the rain continued. Rob Grimes, an accomplished backslider with sixty-odd years of sin to his credit, marched off to meeting as usual and retained sanctity like a best suit until Monday morning, when Mr. Kenny's nervous gray gelding acted up at sight of the saddle and caused the first lapse into blasphemy. It was a conspiracy of the Powers against Rob, that everything should always go wrong on Monday morning, so that for the rest of the week his state of grace should be nothing but a God-damned ruin. Kate Dobson slipped away to the Anglican services that she found a comfort in a barbarous land. John Kenny fretted at home—even he might have been subject to arrest and fine for unnecessary travel on the Sabbath—fretted like one under enchantment who must spend a certain twenty-four hours of every week in the guise of a rabbit, a shrewd one who knows very well that if he should venture abroad where the godly are baying he'd be a gone bunny.
In their first year at Roxbury, Ben and Reuben had been similarly housebound on the Lord's day. But on a morning of urgent springtime in the year 1705, Reuben had advanced the doctrine that one could easily pass from the back door through the orchard and to the woods with no danger of detection, and look: anyone who did observe the sin would be far from any route to the meeting-house and therefore a sinner himself; wouldn't he? "Besides, sir," said Reuben Cory, "we've a'ready done it a couple-three times." "Oh," said John Kenny. "I find your reasoning faultless but incomplete. You omit, Mr. Cory, reference to the necessity of wearing your brown suits that don't show at a distance, and of promising to avoid the sky line and open places. Some say reason doth advance, even in these times. I a'n't sure. Wear your brown suits...."
On the Sunday after the death of Jan Dyckman, the rain was heavy enough to discourage even Reuben's need to wander. He felt it unsafe to go to Mr. Welland's cottage, for part of the approach out of the back fields was visible from the main street of Roxbury; and anyway Ben shamefacedly declared he needed help with the next half-acre of Cicero.
Drearily it rained on the Monday when Jan Dyckman was buried.
More time lost to lessons: Gideon Hibbs nourished that thought so obviously that there was no occasion for him to utter it aloud. He was not attending the funeral, having been only distantly acquainted with the Dyckman family. Acidly, with a kind of humor occasionally encountered at the borders of philosophy, he remarked to John Kenny that he was the fourth son in a family of twelve; all his brothers and sisters had married and begotten young, of whom the expected percentage had died, and thus he found himself already in possession of a massive collection of pallbearer's gloves, for the which he could discover no practical application whatsoever (although familiar with the rumor that some persons of a weightier worth than himself had turned a fair penny in disposing of such); he would therefore, with Mr. Kenny's permission, remain at home and take advantage of the peace and quiet to do a trifle more on a work which had engaged him now for ten years, namely an employment of the sternest logic—(it could not be published in the colonies)—in a demonstration of the immortality of the soul. Mr. Kenny sighed and patted his dusty back.
The few who were present with Mr. Kenny and the boys bulked like a multitude in the spotless parlor of the Dyckman house. More unobtrusive than the Jenks' slave Clarissa, Constable Derry was there—so far as was known, the corpse had not bled in anyone's presence. There were Jan's two small girls red-nosed in doll-like silence, his stricken wife, a handful of dour strangers, Captain Jenks thoroughly sober and looking like the vast man he was instead of a ruin, Faith and Charity stiff and amazingly pale in black, Clarissa self-effacing, and Madam Prudence Jenks with a black enameled comb instead of a red one.
The Lutheran dominie did not exhort, nor shout, nor whine, but spoke all manner of pleasant things concerning the nature of the dead man, and then entered on the main stream of his discourse—this a poetic enumeration and description of the mercies of God, announced with mild certainty as though he had been directly instructed in the matter and had been astonished at the kindness of the Lord in assenting to some of his own small suggestions. Unhesitatingly he implied that if any soul could rest sure of heaven it was the soul of Jan Dyckman. A gentle spirit, this minister: incapable of learning how to be content with discontent, he had luckily never needed to learn it, since not every son of Adam is obliged to go to school.
At some time during this passage of consolation a kerchief tumbled from Faith's restless hand. Ben was able to find and return it to her, not prevented, not even much scared by the polar stare of Captain Jenks. He won a pressure of her fingers and a sudden blue-eyed look of such depth and sweetness that she might have been saying aloud: "I am with you." Reuben sat motionless, all gold and ivory.
The minister's tender music did not touch on the fact of murder, yet somehow conveyed that this was an aspect of the infinite wisdom of God which at the present time it was not polite to mention.
The mellow voice was larger but otherwise not changed, when in the cemetery under a slanting curtain of rain it recited the last words of commitment to the earth. Here Ben and Reuben stood together and glanced often at each other—communication, as any observer would have known, but under this quiet rain perhaps only one message passed, the simplest and the most essential: I am with you.
It rained all night.
In the morning at Roxbury pools of standing water translated the image of a warmer sky, for it was now well past the time of the return of the robins, and of the bluebirds whose color of morning is a music made visible. Once in such a pool at the base of a rock near Uncle John's private road—but that was another April, the April of last year—a distant self of Ben Cory had been revived, so that the older boy could momentarily breathe with the breath of that child and rejoice in the sunlight wantoning over the child's bare chest and legs and muddy feet. He had been five then or younger, master of a vessel on a sea of shining calm—a chip with an oak-leaf sail, a pond in a world no longer living: well, in the immediate world you must write down a Latin subjunctive a hundred times, whipping an intractable brain into retaining it, and by the way, what the devil did Ovid himself care about subjunctives when it was spring in Italy? Nothing, Ru would say—subjunctive's one small step in a stairway to a place up yonder where you might get a glimpse of Ovid; and Ru would take the book from him, and tumble across the bed in his thin-legged sprawl or sit on the floor with his almost beardless chin hooked on his knees, and listen while Ben groped and stumbled through the lesson—correcting Ben casually, guiding, sometimes ripping out lewd or startling comment to make the Latin stick in Ben's mind by association, and never once needing to open the blasted volume and make sure he was right....
By the same pool in the April of 1707, this present year of change, Reuben Cory had stared as through a window on the inverted blue of heaven; had knelt by the rock to find white violets, the first to come, miniature, early-waking, with a midget purple eye. Hurried bees had discovered them before him, since it is not enough for these restless innocent to store up summer in the honeycomb, but with the earliest warmth they must be out and seeking in hunger. He heard then the incessant whispering, the waters of the earth returning to the broader streams, to the sea, the sky, the earth again, the waters of spring.
Drifting away to the south pasture and the woods, Reuben heard also a catbird in a budding thicket, chuckling and mewling and singing in a dozen voices, attempting alone the merriment of a full choir, sounding the bravura of summer before its time, fantastic, strong and sweet as the reed of the horned god. Furry silver softness of pussy willows shone at the edge of the woods; further in, he found the never-distant symbols of struggle and pain, for the tips of the wild grape were becoming fingers, later to grow aggressive, cruel in silent pressure, though all they seek is an island of space in the sunlight. He heard the peeper frogs, the delicate violence in their amorous throats, and now and then the ponderous grumble of a big frog, not yet sustained in the organpoint of summer but large as the owl-voices that had been disturbing the night woods all winter long. He watched a robin carrying mud with a purpose, and other small architects concerned with the foundations of secret houses, and sat long silent in his watching; silent and thinking now and again of something said by Mr. Welland which seemed not unrelated to springtime and the nesting of birds: "I do believe in God, Reuben, but I must tell you my faith is rather like that of a man on a cloudy day who hath some notion the sun may come out before evening. Should the sky remain overcast he will not be too sadly dismayed and may fall asleep with ease. And I suggest, it is no belittling of mine own faith, that I reject the arrogance of certainty."
Silent—so long that a box turtle placed a blundering claw on his shoe before it understood that Reuben was no rock. Reuben moved his hand idly to make it withdraw hissing into the sanctuary; he held his foot motionless, until by degrees the little bothered head emerged, vague and sad like Jesse Plum's, and the creature lurched away to safety. Reuben forgot it, listening to the wind and the voices of a thousand hungers within him, almost but not quite seeing the airy rising in mist of castles in Spain, almost but not quite hearing the reed of the horned god that makes a mockery of everything but blind desire and the need to embrace the fleeing sun-dappled body in the country of Arcadia.
Then from near bushes another music streamed, three notes of purity, the last one twice repeated; notes at intervals true to the human scale but sung as no one sings them except a white-throated sparrow who has come home to April in New England. But even under the glow of this music Reuben's human brain must at once observe how bounteous nature includes the porcupine's quill festering in helpless flesh, the needle teeth of a weasel in a rabbit's neck, the scar on Ben Cory's lip, the drop of a hawk, smallpox, the death of Deerfield, a pencil sketch of unredeemable sorrow in Mr. Welland's surgery, the husband-eating habits of spiders, the right eye of the boy Wilks gouged out by a cutlass; and so it would seem there's no help for it, but the brain must continue, trying in some confusion to kill wolves and learn how to be content with discontent. It will not say: What is man, that thou art mindful of him? Such mock humility, Reuben thought, is iniquitous rubbish, in the presence of the whitethroat's music and the drawings of Vesalius, for if the human creature and the sparrow are not beings of wonder and infinite depth then nothing is wonderful under the North Star.
On cool mornings after fog, Ben Cory liked to search out the green of poplar bark still damp, a green softer and stranger than any other on earth, seeming translucent, leading the mind to green oceans.
Ben Cory knew as well as anyone that the country beyond the magic of poplar bark is not to be entered, and may be declared what you will.
There as here, like the reed of the horned god demanding and perilous, the west winds move beyond the green land and over blue-green waves remote from land.
The days crawled with inky toil into another Saturday afternoon, and Ben Cory was once more free to invade Boston. This time he could ride his mare to the Jenks house—ride like a gentleman, with a solid determination not to fall from grace, no, not in the lightest particular.
In the morning, Uncle John also had gone to Boston, as he seldom did on a Saturday. Since that evening a week ago when Ben had presumed to speak out, Uncle John had appeared withdrawn in a puzzling way—even more since the gray hours of the funeral—almost as though he regretted having allowed young Benjamin to talk up like a man. It created a background trouble for Ben's thought: maybe he had made a fool of himself after all; maybe on second thought Uncle John had found it downright insulting, the idea that his Artemis should abandon the rich journey to the Indies and operate like a cheap ferry tub in the coastal trade. Only background: even the fear he had managed to discuss with Reuben, that John Kenny's fortune might tumble suddenly at the assault of creditors, could not dominate such an afternoon as this, when the warmth of June had arrived to blend with the crystal freshness of the end of April, and the girl Faith was in the garden by the house, alone, kneeling to lift with a pink finger tip the golden face of a jonquil.
Ben jumped down, not able to look again and pretend to discover her until he had made a careful business of hitching his mare to the post in the street, rubbing the hairy foolish nose and murmuring the words old Molly usually required before she would stand quiet and go to dreaming in the sun. He could turn then, but (such is the bewildering skill of women) Faith was still engaged with the daffodil. Only at that moment did she rise, glance toward the house, lift a hand in the light to push back a strand of hair under her little cap, brush away a clinging leaf from the softness of her brown skirt, and then at long last step away from the bed of flowers to find Ben Cory at the gate, with a wondrous flush of surprise. "Oh, Benjamin, you startled me!" Her right hand jumped to her mouth, blue eyes laughing over it in mirthful self-reproach at having used his first name when of course she ought to have spoken with proper reserve in spite of the violets swaying at her feet, and called him Mr. Cory.
"I didn't mean to. I'm not dangerous, now that's no lie."
"That, sir, remains to be seen. You did cause me to forget myself." She was still silently laughing—from natural good spirits, or from kindness, or because Ben Cory was the most comical savage under the sun. "Surprising me so, Mr. Cory!" That in drawling mimic reproach, as her hands held down the latch of the picket gate, in mimic warfare declining to open it.
"May I come in then?"
"Oh-h—mmm," she said, her tone a singing. "I'll consider it, I suppose. I suppose it would be cold and unkind if I obliged you to stand out there in the street. Though perhaps you ought to, as a punishment for surpri-ising me so."
"I'm most sorry for that."
"Are you now? Why, Mr. Cory, if I thought so I might decide you were a poor thing of no enterprise, and so away into the house closing the door, and you might sit out here lorn and lonely enough until the lamplighter cometh in the evening." She blinked both eyes. "Or I could send Charity to you, sir? With another picture maybe, so to keep you company?" She glanced down at her hands.
Out of breath in an April gust of wisdom, Ben lifted their unresisting warmth from the latch, opened it, found himself inside the garden and closing the gate without commotion. She had drawn away from him, laughter fallen from her like a ravished shield. Not too far away, grave, with veiled downward-looking eyes, the hands he had briefly touched holding each other as if for safety between her breasts. Ben could neither move nor speak unless she did so. "Would you like to come look at the daffodils? They were timid, Mr. Cory. They would not bloom in March, but now I think the sun's a little kinder."
The daffodils, yes, but not yet. Ben stooped to the purple glow and wind-stirred motion at his feet, plucked a single violet perfect in fragility and held it near her eyes, so that she must lift them presently to look at him, frightened with discovery, as young in all ways as himself and unsure. He recaptured the memory of a breath of music from the dingy library of John Kenny, and found a glory of pride that he could bring these words to himself out of some dusty hour that must have passed without love, and speak them for her pleasure, and not sound in the least like a fool.
"You violets that first appear,
By your pure purple mantles known,
Like the proud virgins of the year,
As if the spring were all your own;
What are you when the rose is blown?"
"Ah! What's that?"
"The verse is—oh, if I remember, by Sir Henry Wotton, to his mistress the Queen of Bohemia. But I did make it mine," said Ben. "I made it mine, to give you today."
"Why—why, Ben!" He saw the tears start to her eyes. A few appeared on her cheeks. He could not touch them; understood how she must turn her face away quickly, for the tears were no pretense at all, and she as much startled by them as the boy who loved her—no part assigned to that sort of tears in the undertakings of mimic reproach and mimic warfare. "Is that why you came? To—to say something beautiful I couldn't forget, even though...."
"Even though——?"
She smiled down at dainty shoes that were somehow not very muddy in spite of the spring ground, trying again to be distant and a lady. "My mother and father, 'deed they'd be much put out to know I was speaking thus alone with you, Mr. Cory.... I meant to say: even though the words cannot be for me."
"Cannot—why, for you and no other, ever."
"Well, we might——" she glanced at the house, and at him, and at the house again, so that Ben grasped what she would never be so brazen as to put in words, namely that the stone seat on the other side of the bed of daffodils stood very near the house wall, and that this part of the wall was blind, without any windows to overlook the seat; that the jonquils would not tell and the stone would be warm in the sun so much like a sun of June. She sat there with a woman's grace; without a smile, shyly touched the stone beside her. The seat was small, yet she could only mean that he was to be there, that near to her, breathing her fragrance even as fantasies of twelve troubled nights had dwelt upon it. "Now tell me, Benjamin, tell me truly the reason that brought you here?"
"Oh, to—to pluck this violet, and look on it, whether it be, as they tell, the flower of modesty."
"Now you laugh at me."
"Never."
"Any scholar may laugh at me, Benjamin. I'm not learned."
"Nor I. But as I remember—well, not the books but what my mother used to say, maybe I ought to take from this garden a sprig of rosemary, but there'll be none in the bloom this time of year. Oh, Faith, I'm no scholar at all. My brother is the wise one."
"Ay, faraway Reuben. Monday, you know, was the first and only time I've laid eyes on him. I thought only his body was there, and he the other side of the moon—but of course a funeral is a poor time to meet anyone.... Rosemary? Why rosemary? Rosemary's for remembrance."
"That's what my mother used to tell. You see, I may be going away," said Ben, and at the moment quite believed it.
"Going away?" Her face was a new miracle because of nearness.
"You heard what happened to the Iris?"
"Oh!" She caught his hand in both her own. "Yes, I heard of course. You mean—what do you mean, Ben?"
"I ought to be out and earning my way. I spoke of it to Uncle John the other evening. You see"—and he found that he was speaking to her very much as he had done in certain dreams before the onset of sleep: reasonably, bravely, easily, finding words without stammering. This realization of a dream was in itself so great a wonder that he could take other marvels almost lightly, even the marvel of her thigh against his own, her two hands holding his one as if they desired never to let it go. He would sail, he said. He would learn all there was for him to know of the sea, for it was the mightiest of highways for human enterprise—and the world, said Ben, is scarce explored. Faith seemed astonished to learn how few were the names of great explorers.... If, said Ben, a shipowner of Boston could build his fortune soundly on the colonial trade until his resources were great enough so that no minor disaster need shake him, there was no reason why such a man—he was not completely sure at this point whether he meant himself or Uncle John Kenny—why such a man, later on, say when the present war was over, should not fit out a fleet, maybe five or six vessels as fast and good as Artemis but probably larger, and strike out for those parts of the incredible Pacific where anything might be found. Islands—continents.... Why should Spain and France sit a-straddle of half the known earth? For that matter, what did England herself really understand of the New World? "Oh," said Faith. "Why, this land of our own," said Ben—"I say this ought to be the heart and center for the exploration that's still to be done." And Faith watched him, shining, but presently let go his hand and turned her face away.
It dawned on Ben that this vision had been newborn of this moment. It was in the blue intensity of her eyes that those five or six vessels as fast and good as Artemis were setting out, breaking out the full splendor of white canvas and turning south—across the Line, and then the Horn? Or should they rather beat across the South Atlantic and round da Gama's Cape and so on through the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean toward their goal? Well, Shawn—Daniel Shawn would know what way they ought to go, and would go with them of course. But not just yet; not for a few years; not until.... Born of this moment, and so perhaps all his earlier imaginings of the sea had been no more than prelude—including those of a great while past, when he had never seen so much as the tame waters of Boston harbor, but his brother (at some moment of that past so far away that Ben could not now locate it in time or place) had said: "I'll go with thee to the Spice Islands."
Faith was saying: "I see those things for you. It's very fair and brave." She was not happy. "I see you will go away."
"Why, I'll come back."
"I don't know," said Faith to the faces of the jonquils. "I don't know, whether they ever do. I am not sure my father ever cometh back, Ben. He is here and not here."
For that Ben found no answer, but a new wave of courage allowed him to recapture her hand. "I suppose, Faith, it sounds as if I were talking the stuff of dreams."
"Brave dreams, but—why to me?"
"I think you made them."
"Oh, Ben, you'll break my heart. I am not—I—never mind, I don't wish to speak of it. But you should not be telling these things to me. I should not allow it. When we first met I thought you were only a green boy. Now I see you're—not, quite, and I...."
His own courage amazing him, Ben said: "And thou, Faith? How old art thou?"
"I am seventeen. But women are much older."
"I have heard that, and don't believe it."
"Oh! Oh! Must I now be angered with you?"
"No," said Ben, still dizzily courageous—"no, you must not. But you must tell me why you should be suddenly distressed, and—and why I shouldn't tell you what's in my heart. What is it, Faith?" The courage, he supposed, could hardly last much longer, but he could take some pride in it, this courage faintly like cruelty, that seemed to have swept away her needless defenses.
"We should not be speaking thus together." As though the dutiful assertion itself had given her confidence, she went on more tranquilly: "Have you ever thought, Benjamin—but, la, why should you?—that the lot of women is none so easy? We must stay at home. In many concerns we may not even speak. We marry, d'you see, and bear children, and must mind the house—no matter if those we love are on the far side of the earth, yet we must do that, and keep our own counsel too.... One day, Benjamin, I shall marry a rich man, and I hope"—but as she said it she clutched his hand and her eyes filled—"I hope and pray he'll have nothing whatsoever to do with the old gray sea. Oh, I will not marry a sailor, never! Only think," she said, warming to it and laughing now with some mischief—"he my husband shall be a pillar of the colony, like Judge Sewall, ha?—or even a royal governor, Benjamin, with such a wig!—oh, Ben, Ben, have I hurt thee?"
Helplessly Ben said: "I love thee."
She rose quickly and moved away. He dared not look up until she spoke again. "I am—sorry.... Marry, yes, and bear children and mind the house, and grow old little by little—why, that Magellan of yours, tell me, how long was he gone when he made the circuit of the world? I shall be old and gray when you—come back. Oh yes yes, an old gray dame with wrinkled cheeks and shaking hands, and belike I'll say, 'Why, grandchildren, I knew him, the great Benjamin Cory——'"
"Don't!" said Ben, and knew her hands were on his shoulders.
One of them curled under his chin to lift his face. "There!" she said—"do you see? You see what a naughty heartless old woman I am already? But promise me, Ben—promise me you will come back."
Ben knew he could have stood up then and kissed her—if someone had not passed by in the street. Faith herself seemed not displeased by that intrusion of alien noise, only took her hands away and stood back smiling at him, the moment irretrievable. "I will come back."
"Ben, I wish I had known you'd be here today. We have a guest arriving soon—I must dress, and aid Mama with a few things, and I cannot invite you to stay. I wish I might, but you understand—not my place to do so, and I dare say Mama would be upset."
"Of course."
"But you will come again—that is, if you wish to," she said, and laughed herself at the high absurdity of the notion that a time could ever come when he would not wish to see her.
"Of course—whenever I may, Faith."
"I do wish you might stay this evening, but—well, 'tis a——" she sighed in some private trouble or exasperation, moving her hands vaguely—"one of those occasions."
Dimly frightened and not intending his own words, Ben asked: "Someone important?"
Faith made a wry face. "He would think so." Her hands sketched a wig on her head, and she strutted a little in mimicry of self-importance. "A man of substance, la. A little wintry in years to be sure. A merchant, a pillar of the church, and a—widower."
"I see...."
"Take care," she said with what might be a show of real anger, "that you do not see too much. He is a good man—I am sorry I was so naughty and forward as to make light of him. Good day, Mr. Cory!" Then in a lightning change at sight of his stricken face, Faith hurried to him and framed his face in her hands and whispered: "Did I not make you promise to come back? Oh, make your voyages—if you must. Make them for me, Ben, and forgive my cruelty!"
"You——"
Lightly and quickly, Faith kissed his lips. "Queer little scar," she said, and touched it with a finger tip, breathing hard. "Tell me of it some time. Why, I—Benjamin Cory, I would wait for you a thousand years." And she ran away across the garden, vanished utterly, in some place where Ben supposed there would be a door to safety.
He passed through the gate in a golden haze. Molly was restless. She meant no disrespect, but sometimes found it humorous to fidget and dance ponderously at the moment he was lifting his foot for the stirrup. She did so now, perhaps in comment at the obvious remoteness of Ben's mortal mind. It had the effect of drawing him back to the present world, a few mild expletives quivering on the edge of utterance, when the brown girl Clarissa, returning from some bit of marketing with a parcel under her arm, observed his difficulty, set the parcel on the steps and came to him. "May I hold her for you, sir?"
"Oh, thanks!" Ben smiled without knowing it, and mounted easily as she competently held the bridle and stroked Molly's friendly repentant nose. He was in the saddle, but her hand remained there a moment longer, and her look held him, a look profounder than a touch, demanding nothing, declaring nothing except some kind of understanding which (until he thought about it later) seemed to Ben quite natural. As if they, the two of them alone, understood and recognized certain things that concerned no one else, that no one else had ever guessed.
Clarissa spoke also, quietly, looking up at him in the sun with no smile: "Good fortune, wherever you go."
"And to you," said Ben—involuntarily, in a way, or because no other words could possibly have been spoken. She turned aside to take up her parcel, and Ben rode home—across Boston Neck, past the waters of Gallows Bay, the marshes and the quicksands.
In the nights that followed Ben's return from Boston with a glowing dreambound face, April became May, but Reuben did not slip outdoors while the house was slumbering to walk in the dark woods. He had done so sometimes last year and the year before—usually on summer nights of light airs and starshine when beauty like something dangerous commanded him to approach, even though it be madness or immolation, because to retreat was a sure kind of dying. The summery warmth was continuing; the nights following Ben's return were as soft and full of sorcery as any that had ever called outside his window, but Reuben did not go. A certain new trouble had come on him, and part of it was a simple and shameful physical fear, like that of the boy who watched the careful advance of a wolf.
Shawn—that devil Shawn.
To Reuben, on the morning after Jan Dyckman's death, the office at the warehouse had stunk of guilt from the moment Shawn strode into it. He could rule that out as a morbid fancy for which Mr. Welland might have chided him; he could damn himself half-heartedly for owning a suspicious nature; nevertheless one fact remained clear to him (and apparently to nobody else): the death of Jan Dyckman was simply too convenient for Mr. Shawn, and Shawn was a man driven by a demon of ambition. Never mind whether the ambition itself was good or bad: whatever it was, Reuben felt, it crowded to fullness that part of the man's nature which in most human beings held the capacity for love, kindness, and compromise with the needs of other lives.
And now, Reuben knew, he would find no calm out there in the calling, sweet-breathing night if he must imagine that devil Shawn behind every tree, and fear the moonlight itself because it would illuminate his body for—what? A knife-throw? A lethal rush?
Once Reuben had supposed that everyone possessed something like his own electric awareness of the emotional state of others. In school at Deerfield he used to foresee disaster whenever the teacher was about to break into rage at Johnny Hoyt or Tom Hawks or some other favorite butt; Reuben had never been wrong, wincing in sympathy for five or ten minutes before the ruler slammed on a palm or the birch was lifted in ceremony from the wall. At fifteen he still found it difficult to credit that few actually did possess that awareness. The thing itself, he guessed, was merely a sharp observation for tiny shifts of expression or inflections of the voice.... Shawn had reeked of guilt—but more. The large blue eyes had met Reuben's once above the glittering coin; and had understood.
Unable to suggest anything in the realm of proof, Reuben quailed at thought of speaking out. On Sunday, briefly alone with Uncle John, he did attempt it, and fumbled it; the old man was shocked, confused, a little angry and apparently not in a mood to listen; Reuben in misery cancelled his own words. After that, with pain but doggedly, Reuben considered the possibility that he was suffering from green vicious jealousy because Ben so plainly admired the big Irishman. But the one fact that needed no proof, the fact of the convenience of Jan Dyckman's death for a man who wished to be mate of Artemis, remained like a cold lump of indigestion, inescapable and sour.... That devil Shawn would not have used the knife himself. That would be Judas Marsh. It could be one-eyed Marsh behind the peaceful dark trees of John Kenny's orchard.
When Reuben could sleep at all, Shawn invaded sickly dreams, his features rather changed, sometimes carrying a flintlock, but always rubbing the brilliant coin, sardonically ready to tell Reuben something or other. His words (usually) were no more than "Floreat Rex"—but the Irishman's true meaning appeared to be that the house was afire, or that somebody, somewhere, was being flogged, and Reuben too much a womanish coward to do anything about it. "Floreat Rex," said Shawn, meaning also of course: "I think I'll cut that off—you can't plant anything with it." Three times Reuben woke in a sweat from such a snarling dream, the third and worst time being on the Saturday night after Ben's return from his hour with Faith in the garden—of which he told Reuben with shy self-deprecating astonishment, a need to speak, a need to marvel aloud that anyone could be as fortunate as himself.
On Monday night Reuben dreamed that he was (as he truly was) lying in his bed in this familiar lovely room, but frozen to immobility, the house as silent as though everyone had died and no wind would ever again rattle a shutter or chuckle outside in the expanding leaves. One sound, however, could be felt—leisured footsteps on the stairs. Reuben's eyes were glued shut; he knew that, knew also that the stairs were dark, the night-light somehow blown out; but with another kind of vision he could watch the man Shawn coming up-black patch over left eye, bright farthing in the busy fingers of the left hand, flintlock in the right. If Reuben could have spoken, as he tried to do, he would have said: "I killed a wolf." He could not. He knew that if he did, the man would merely lift him with gouging fingers under the cheekbones and toss him aside, because it was not for Reuben, or rather not only for Reuben, that he was gliding up the stairway. A halting then, a steady, purposeful raising of the flintlock until Reuben must stare down into the small black eye of the muzzle and understand that it was all over. Then waking, swift cool wave of understanding how once more the thing was a dream.
It had been much like that not so many years ago, when the dreams were of Hell.
The moon was not shining, but the sky was a field of a million untroubled lights. As Reuben got up and stretched a cramp out of his arms—his body must have been locked like iron in the dream—he could make out something of his brother's face, enough to sense the tranquillity of Ben's healthy sleep, and envy it.
Ben's smooth forehead was turned away; his hand, firm and large, curled childishly under his rounded chin. Ben's eyelashes were long as a girl's, darker than his brows and curling upward at the tips, darker than the thickening down on his lip that he must now shave every other day. Reuben sat quiet, staring in the dark, until the dim pattern of his brother's face was set free from natural bounds, became incomprehensibly vast, all else a background, then dizzyingly small and far away, unreachable as an image in the bottom of a well.
What are you? What am I?
What is fear?
What is happiness?—well, that arrives unsought, if at all: to seek it, I know, is to stumble in a quicksand; to wait wearily hoping for it is simply one tedious way of dying.
What if nothing is real at all except the present moment?
Why, if so, then eternity is only a word. As I look on him now, I look on him forever. But there's deception here, for we do move and change: eternity is a word.
If the present alone is real, then do we ourselves create it from moment to moment? What is memory? I remember looking over hemlocks to the North Star, and Ben looked there too, and I have no way of knowing, ever, what he saw. I remember a day of summer——
Mid-July, for the hay was ripe then, and Reuben and his mother were returning from carrying a noon meal and a jug of beer to the outer fields. Other men beside Father were there, and Ben too, and some other older children and women to help with the raking, but Reuben at seven years old was no use with a rake. He had been allowed to carry the beer, sipping one mouthful and no more on the way. This was the homeward journey, and she in a smiling mood, tanned cheeks flushed, dark eyes full of mischief.
She sat in the long grass by the palisade gate, sweeping her skirt about to cover her feet in one graceful glide of her arm, lightly as any young girl——
(And so she was of course. Always young. Never to be old.)
"Sit by me, Puppy." No one else was about: only the men in the fields now toylike with distance, a flock of cloud-sheep radiant in the lower sky, a bumblebee lighting with clumsy abruptness on Reuben's knee. "Ah, don't stir! He won't sting thee. See!—yellow packets on his legs, he's been a-gathering. Tell me where he's been and what did he see?" (Warmth of a laughing face expecting nonsense.)
"Why, Mother, he went away over England, away over France, even way away over Boston, and he went awa-a-ay over the places in Ben's Hakluyt book where the Spice Islands are, and there was a king with ten thousand courtiers and he stung them. Every one."
"Now why? Did they do wrong?"
"They stole the king's beer."
"What, all ten thousand of 'em?"
"Every-each of the ten thousand."
"Now, love, what a selfish old pig the king must've been, for if there was beer enough for all ten thousand, I vow that was more than he'd ever drink alone, la?"
"Phoo, he was a big king."
"Ah, I see.... And was there a queen of the Spice Islands?"
"There was, and she did try to prevent them stealing the beer, but one would be tying spoons to her apron the while the rest was after it, she could no-way catch 'em."
"Wicked things!... Was she beautiful?"
"Ay, but not like you."
"Reuben, thou'lt have me weeping."
"Why, Mother? What for?"
"I don't know, Puppy. They say women must weep sometimes, if only because—I don't know.... Don't ever leave me."
On the same Monday night Ben Cory dreamed:
Faith arrived in the coach to call politely on those who lived in the stockade, and Ben was embarrassed for them, because they allowed her blue skirt to become draggled in the mud as she stepped from the coach at the stockade gate. She was not annoyed, but walked in grace to the inner citadel under the red parasol that Clarissa held unopened above her head. Ben shook hands with her pleasantly, and climbed with the girl named Clarity up the long spiral ladder to the top of the citadel. "Deerfield hath no citadel," said Clarity, Ben good-naturedly agreeing. From this eyrie they could watch the country beyond the stockade, while in the inner rooms far below, Faith and some friend of Uncle John's were enjoying cakes and coffee and Madeira. "Like crosstrees," said Clarity, Ben good-naturedly agreeing, and she placed her brown sweet sunlit hands at the edge of their perch and pulled at it to make it set up an agreeable swaying, entertaining as a swing in a garden.
The forest beyond the stockade was alive with gray dogs.
"He is compassed about," Ben said, knowing Clarity shared his anxiety. "He may be obliged to sell a tetradrachm of the time of Dyckman." Clarity nodded, moving their crow's-nest back and forth with her little brown hands, so that he could see her body arch and sway, arch and sway, bending and straightening as the wind blew her hair back to him and hid her face from time to time—still he could look down and see Faith walking out through the stockade walls into the woods. The parasol was the only thing the gray dogs were likely to desire, and Clarity had that now, under her arm; therefore the dogs were not likely to attack Faith, but Ben nevertheless felt a certain gloom, because she was too far away, too far down for him to shout a warning. No real danger of course. He said to Clarity: "Mind that thing, Mistress Coronal—I must be going."
"Rest, John! All evening you was like a cat on a hot stove, la, and all Sunday too. Can't you sleep? Can't I help you sleep?"
"I'd have been lost long ago but for your kindness, Kate."
"Oh, now! Something hot to drink? I could get it easy."
"I had enough in the evening, or too much. Besides, dear, I'm not certain the boys are asleep. Heard some stirring. One of them opening the window or the like. I don't think Ru's been sleeping well—red-eyed in the morning, and d'you know I can't ask? Don't know how."
"Don't fret so—'tis only their time of life. Both brave boys, and will be grand men. In a few years you'll have no cause for anything but pride in 'em, the both of 'em."
"That's true.... Kate, it would not much amaze me if the boys—Reuben at least—were quite aware that sometimes I come up here to thy room at night. They'd never speak, never show the knowledge by so much as a look; I think they'd never even discuss it with each other alone; and neither would have any unkind thought about it."
"Oh.... All the same——"
"I know. Best to remain discreet. Still, if we were wed——"
"It's not fitting, John. The gossip that's gone on about us, all these years, it's become a—a—what's the word I want?"
"A commonplace?"
"Yes, of course—that, with a pox. But don't you see?—if we was to wed now there'd be talk of another kind, and then—then I must be Madam Kenny and bear it like a lady, which I am not, John, and cannot be. Oh, let be as it is! I'd be most wretched, John—truly.... As you say, the boys would never speak of it. I know them too. I love them too, John."
"Well.... If it were spoken I suppose Ben would be—embarrassed, let us say, because he's much aware of social opinion. And Reuben—who looketh down upon social opinion from his own mountaintop like a puzzled angel—Reuben would hold some thought about it which I could never understand, never interpret—Kate, I don't know them!... I can't see my own youth, Kate. I think of it. A thousand things keep coming back to me now that never did so in my fifties, or sixties—my father's sniff, my Aunt Jessica's passion for setting the furniture exactly parallel to the walls and washing her hands a hundred times a day—damme, the very shape of a knot in the ash stick my father used for correcting me, and didn't I count it a great thing won if I was hit with the plain part of the stick and not with the knob! How Ru would have loathed him! I did too, but a long time after he was dead I suppose I acquired a certain comprehension, even gratitude in some matters. Well, those things come back, but only like little pictures, Kate. I can't feel how it was, to be a youth of Ben's age. I only know that once I was, and that in a world nothing like the one they live in, nothing like.... Mr. Welland stopped by at my office today."
"Mr. Welland!"
"Nay, nothing to do with illness. I now learn, Kate, that our Reuben hath suddenly decided he wishes to study medicine."
"Marry come up!"
"Ye-es. Well, I wish he might have discussed it with me first, but from what Mr. Welland told me, I believe the thought came suddenly, and I suppose Ru felt unready to speak to me about it, and Mr. Welland being in town anyway on some other errand—mph, anyway, so it is. Maybe a passing thing—but Welland seemed to think not, and was earnest, nay almost impassioned in telling me he thought the boy had a true call to it. I like Welland of course—honest man, courteous too, said he would be pleased to take Reuben as apprentice, by whatever arrangement suited my own plans for him. Man of learning too—I found we share many interests.... Damn the thing, I could have wished better for Reuben than—oh, pills, syrups, the whining of sick people, exposing himself to dangerous ills, but...."
"That's what troubled you today?"
"Uh—well, no. Of course I must have some talk with Reuben about this in—well, in a day or two...."
"Tell Kate."
"Kate, I have done a thing, the which seemed right to me at the time, and still does, but...."
"Tell Kate."
"Artemis is to sail tomorrow. The Tuesday afternoon, if the weather be right. The sky's clear tonight—I dare say it will be fair."
"Oh?"
"Ay—Barbados. And Ben does not know it, Kate, and will not know it until she is gone."
"Oh, John!"
"I know. Now let me try to tell thee: Ben was most desirous to sail—you knew that—and I—I can't have it, Kate. Not now, and he so young—the hardships, and his study disrupted, all that. A while ago—a week ago Saturday, I think—he spoke to me of this. He had the thought that Artemis might make a quick passage to New York. It was reasonable. He'd given it much thought evidently, and spoke up every inch a man, I was obliged to consider it, though I still think my own judgment is best, and so—so she's for Barbados, and will surely bring enough on her return to clear away—certain debts, and put us in good posture for some time to come.... Well, let it be I'm simply a coward, Kate: I could not face him, and tell him he was not to go—that is, not now, when I—I tell thee, Kate, I can't quite seem to recover from what happened to Iris. Not as I used to recover from such misfortune. Why, when Hera was lost—oh, I'm getting old. I simply could not bear to see the light go out of him, as I knew it would."
"But later, when he's bound to know——"
"Kate—dear—don't you think it may be better for him to meet it as a thing already done, no room for discussion?"
"Oh, I don't know, John. He—it's not for me to say."
"But you know I wish to hear whatever you think."
"I—don't know. Some-way, it don't seem...."
"You think he may be angry with me?"
"I never saw Ben angry. Could be, I vow, if he was hurt."
"And you think this may hurt him, too much?"
"I—don't know, John. It seemed right to you, and—oh dearie me——"
"Well, there, never mind. It's done. I sha'n't tell him till tomorrow. Nor Reuben of course, seeing I can't burden him with the obligation to keep a secret from his brother.... I was obliged to cross Ben in one other particular—maybe it a'n't important. He put in a good word once or twice for Mr. Shawn, you see, to replace poor Jan. I considered it. I like Shawn well enough—I suppose. But then yesterday—ay, Sunday it was—Reuben said something, to me alone, that gave me pause."
"Reuben did! John, I—did not like that Mr. Shawn."
"You too?"
"I only glimpsed him the once, that evening he came here. I felt a coldness in him. I a'n't wise in the head, John, but my heart knows a little sometimes. I did feel a coldness."
"Not so far from what Reuben said. We were speaking of Jan's death, and Reuben said—blurted it, not his natural way at all, and I could see it cost him pain—Ru said: 'Ha'n't they even questioned him?' I was obliged to ask whom he meant. He said: 'Shawn, that devil Shawn.' He said: 'Will they not ask him concerning ends and means? Will they not ask him how far he would go to secure a vessel so to be another Francis Drake?' Well, I—I chided him, Kate—it shocked me, not only because he lacks a man's years. He apologized and said no more. But then today, it so happened another man applied—Will Hanson, New Haven man, a good sailor that Jenks knew from years past. Jenks wished to sign him on. I had meant to suggest Mr. Shawn, but I remembered what Reuben said and held my peace, and so—so Hanson will be mate when she sails tomorrow.... I'm getting old—fret and fume over decisions I'd've made a few years ago with a snap of the fingers—and been right too. Usually. Oh, my foot! God damn that bloody thing!"
"Lie still. You know it alway stops hurting if you lie still."
"Ah, you're kind."
"Why, John, you're mine in the sight of God. And you not even able to believe!—well, there, I made my peace with that too, long ago, for a'n't it what makes the world go 'round, a'n't I alway said so? Nay, love, never mind how I chatter. Try now if you can't get some sleep."
Chapter Seven
If the present alone is real, one might as well eat the damn' porridge. On Tuesday morning Reuben did so, admitting at once that the porridge was good as always, that the fault lay with his own jumpy stomach, his sandy-eyed weariness from a bad night. Ben also seemed depressed, or at least without the glow and buoyancy he had shown since his last return from Boston. Reuben had intended to offer a few not too classical flights concerning Aphrodite Anadyomene the sea-born, partly in the hope of learning whether love totally obliterated the sense of humor. He left them unsaid.
It might be abstraction, not depression, that ailed Ben. Experimentally, while his brother gazed moodily out the window, Reuben stole a sliver of bacon from his trencher; Ben never noticed. When Reuben replaced it, Ben did observe the action, vaguely startled, smiling and saying: "Thanks."
"Well, damn," said Reuben. Kate had watched the operation—vacantly and without chuckling.
"Uh? A'n't you hungry, Ru?"
"Damn again," said Reuben. "I am alway hungry. I own a tapeworm of the soul." He recaptured the bacon and popped it in his mouth. Ben was still merely looking puzzled. "'Twould appear that this morning I am penned up with mooncalves—even Kate won't laugh. And yet it's a fair day, a red sky last night." Kate turned her back with odd abruptness. And in his own dark privacy, it seemed to Reuben that he was like one who can behold the gathering of the crimson banners for Armageddon where others see only a flaming translation of natural clouds.
Something spoke then within him, so vividly that Reuben imagined at first he was recalling some remark of Mr. Welland's; but casting back, he felt certain that in their few meetings of the last weeks, the doctor had said no such thing: Learning begins now. Simply his own thought, taking on a verbalized form of uncommon clearness, of imperative power: LEARNING BEGINS NOW.
Ben had drifted back into his country of dream. Kate was, abnormally, not talking. Having breakfasted early as usual with Mr. Kenny, who had left for Boston, Mr. Hibbs was waiting in the schoolroom—perhaps not too impatiently, since work could always be done in odd moments on the immortality of the soul. The kitchen, not oppressed by dining-room demands of dignity, was rich with pleasant smells and the warmth of May. Reuben refilled his coffee cup.
If learning begins (ever) it must somehow begin with premises that will not betray. All men are mortal; Ben and I are men....
Death is the conclusion of known life. I am forced to doubt, what once upon a time I believed, that a knowable life continues in a heaven or hell; therefore I am forced to doubt, what once upon a time I did believe, that Ben (or I, or Mother, or honest Jan Dyckman) can continue beyond the conclusion we call death.
Knowledge (Mr. Welland said last Saturday) pertains to what can be proven by the carnal senses.
Faith is belief in a proposition that cannot be established by the carnal senses—("My faith is like that of a man on a cloudy day....") Faith cannot be supported by knowledge, for if proof is found the proposition becomes knowledge and faith is no longer relevant; if it be not found, the proposition comes not within the region of knowledge.
Hope and desire—(must you rattle those pots, Kate, at this especial mortal moment?)—hope and desire may derive partly from knowledge, but cannot possess the force of it, for they are directed to the future, which does not exist. Therefore faith, hope and desire are all in the same class: to say that once upon a time I had faith in a heaven is no more than to say that I desired it, or hoped for it, or was told I ought to desire it—all without knowledge.
They say: "Help thou mine unbelief!" But belief and unbelief are no more to be helped or hindered than the eyes' perception of a cloud. If the eyes carry out their function and if the cloud be there, I shall see it. Why, so far as belief and unbelief are concerned, will, desire, hope, fear, pain have no part to play at all, let them be cruel as flame or powerful as time.
The mind, he understood, would continue proposing premises for all its life: some false, to be rejected; some (so far as the senses themselves can be trusted) true; every one of them to be examined in the atmosphere of doubt. Since without faith there is no other atmosphere.
A few strange years ago I walked on a quicksand, in a fog. Then it never occurred to me that the seeming certainties were a quicksand, the visions of Heaven a fog of fantasy. Am I any more likely to sink or stray, now that I know it? Proposition concluded pro tem.
As for Hell—Open up, old rat-hole! I may wish to spit.
"Ben," said Reuben, "do be a good boy and eat your bacon."
"Mm," said Ben, and smiled, and ate it.
Kate's unnatural silence was like a crying. Reuben made a private note to find out, if possible, what ailed her. The dregs of his coffee were still good for a bit more lingering.
You could not—in simple nature you could not listen to all the surrounding voices explaining and re-explaining, accusing, justifying, probing, forever contradicting one another and seldom pausing for an answer. You could heed only a few. Which ones? How to choose?
Love will choose some of the few, the nearest and surely the most important (including Kate). (The most important, why? Query noted, for future consideration.) Caution will select a few that must be heard, for reasons of safety and self-defense. And some will be chosen by native curiosity, which Mr. Welland described last Saturday as one of the rarest of all virtues.
Other voices speak outside the region of individual contact, some of them urgent. Micrographia; the old voice of Hakluyt if only because Ben loves it; Scripture, if only because the world is so obsessed with its thunderings; many others—even Ovid. Mr. Welland spoke of the dramatist Shakespeare; Uncle John has one volume of him—note: find and percontate, immed. These voices are not altogether unlike the near ones—more methodical, because the pen, unlike the voice, need not move in dizzy haste to get everything said before someone interrupts; more methodical and not so much given to hemming and hawing and conversational fluff; but these voices too are engaged in explaining and re-explaining, commanding, blurred sometimes in flurries of contradiction. Sometimes (Michael Wigglesworth for example) they sound downright embarrassed and peevish, when the stubborn universe they speak of is so plainly not as they describe it.
Since not all voices may be attended, since some of them lie and many more speak loudly in the absence of knowledge, one must wait, Reuben guessed, for the sudden inner waking, the unsought recognition, the mind's clear declaration: This voice—(Why did you say to me, "Run, boy! Run!"—why?)—this voice is speaking not merely out of some other's need to assert, but speaking to me, and I understand what it says—some of it....
If we create the present by living it, then right and wrong are man-made. I will accept the verdicts of others in this matter if they seem reasonable to me, and just—not otherwise.
It was once proposed to me on excellent authority that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. It seems to be necessary to hear much nonsense while waiting for the sound that rings true. I may be deceived again, many times, but I say it shall not be from any scared wish to believe.
Am I correct, Mr. Welland, in supposing that if doctrines of right and wrong are man-made, learning begins now?
Ben struggled through Tuesday morning's Greek and logic without serious discredit, and picked up only a few minor fresh scratches from the thorns of Latin grammar. He could not quite win clear of a mental shadow that had haunted him since waking after a dream not plainly remembered—a foreboding uneasiness something like that of a child who has wandered into a strange and exciting room: he has not been specifically forbidden to enter here, but knows he has not been granted permission either; presently someone may arrive and with the cool finality of adults chivy him back to the nursery where the toys have lost all magic.
In the afternoon Ben achieved brief glory, encountering an area of De Finibus in which Reuben had drilled him so briskly that error was nearly impossible. After this victory the deadly hour hand, the slightly less cruel minute hand, appeared to be creeping with better speed toward the beautiful moment of three o'clock, when Mr. Hibbs would snap his books shut, blow from the tops of them a little imaginary dust, and go away. Ru said once (a dreamy voice coming out of the dark of the bedroom when Ben thought he was asleep): "If I live to be old, I shall alway consider that the immortality of the soul sets in at three o'clock post meridian."
A resolution to go once more into Boston had grown today, less like a rational decision than like the climbing of a fever. With the lessons concluded, he would not, like a schoolboy, ask permission: he would simply go, as casually as Ru had been strolling over to Mr. Welland's cottage lately; if there should be consequences of disapproval from Mr. Hibbs or Uncle John himself, Ben supposed they would not be serious—in any case he could meet them with a man's calm, surely?
He tried (from two o'clock on) to lay it out serenely as a plan of campaign. One: he must speak with Faith again—briefly, soberly, a man of affairs saying a temporary good-bye. Two: he must interview Uncle John at the warehouse, in the cool atmosphere of business affairs, and pray for a definite answer, on the grounds that the time of Artemis' departure must be quite near. At this point the plan hazed up a little—Uncle John seldom stayed at the warehouse later than five o'clock. Well, Molly could make fair time into the city, and he would not remain long with Faith—he spent some effort here, defining a few poignant answers he would make to what she would say. Still, he had better prepare a second line of approach: if Uncle John had already left for Roxbury, he would seek out Captain Jenks himself, no less, beat down the devils of fear and self-consciousness so to put the matter plainly to the iron mountain and get an answer. After all, Jenks wasn't so bad. Honest and human. In fantasy Ben saw a gleam of rugged friendliness (respect?) in the little blue eyes....
Better have a third line. If Uncle John had left and Jenks could not be reached, lost in liquor or otherwise unavailable, then he could—oh, hell, ask around at the wharf anyway, find out when Artemis was expected to sail, since it seemed that Uncle John was unwilling to tell him. Tom Ball ought to know. Maybe he would run into Daniel Shawn again, and could, at the very least, learn whether Shawn was to sail as mate. On Sunday, Uncle John had been immune to approach, shut up in his study the better part of the day; yesterday evening he had displayed an impossible mood, his manner testy and faraway, his foot tormenting him. But with a plan of campaign you could always accomplish something. Couldn't you?...
He found it infuriating that as three o'clock drew very near the whole thing seemed more and more like a fever. His breath was difficult; he looked into damp palms and thought: What the devil am I contemplating? Running away? From what? Good God, not from Uncle John Kenny, the soul of generosity! From what?... He watched the inexorable dwindling of the pie-slice made by the hour-hand and the minute-hand as ten minutes of three became five minutes of three. At three minutes of three he felt downright sick, and then jumped like a fool when the dry uncomprehended monologue of Mr. Hibbs ended with a quite familiar snap of a closed volume. He sat still, demoralized, watching Mr. Hibbs stride away; waited for inner quiet and was again grotesquely startled when Reuben, in one of those warm moods which Ben nowadays found almost as strange as his moods of withdrawal, came behind his desk and leaned over to lock thin arms under Ben's chin and murmur: "What's the matter, Mooncalf?"
"Nothing, Ru—nothing. I think I'll go into Boston."
"Oh." Reuben broke the contact; Ben had found it vaguely comforting as well as disturbing. Reuben came around the desk, and re-established nearness by placing his hands over Ben's, hands thinner and smaller, but harder, sometimes even stronger. "Would you," said Reuben presently, "care to take a creeping crawling student of medicine into your confidence, not that the ancient creature wishes to intrude, but——?"
It was not always possible to look directly at Reuben. He saw too much, or if he did not, his quiet intentness made it seem that he did. The faces of others were apt to make it plain enough that they were not so much concerned with you as with themselves; Reuben (who surely thought about himself as much as anyone) somehow could put that preoccupation aside, and make you believe that nothing mattered to him at the moment except that jumble of thought and image and desire which you had grown accustomed to calling your Self. And it was, Ben thought, no illusion: the boy did search, and he did care for what he found. Ben fumbled for an evasion: "Student of medicine for sure?"
This proved to be no evasion after all, for Reuben smiled, and used the question itself as a part of the effort to illuminate the self of Ben Cory. "Yes, truly, and I wish you could find the same kind of certainty, Ben, because it's good. Why, I almost think, Ben, that anything could happen to me now—anything, no matter what—and though I might be hurt as much as I would have been, say a year ago, I could defend myself against my trouble, whatever it was: I could go and study another page of Vesalius' Anatomy. Or the books you bought for me. They wouldn't fade, I think. They wouldn't betray me.... Find something like that, Ben. Suppose you did change your mind about it after a while, at least you'd have it for now."
"But when I search myself I don't find it. I only...."
"Only what?" Reuben tightened his hands, relentless.
"I only wish—oh, I wish to God Uncle John would allow me to sail with Artemis."
Reuben let go his hands, and perched on Mr. Hibbs' sacred desk, swinging his feet, drooping a little, boyish and old, perhaps no longer searching. "You put it to him a few days ago, did you not?"
"Mm—he wouldn't say ay or no."
"You know Uncle John would find it difficult to disappoint thee."
"I am not a child."
"No," said Reuben, and with nothing in his voice to contradict the word. "What about this afternoon, that is what's left of it?"
"I thought I might see Uncle John at the warehouse. Ride home with him maybe."
"Ay, might be easier—he's a rather different man there at the office."
"It—seems not wrong to you, that I wish to sail?"
Reuben was long silent, drooping, looking into his empty hands. "Ben—'d I ever recount to thee the story of the woodcutter's stupid son who tamed a lion?"
"Woodcutter's son—I don't think so. Is it from Aesop?"
"No. Well, that's nearly the whole tale already. He found it as a cub. They grew up together, played together, the lion learning not to unsheath his claws, the woodcutter's son trying to roar like a lion, but 'tis said he made only some poor squeaking sounds that carried no great distance. They were yet friends when the lion was full grown, but then the poor brute in some manner sickened, fretted, vanishing at whiles and returning unwillingly, until at length the woodcutter's stupid son did arrive at one moment of wisdom, and took his friend into the forest and said to him, 'Go thy way.'"
"I am no lion."
"Marry come up, I am a shade more learned than that woodcutter's son. Ben, I'm only trying to say I don't think anyone should try to possess you, as I suppose Uncle John does, as maybe I've done—but if you wish to sail, if it's your decision and your heart in it, d'you think I'd impede you? Supposing I could?"
"No, I don't think you would."
"And I will not," said Reuben, and jumped off the desk. "I'm for Mr. Welland's, by the back fields. Best change thy jacket, Ben—that one beareth the slight saffron memory of an egg which hath gone before. I'll saddle Molly for thee, meanwhile."
When Ben rejoined him in the stable, Reuben had nothing more to say, except the light random murmuring that Molly enjoyed. Ben led her out into the yard—not in sight of Mr. Hibbs' window. Reuben said again, unnecessarily: "I'll go by the fields, you by the road."
As Reuben held the bridle, Ben was bewildered at his reluctance to set his foot in the stirrup. "Ru, what ails thee? It's not as if we were saying a good-bye."
"No. Why, man, if you sail, I also—well, I hope it turns out as you wish. I believe Uncle John heeds what you say, more than you suppose. Why the knife, little Benjamin?"
"Oh, I might be in the city after dark. I rather missed it that other night, coming home."
"Well, tuck it under your britches, can't you?—so to look less like a bloody cutthroat and more like my little brother?"
"Very well.... Ru, I don't know how to say this—lately I've been some-way troubled about thee."
"Oh, why, why? Have I two heads?—but don't answer that."
"As if we no longer understood each other—my fault, I think."
"It is not. It is not even true." Reuben still held the bridle, his face stiff and white and smiling. "No cause for trouble about me. I am one of the fortunate, didn't you know?"
"I don't understand."
"I own a shield. I walk in the woods. I read the Anatomy of Vesalius, and the books you bought for me. And I told you, Ben—they do not fade."
"Ay, there's that. Still, if I live to be a thousand I don't suppose I'll ever understand you."
"Must you, Ben?"
"I try."
"I have never understood another, and yet I think about them as much as you do."
"But—oh, I don't know how to say it—I don't think I meant that kind of understanding. There's more than one kind...."
"Ben, you'd best hurry a little if you're to have any time with Uncle John at the office."
"Yes," said Ben unhappily, and was in the saddle looking down, more than ever reluctant to be going away. "I'll tell you after supper, what he says. Ru, what was that?—you started to say that if I sail, then you also—?"
Ben had spoken softly, in his confusion. He supposed Reuben had not heard, for he did not answer, and that was a discourtesy Ben had never known him to employ. Ben saw him rub his hand along Molly's fat neck. "Be a good horse," said Reuben, and was gone, walking quickly around the stable, the shortest way to the back fields.
The cottage with the green shutters sat comfortably under the dignity of twin elms—like its owner mild, and quiet, and rather old, carrying age as an elm does with rugged awkwardness, with many scars, without pomp and circumstance.
Reuben had learned the inside of the cottage—simple, on the same stark plan as the house in Deerfield, with two main downstairs rooms and a garret, but where the Deerfield house had owned a small lean-to off the kitchen, Mr. Welland had a larger annex, more solidly built, which he called the surgery. It was also his reception room for patients, his library, his study, his room of contemplation. The gray striped lady, Goody Snively, who kept the cottage rather constantly supplied with kittens (often yellow), lived here in a box of her own beside the wood-box at the fireplace. Very few patients ever came to Mr. Welland here at the cottage, so few that he did not try to keep precise hours for them, but it was understood that he would ordinarily be at home in the late hours of the afternoon. Most of his work was done in visits that often took him a considerable distance to outlying farms. A small stable stood separate from the cottage, home of the brown mare Meg, who carried Mr. Welland on his labors in all weathers, all times of day or night. He claimed that Meg was a better diagnostician of the purse than himself, being always restless outside the houses of wealthy patients, who were invariably the slowest to pay his charges. That puzzled Reuben. "You'll learn," said Mr. Welland. "Your great-uncle is one of perhaps five exceptions to the rule that I can remember."
Mr. Welland kept no servant, and no one came in to clean or cook for him. He took most of his meals at the ordinary down the street; messages were left for him there more often than at the cottage. In the cottage he maintained a monastic neatness—no dust, no clutter, very few possessions and those necessary, functional and in good order. "It's not difficult," he had explained on Reuben's first visit, "but a servant or woman-by-the-day would make it so, and by the way, Reuben, my house is never locked, this door from hall to surgery never closed except when I have a patient with me. I like simplicity, seeing it leaves one free to consider complexity—especially that of persons who a'n't so smart as you and me. Don't trouble to knock, I don't like it. I hate knocking. If it's loud I jump out of my skin, if it's soft I blame it on the mice." "Mice, with that cat?" "Mice is a general term, boy. Mice includes everything that bothers by day or goes thump in the night. If a door squeaks I blame it on the mice for a week before I oil it. Everyone needs a devil, Reuben, and mice have served me bravely in that capacity for lo, these many years. Pull up a chair and be at ease."
On this Tuesday afternoon Reuben entered without knocking, an action that still caused him some shy discomfort, and spoke Mr. Welland's name unanswered. The door to the surgery stood open; also the stable door, as Reuben noticed through the window; the doctor was away, and this new loneliness an unexpected blow. "I am most unreasonable," said Reuben to Goody Snively, who rubbed his leg, and purred, and exercised a cat's privilege of trotting ahead and sitting down in front of his feet as he was about to go into the surgery. Reuben hooked her on his shoulder; she sang casually and damply in his ear as he went to the doctor's bookshelves and took down the Vesalius.
"This is a man——" well, certainly, but also not a man. A man is motion and thought; a man is foolishness, courage, love, pain. Reuben turned the pages at the desk, rather blindly trying to force them into some clearness, and he wondered if there had been any truth at all in what he had said to Ben less than half an hour ago. Vesalius had not faded—that much was true. The mist is in the observer.
Not only now, he thought, but always, in every observation, whether made at a favorable time or not. If I were happy, that also could deceive, a rosy mist no easier to penetrate than a gray one. If I were calm, neither sad nor happy—still a mist, of accepted thoughts that may be false as fog over quicksand. "But don't you see, Goody Snively?—we know one thing: we know the fog is there. And that, by the way, is my tender thigh and not a tree trunk. If you regard me as a tree, I may bark." Goody Snively retired—shocked, maybe.
The drawing before his face was lost to him a while, the room also, in a trance not of thought but of stillness avoiding thought. Then, as the body itself will usually shatter such a refuge with its own cantankerous insistence, Reuben's nose itched, his hands upholding his cheekbones grew sweaty and cramped. He gave it up and wandered about disconsolately. He knelt by the box to which Goody Snively had returned. Her latest kittens were quite new, their open eyes not focusing, their legs uncertain. He lifted the black-and-brindle one of the four and held it against his cheek, liking the harmlessly wild kitten smell; it mewed in small wrath, and Goody Snively began to look stern, so he replaced it at the consolation of the nipple and strolled away. He leaned in the open doorway of the front room, the room where Mr. Welland slept. Curious, but somehow not inappropriate, that this room like the rest of the house should be bare of ornament. Monastic was the word, but it held a sense of comfort too. A plain narrow bed, made up with sharp precision. One armchair, much worn in the seat; beside that an unpainted table, bearing a Betty lamp, a pitcher and a basin, nothing else. Two pairs of shoes—so the doctor owned three altogether—lined up at the side of the bed like little soldiers. Reuben thought of his own five expensive pairs, of the days in Deerfield when he had not always owned two pairs, of time and change and human virtue, of the froth of bright embroidery Kate had stitched at the buttonholes of the fine maroon waistcoat he now wore, and shut his eyes, wondering if that enameled snuffbox was the doctor's only luxury.
Opening them—but still holding away thought, or letting his eyes alone think for him—Reuben observed that one pair of Mr. Welland's shoes bore the marks of dried mud. The man must have changed in haste with no time to take care of them, or had forgotten. Reuben recalled noticing on a kitchen shelf a few cleaning rags and a jar of neatsfoot oil. He carried the yellowed shoes out there, refreshed the fading hearth-fire and sat by it to polish them. The crackle of new wood and the noise of his cleaning covered the light sounds of Mr. Welland returning and putting up Meg in the stable. Reuben was aware of it as the doctor opened the door, but the task was not quite done; he did not want to abandon it, or even to rise respectfully: work started ought to be finished, and as for the trivia of politeness, Amadeus Welland wouldn't care.
"What's this, Reuben?"
"It was something to do, sir. I couldn't bring my mind properly to the study, some-way. Besides, if this mud stays here too long it'll spoil the leather."
"Ay, but—thou, scrubbing my shoes? It's kind, Reuben, but I don't find it fitting."
"Sir, I do."
"Eh?" Reuben could not answer, nor look up when after a silence the doctor drew a chair to the hearth and sat there spreading his hands to the warmth. Yet he was not disturbed, nor worried—if Mr. Welland was annoyed, that would pass. It occurred to Reuben as his fingers (remembering Deerfield) worked the oil into the leather, that he had in fact never felt less troubled about his own behavior and how it might appear to another. It was simple, satisfying and natural that you should scrub mud from the shoes of someone you loved, taking it for granted that if the occasion ever happened to suggest it he would do the same for you. "Each time you have come here," said Mr. Welland at last, "you have been in some degree different, and also the same. Each time I must become acquainted with you again, and each time, I suppose, a little better, since I change too if only by learning."
"You remarked that living is a journey."
"Oh," said Welland, and sighed, "I fear that was little better than a simile after all, for what is the thing that travels and cannot itself remain wholly constant? All is change; all things flow; and what's more, I'd no idea those dem'd shoes had so much virtue left in 'em." Reuben could look up then and smile. "Well, Reuben, being in Boston yesterday, I called at thy great-uncle's office and spoke to him concerning thine apprenticeship. He is not averse to it, not at all, but would have thee continue for Harvard, and perhaps not be formally bound immediate, but later, if it is still thy wish in a year or so.... Pleased, my dear?"
"I—am. I would—I would...."
"What, Reuben?"
"I would study, and—serve, if I may, whether formally bound or not. I think that is what I was trying to say. It won't fade, Mr. Welland. I was never so certain of any other thing.... I ought to have spoken of it to Uncle John, but rather feared to because he hath had so much to distress him lately, the death of Mr. Dyckman, the loss of the Iris."
"The Iris? I heard about Mr. Dyckman of course, everyone has."
"A ship, that should have brought him a great return, taken by pirates off Virginia. Ben is worried about his affairs, knowing more of them than I do. That's one reason why he hath so set his heart on sailing and earning his own way."
"So?"
"Yes. Mr. Welland, you and Uncle John—you are both very kind. I will not disappoint you. I can work."
"Not exactly kindness. On my part at least, let us call it—mm-yas—recognition, and no more of it for the present, because—well, because the subject is complex and I must presently be off again, almost to Dorchester, damn the luck. There was a message for me at the ordinary. I've only time to snatch a bit of rest for me and Meg, and a quick meal, and a—I think, a change of shoes.... He never spoke of the Iris—well, he and I are not well acquainted. Certainly he hath a marvel in that ketch Artemis. He was good enough to take me aboard for a few minutes. I'm no sailor, but even I can see she's no common sort."
"Was Shawn there? A black-haired Irishman with a green coat?"
"Why, no, I noticed no such man, but there were many about."
"You would have noticed and remembered him."
"Mm? Mr. Kenny introduced me to two or three there at the wharf—Captain Jenks, and the mate, who was here, there and everywhere with scant time for landsmen."
"The mate? What was his name?"
"Why, Hanson, I think—don't you know him? We exchanged some little talk about New Haven, where he comes from, seeing I lived a year there once. Everyone was in a whirl of last-minute business. I felt in the way. Never knew there were so many different ropes to trip over."
Reuben set the shoes aside. "Last-minute business?"
"Why, yes." The doctor glanced down, puzzled. "What's the matter, Reuben? What did I say to disturb thee?"
"Did Uncle John say when Artemis was to sail?"
"Why, today. You didn't know?"
"No, I—pray tell me about it."
"Well—he said she ought to have sailed that day, yesterday, but they were waiting on some cargo from Gloucester, salt fish I believe, that hadn't come, and Captain Jenks all of a growl about it. They left it that they would wait till today, and if it still had not come she'd sail and—let me think—put in at Sherburne on Nantucket, and find what the islanders might offer to fill her hold. To my ignorant eye she already looked low in the water, but Captain Jenks was swearing she'd ride sweeter for another twenty ton, and a dirty shame—not his exact words—she should sail light."
"And then New York, from Sherburne?"
"Why, no, Reuben—Barbados, thy great-uncle said."
"Ah!... Thunder!—she may be gone before he's at the office. Ben hoped to sail, Mr. Welland. His heart was set on it. He was all one ache for it. He left for Boston only an hour ago, with no notion that Artemis was to sail today, only hoping to persuade Uncle John to let him sign on. I felt, sir, as if I was saying good-bye. He felt it too."
"I'm confused. Isn't he for Harvard in the autumn, with thee?"
"Yes, but he hoped to make a quick voyage to New York and return. It was his idea she should go there, and damn it, the proposal was most sensible. Uncle John might at least have considered it. Now he'll be heartbroken. Maybe I was saying good-bye to him, and not in the way I thought. He won't be the same when he comes home, not after this."
"Surely, Reuben, you're making too much of it."
"I know him, Mr. Welland. Certainly Uncle John meant it for the best, but it won't do. You can cross Ben, disappoint him, be harsh with him, but damnation, you can't deceive him, never mind if it may be for his own good—he won't bear it." And yet even as he spoke Reuben knew that his own strongest feeling was unwelcome, unreasonable relief: Ben would not sail, not yet.
"Mm-yas, I begin to see.... Reuben, why do you speak as if he were somehow your charge? He's the older. He must find his own way."
"That's true, sir. I even tried to tell him so this afternoon. To tell him that I had been—oh, too much my brother's keeper, and was sorry for it. I think he understood."
"Then let it be. If he's hurt and angry about this, it will pass. You've only to stand by and be a friend to him until it does. Don't make it more important than it is. I'm sure that after the first day or so, Ben will not."
"I hope so." Reuben hugged his knees, watching the fire. "I hope so, and I'll do as you say. And still I feel as if I had said good-bye to him."
"I suggest that much of living consists of saying good-bye. I suggest that a man says good-bye to his wife when they fall asleep in the same bed, the morrow's morn being a new region in the journey that can't be known till they meet there together. If they do. At certain times we are more aware of saying good-bye, that's all. As presently I must h'ist my creaky bones out of this comfort, change to those good shoes, and say good-bye to thee for a while. By the way, if study should come hard this evening, let it go. Thou dost look, as a matter of fact, very tired."
"Nay, I—maybe I am.... Dorchester, you said? Might I not go with you? You said a while ago that soon I could go with you on your rounds."
Reuben heard Mr. Welland catch his breath. "Not this one!" As often in bothered moments, Mr. Welland took snuff. "The message at the ordinary was—fi-choo-shoo!—garbled as usual, but having dissected out the fleck or two of not-so-golden truth from the rubbish, I have some reason to fear smallpox. That's in confidence, Doctor." He poked Reuben's shoulder, smiling a little but also stern. "Not a word to anyone. If it's true we'll all know it shortly, but if not there's no reason to set people's hearts a-squirming. Lord God, it comes, and comes again, and again, and we live like sheep on the side of Vesuvius, never knowing. Reuben, I sometimes think—and you'll have bad moments of thinking it too—that all we doctors do is no whit better than what the Inj'ans do, howling and screaming and beating drums around a sick man's hut to scare away the demons. Do you know that in all history no epidemic hath ever been overcome, nor even much lightened? It strikes, runs its course, and we stand helpless, making motions in the air. And yet one would think that if contagion could somehow be prevented—but where doth it breed? We don't know. What is contagion? We don't know. Why should a thing like the black plague have struck at England as it did some thirty years ago, and then after blazing and slaying for a time, simply fade away, for no reason men can see? Don't know, don't know. Sir Thomas Sydenham, a great venerator of Hippocrates by the way, was much concerned with epidemiology; I remain skeptical as to his conclusions. Galen, the great Galen to whom they say we must all bow down—Galen evades; I would have thee most cautious, Reuben, with regard to all the doctrines of Galen. If at Harvard they give you Galen as a final authority, be polite, but read in private the works of Sydenham—and even Paracelsus for that matter.... I'll tell thee an almost comical thing: I have lived fifty-three years, have read much and pondered, have spoke with a goodly number of learned and thoughtful men, and I have never, never satisfied myself as to a proper definition of good health."
"May it be, that state wherein flesh and spirit (the two indivisible, I think) are free to act as fully as the condition of a social being will allow?"
"Reuben...." The doctor was leaning forward in his chair, frowning intently, hands clasped before him. "Reuben, you did not give me that on the spur of the moment."
"Why, no, sir. I was fretting at that question the other night—only I came to it from the other side, wondering, what is disease? I wished a broader definition than any I found in the books, and so searched a little, but I don't know that it satisfies me altogether."
"I think—mm-yas—I think I will accept it until such time as you give me a better.... It takes no account of theology of course. But then, I cannot entertain the thought of a punishing God. Nor even a personal God perhaps. If personal, then in some way well beyond man's imagination. It often amazes me, that others can find such great comfort in the notion of a punishing God. Yet they do."
"It saves them from thought."
"Eh? How's that?"
"I think it saves them, sir, from the pains and trials of thought."
"Keep thy sharpness, Reuben. Thou hast already a summer heart and will not lose it. Keep that thorn in the tongue. Hide it almost always, but use it at need, never mind if others wince or even hate thee for it. Sir William Harvey was an angry man, too much perhaps, yet without the thorn in his tongue I dare say no one would ever have heeded him. I have none myself." Mr. Welland bent down, short of breath, to fumble at his shoes. "In anger I am—mm-yas—most ineffectual, a poor thing. I flush and mumble, lose all command of my thoughts. Anger requires a coolness I do not possess." He groped for the shoes Reuben had cleaned, and slipped his feet into them, and sighed. "Ah, that's better—my most comfortable pair. Thou art both cool and warm." Mr. Welland's fingers fussed awkwardly at the shoelaces; Reuben would have helped him, but had been unreasonably shaken by the words and did not trust his face. "I suppose that is one reason why I love thee."
Reuben thought: He is speaking only as convention allows; I must not make it mean what it cannot. He said rather clumsily: "Mr. Welland, if I'm to be a doctor, some time I shall be obliged to attend smallpox cases, whether or not I have the disease and the immunity it brings."
"But not now!" said Mr. Welland sharply. "Well—they say it's worse for the young—and mine own observation—thou art still growing. I will not see—I will not allow—no, not now!" he said, and having laced the shoes after a fashion, he rose and went to the door. "I must go."
Still at the hearth, watching the fire because his vision needed a refuge, Reuben asked: "Sir, may I detain you for one question more?"
"Of course."
"Mr. Welland, I am fifteen. I have a man's body—came to the change two years ago, nor am I ignorant of its meaning. Why have I never desired women?"
The fire murmured in peace; Reuben held out his hand to it, watching the aureole of light around the fingers cleanly defined. Eventually Mr. Welland spoke. "Never ask that of anyone else. I am glad, I suppose, that you asked me. Never ask it of anyone else."
"I never could," said Reuben to the fire. "It would never occur to me."
"Especially not of a priest."
"I have no need for any sort of priest," said Reuben Cory.
"I know. I say that because a priest is commonly the most earnest in nourishing and supporting men's hate for whatever is unlike themselves. I have never understood why it should be so—Jesus, if I rightly remember, did not assert that there was only one path of virtue. Well—the desire of women may come to thee at a later time."
"It came to Ben before he was fourteen."
"And in France, I believe, they still burn at the stake the ones who—never mind—my wits are wandering. Thou may'st have wondered too, why I live so like a monk? Why I have never married?"
"Mr. Welland, I don't think I've ever wondered much, about your life, because—oh, because you're as you are, because I don't seem to have any wish that you should be in any way different."
"What art thou saying now?"
"Is that strange?" Reuben was able then to rise and go to him, seeing his crinkled hands hanging motionless, his face that most would have found supremely ugly, lowered, eyes downcast, hidden. "Is it strange?"
"To me, yes. Since no one ever said the like to me. Reuben, thou art still growing—many more changes—let them come to pass—heavens, what else can anyone do? But remember: whatever thou art, that is good. I have no fantastic heart's image of thee, Reuben. I love thy self, whatever it is and will become. Now let me only kiss thy forehead, once, and I must go."
The garden was empty but for the daffodils, and the violets by the fence, and, near the empty stone seat, a hyacinth that had opened blue eyes for the sacrament of May. In the house itself Ben imagined too much quiet.
His uneasiness had not lessened but grown. His hands had been shaking when he hitched Molly; now they wobbled again when it was necessary to lift the knocker, but they lifted it, and let it fall, and Ben winced at the outrageous clamor his ears made of it in the silent street. Foolish of course, a green boy's idiocy, to stand here shivering and hoping everyone had gone away. No sound of footsteps within. Ben made vague resolves to try the knocker once more and then hurry for the warehouse. He was not late, however; it was still short of four o'clock, so Uncle John would not have left. No sound of steps, but the door opened, and Clarissa at sight of him looked unmistakably astonished.
"May I have a word with Mistress Faith, or"—Ben gulped, and applied finishing touches to half a dozen plans in the time it took Clarissa to glance down in slight embarrassment at the soft slippers she was wearing, and up to his face again—"or with Captain Jenks, if he...."
"Why, I'm sorry, sir. They're all away. They left within the half-hour."
"All away?" Ben thought: This is—relief? Relief?
"Yes, sir. Madam Jenks and the girls might be returning within an hour or two—or, I think, you might find them at the docks. They all left in the coach."
"Oh.... The—docks?" I must stop this parrot-babbling.
"Yes, sir." That answer had been slow in coming; when it did her voice had subtly changed, softened. "The Captain is sailing today, Mr. Coree. Did you not know it?"
"The—Artemis—is sailing?"
Not relief. Something dull, heavy, unreal, as if friendly trustworthy Molly had swung her rump about and let him have her heels; presently, when he could scramble up from the ground, the pain would start. He felt prepared—maybe this was the pain beginning—quite prepared to be savagely angry with the little brown slave if he discovered that she was amused at his ignorance of the sailing. Let her laugh, just once, or merely smile, with that cool superior wisdom——
She did not. He had known all along that she would do nothing of the sort; had known also that he would not have been angry if she had, seeing it was no fault of hers that part of the world had fallen down.
The look in her brown face—widening of brown eyes, slight parting of friendly lips—not pity, surely? Why should the slave pity him? Yet Ben's mother had worn that look at times—when Ru cut his finger trying to prove he could whittle with the knife in his left hand; when, on a certain evening, Father had spoken of the French butchery at Schenectady.... "Sir, you must have ridden hard—I see your horse is a-sweat. Will you not come in and rest a moment?"
"Artemis, sailing today.... I dare say I have no occasion now to—to go——"
"Sir, come inside. I'll fetch you a drop of brandy, isn't it? I think you rode too hard, and the day that warm it might be June." She touched his arm lightly, almost commandingly. Ben stepped into the cool entry, and she closed the door. "Come into the parlor. I won't be a moment. Do sit down, sir, and be at ease."
Ben sat down, his eyes avoiding the stern, badly stitched sampler on the wall, seeking instead the graceful model of a full-rigged ship on the mantel. He had been about to get up for a better look at that model, he recalled, when Charity and Sultan ambushed him. Clarissa spread open the drapes at the window, startling him; he had thought that in her noiseless slippers she had already left the room. He said clumsily: "I remember you did that when I was here before."
On her way out of the room she looked down at him—not smiling, he was sure, though the light shone strong behind her face and he could not see her very well. "Yes," she said thoughtfully, and was gone, and Ben turned to the model, finding in this better light the name painted on the side: HERA. Then this was she that went down off the Cape in a fog, seven years ago—not a man lost.
Uncle John's telling of the story had never given Ben much realizing sense of the smothering terror of fog at sea. He had it now, in the delicate presence of the Hera's image. Wet smoke pressing on the eyeballs of men seeking to live; no guide, no refuge, no gleam of direction anywhere, only merciless whiteness concealing fangs. A whiteness like snow, a silence like the silence of snow that muffles footsteps in a winter night.
No wind: fog flows in where the wind is not. Under the fog, no weakening of the rolling invisible currents that could drag man's creation into the snag teeth of a reef or against the crushing mass of a dead hulk. "Stove in her la'board side, filled in twenty minutes...."
Fog....
They would have prayed, the men of the Hera, and perhaps Captain Jenks with them if he had time for it. When they came safe ashore, not a man lost—but first the long blind groping, in one boat and one damned little dory, never knowing what might answer the next weary thrust of the oars—why, safe ashore they would have praised God for hearing them—the same God who strangely failed to hear a myriad others praying in extremity—and with some leftover gratitude to Peter Jenks as God's instrument. "Ben, hear me. I say God is far away, no whit concerned with man...."
"Sir, will you not look up?" There was a trace of most gentle laughter in that. Ben wondered when she had come in her silence, how long she had been standing there with the brandy glass on a little tray.
"Oh, I'm sorry. I was far off indeed."
"I know."
"Thank you—this is very kind.... You are from one of the French islands, are you not?"
"Guadeloupe."
A sip of the brandy warmed him a little. It was old, and smooth, the glass fantastically lovely—probably the best in the house, and probably English or continental, since nothing of the kind was made in the colonies; Uncle John's house had nothing to match it. "This must seem a cold foreign place to you."
"Oh, I have been more than eight years in Boston, sir. It used to be, I must think in French and translate before I spoke—I do not do that now. Perhaps I do not look as old as I am."
"I had thought you was near my age."
"I am twenty-seven, Mr. Coree. I know it to the very day, because Monsieur Lafourche—of Lyons, who later settled at Guadeloupe—used often to say that I was born but two days after his other—after his daughter. He wished me bred up as maid and companion to her. I had lessons with the same teachers when we were little girls, even the reading and writing. I cannot read English with any comfort. She, the little Mademoiselle, she died at sixteen of a consumption. I think my presence hurt him with reminders of her." Clarissa's voice was passionless, cool and distant; Ben noticed his hands were no longer shaking. "Monsieur Lafourche his fortune was much impaired in the war of—of your King William's time. Then in 'ninety-eight, between the wars, he sold his plantation at Guadeloupe and returned to France, and so was obliged to let me go, to a merchant of Boston, who later sold me here. Where," she said mildly and remotely, "I have received much kindness."
Anger moved in Ben, severe but directionless, formless, thwarted, without an object and seeking one. One could not be angry with Uncle John. He must have meant it for the best—somehow, somehow. "Where—do you know where Artemis is bound for?"
"Barbados, sir."
"I see.... Clarissa, I cannot think of you as a slave."
She moved into the light at the window, looking out; presently said with neutral calm: "But I am a slave."
The anger moved blindly, a flooded river seeking any low spot, any outlet at all. "Don't you know there's talk in these times that slavery itself is wrong? Why, Judge Samuel Sewall hath said it, written it too, and maybe not many will agree with him, but—but before God, I do," Ben said, wondering at the wiry clang of his own voice.
"One hears of it," she said gently, "but I think there will alway be slavery."
"Oh, why?"
"Perhaps because no one is ever wholly free."
"Oh, don't put me off with philosophy! I understand you, but—that was not—well, my brother, and my Uncle John too—I have heard my Uncle John say he would never own a slave, for that the thing itself is wrong. And later I talked of it with my brother, he was most passionate, he said it was vile and contemptible that any man should pretend to possess the life of another, or be privileged to command it and drive it where he may please. My brother is strangely wise—younger but a better scholar than I, much wiser. Somehow I can't ever do anything without first wondering, how would he do it, what would he think of it? I lean on him too much—well, I suppose it's because we went through much together, and I love him so, and we—I don't know—I'm confused."
"I am not so sure," she said, speaking into the light. "I think you have your own wisdom, Mr. Cory. Perhaps, if he be the quicker scholar, it is only that your brother can speak his thoughts more easily."
"No," said Ben, and sighed shortly. "No, he's truly wise. I have alway known it, am even pleased it should be so. He hath chosen a most difficult life work, medicine. I have alway known he would go where I cannot."
"You wished to sail with Artemis, did you not?"
"I did so."
"Mistress Faith spoke of it a few days ago, when I was dressing her hair, and charged me hold it in confidence because, she said, she was not sure you were ready to discuss it with the Captain."
It never occurred to Ben that there might be something strange in his lack of interest as to what else Faith Jenks had said about him. "Yes, I wished to sail, and it seems to me—I don't know why I never saw it before—it seems to me the best reason I could have for learning my great-uncle's trade and making myself of some account in it, would be that then I could aid my brother. It must be difficult to be a doctor. No one seems to grant them much respect. Mr. Welland of Roxbury is a very learned man, Reuben tells me, and yet I never heard of anyone deferring to him. He lives more or less in poverty."
"And still," said Clarissa, to the light—"and still, perhaps even wisdom is not everything."
"Nay, I'm sure it's not," Ben said, and wondered whether it was wisdom he was searching for in the brandy glass, where half of the beautiful amber sparkled as yet untouched. He saw her then, with a more naked vision, as she stood in the light and shadow slight as a child and wholly a woman, in her feminine grace no longer alien. He rose with no thought for the action and entered the same sunlight. "Clarissa, there is more here than I should drink. Will you not share it?"
Her eyes held him, not once lowering to look at the glass, her hand not moving to take or reject it. She was not shocked, he saw; not afraid of him, perhaps not afraid of the brandy glass. It might be that she was only considering what to do, like Reuben considering a position on the chessboard; but then he understood it was nothing like that. Nudged by his own heart, Ben said: "I assure you, no red comb will pop."
She stepped back, staring rather wildly. Her hand flew up to her mouth, but that was no defense, for mischief and delight were brimming over, uncontrollable. As Ben himself began to chuckle, she gave way to it completely, throwing back her head, pointing at him helplessly, the laugh going up and up in a golden rocket. "Oh, le peigne, le peigne, le bon Dieu me garde! Whoo!" Clarissa wailed, and slapped her thigh, and swayed toward him—sobering completely as Ben's arm went around her waist, but not drawing away, studying him a while with a dark and new sweet gravity, then at last taking the brandy glass, turning it about so that when she raised it the small mark left by his lips was covered by her own as she drained it. The glass dropped to the floor from her drooping hand; Ben felt she would not have cared if the lovely thing had broken, or perhaps she wished it to break, but it did not. "Une heure, fugitive et immortelle, une heure et alors——"
"I have no French." Ben's fingers lost themselves in her dark sweet-smelling hair. "My dear, what art thou saying?—tell me."
"Ah, little or nothing," Clarissa mumbled. She unfastened his shirt, her fingers swift and petulant, until she could rub her cheek over his bare skin; her mouth groped for his nipple and clung lightly a second with soft pressure of her teeth. "One hour, I think I said, one hour and then nothing more, because you will go away, because one hour given by chance is all we may have, mais ton sourire—but your smile I shall yet see, as I saw it first when you gave it to my little Charity there at the wharf, and I could look into you and know you, and my loins hurt me and my empty flesh, and my silly heart cried out I love you, I love you." Her hand sought for his wrist and clutched it hard. She spoke in a breathless tone like anger: "Come to my room!"
It was small, and bleak, and very clean, a room under the eaves with not even a bed but a pallet on the floor, a chair, a few hooks on the wall for her few garments. As he followed her half blindly, Ben had received a dim impression of passing, on the second floor, the open doorway of some luxurious room. It didn't matter. In her room she turned to him, suddenly grave but no less urgent. A small laugh came and passed like a breeze, impatient, as she helped him with his clothes and her own, her hands a bridge of warmth between them.
Slowness he felt then in the upward reaching of her mouth to find his lips. She was embracing him, a small column of urgent softness, and slipping down, kneeling, falling away—a slow and graceful falling until she lay on the pallet at his feet, no longer looking at him but knowing he would come to her.
There were the fears, shy, ridiculous but now amusingly so, not even shameful when with another faint gust of laughter Clarissa helped him again. Time thereafter was measured in roaring heartbeats, in the grotesque innocent throes where Ben at last discovered a strength that was his own, a sureness and a rightness. Some part of him could still observe at the very crests of the waves. He could see, perhaps pity, her rich mouth squared down as in suffering, her brown dear face suddenly drenched in tears and twisting from side to side, and yet know that nothing of this could be held back, nor softened, nor in any way denied, and that pain was of no importance whatever until the cup should be drained.
He was aware of most of the words she spoke—random and wild, fantastic or pitiable, they all owned a rightness in the moment and were a part of the climbing waves. "O God, hurt me! Set thy mark on me, Benjamin, Benjamin. I want thy seed. À moi! Now! Now! Benjamin—thy bright mouth—ainsi je vais, je vais avec toi jusqu'à la fin de la terre."
Out of limitless quiet, his face on her satin shoulder, Ben asked: "Have I hurt thee?"
"No. Yes...." And again with the faintest moth-wing touch of laughter: "No...."
He drew away from her; presently sat up and saw her lying still, with wet cheeks and closed eyes, near and defenseless, wholly quiet. She said: "I will not yet open my eyes." And she did not, even when—timidly this time and bewildered at his own impulse—Ben curved his hand over the golden round of her breast where fading sunlight lay across it.
"Clarissa, forgive me."
She looked at him then, pools of darkness opening, filling with amazement, then sorrow, then showing him such a remote and ruminative blankness that Ben was frightened as a child, for it seemed to him that what his own voice had said was monstrous, and nothing said now or later could redeem it. She stood, unconcerned at her nakedness, looking down at him he knew, the abyss between self and self widening. At length she asked with much coolness: "What does that mean?"
"Clarissa, I did never intend"——Oh, close my mouth, anything I say makes it worse, and I go on spilling words—"We were swept away—I never intended—I've—sinned—betrayed——"
He managed to stop the noise. She was silent; he could not even hear her breathing. Forced by the silence to look up at last, he found as he had known he would the high blaze of contempt. "Sin? Betrayal?..." Then—he had known this too and feared it more than anything else—contempt and anger were gone, closed away altogether by a mask impenetrable and cruelly polite. The mask said gently: "Shall I help you with your clothes, Mr. Cory?"
He thought with a resentment that could accomplish nothing: Nay, I didn't deserve that.
The mask softened a little; a brittle thing quivering, but because it was so greatly needed it would not break. She caught her breath and said: "Oh, I am sorry! Forgive me too—if you can." She caught up her clothes in a clumsy armful and ran barefoot out of the room.
She had forgotten her slippers. Ben knew—this was the worst knowledge of all—that he could not search for her in the empty house. If he found her somewhere, a hurt and shrinking brown slave, he would not be finding her at all. The slippers were very small, soft, gray, a little run over at the edges. Ben dressed clumsily. He took up one of the slippers and tucked it under his shirt, but then it seemed to him that he could not even do that. He put back the mute and harmless thing beside its companion, and left the house. As he unhitched Molly and set his foot in the stirrup it occurred to him, in a misery now grown dull and almost impersonal, that perhaps it takes more than a successful act of intercourse at seventeen, to make a man.
"I say overside is the only place. A devil's name, what do you want of a pisstail boy on such an errand?"
"Watch that tongue, Judah. Watch it, man, against the day the rations'll run short and I'll be a-mind to cut it off and ram it down your gullet for amusement and nourishment, now that's no lie."
"I said nothing, only spoke m' futtering mind."
"Good. You may do it again. You may speak up plain and tell me who's captain of this bloody sloop."
"You are, Mister Shawn. I'm only saying, a God-damn boy is no use here. Are you soft on the pup?"
"You could say one thing too much one day."
"Dead in hell or alive in hell with one eye, what's the difference? Comes to that, though, betwix' you and me, maybe I won't be the one that dies. Be you going below—sir?"
"I am in a moment. You too."
"Leaving only Joey and Manuel on deck, and Joey scared of a tiller he don't know yet, and the God-damn night blacker 'n a witch's box?"
"What's to be scared of, you fool?"
"I a'n't scared of nothing, never was. Piss on 'em all. What've I got left any man could take from me? You want Joey to pile up the tub on Noddle's Island it's no beshitten difference to me and you know it."
"Noddle's is it? You're daft. We're miles south of it, and clear of Dorchester Neck too, and nothing to watch but a sweet wide-open sea. Steady as she goes, Joey Mills! Why, Judah, man, I can feel and smell the sea and the land in the dark, the way they lie."
"I'll ever recall how Quelch give you a rope's end once for that same mad Irish brag. Nobody can feel land in the dark."
"Mother of God, what I put up with from you! Peace on it, Judah.... Keep your eye sharp for riding lights, Manuel—any lights. You won't see 'em, and yet you might. Close 'em just once, any more 'n you need to blink, and you'll hear old Shawn speak in a manner unkind. That's my boy, Manuel—steady as she goes! O the fair night, and we better off without a moon!... Well, Judah, well—say I brought the boy on impulse, though it's not that entirely. I never planned it, that I did not, but didn't I find him, the poor puzzled thing, hiding in the doorway where I was a-mind to hide me own self for a last look at Artemis going down the bay? And didn't I learn the way he'd set his own heart on going with her, and Kenny played him false too, with promises and then a chopping and a changing? God damn the old fart, I could puke to think of the way I all but licked the boots of him for a berth on her, and then to be shoved aside, shoved aside! We'll learn how far they'll be shoving old Shawn aside! Why, Ben's heart was set on her, so it was, he was that full of it you wouldn't know the thing he'd do, to be sailing on her—wisha, he shall!"
"If he was that hot for it why'd you bother to drug him?"
"This fishy tub will not have been his notion of going to sea."
"What are you laughing at now?"
"You wouldn't know. There's a sailor in that boy, Judah. There's an explorer in that boy."
"Ah! Still beating that dead horse."
"Steady as she goes, Judah! You know how much you can say to me—don't exceed! Ah, at that I might've persuaded him, seeing how sweet he come aboard of us here for a gossip with old Shawn, and was telling some of his boy's troubles but not all, not all, and believing everything old Shawn was a-mind to tell him over the little drinks, and the fish stink, why, he wasn't minding it, and the lantern light winking on the pretty face of him——"
"Shit, you're drunk."
"Drunk on sea water, Judah, you with your leather heart, you wouldn't know. He might'a' come along of his own will, now that's no lie. He was halfway so minded. He did believe I'd been given command, for a quick fishing trip to the Banks and so home—I think he did. But there'd have been much to explain later, and the devil with all explaining, the drop of opium didn't go amiss and will do him no hurt.... Judah, you fool, don't you know he saw you there at the Lion—and you that clumsy, and giving him your dead-window look, the way you might as well have written a letter to their Select Watch, that you might."
"What if he did? The others is bought and paid for."
"You'll run me no such errand again, Judah—nor wouldn't've then, had not my voice told me there was need. Mother of God, to think I may have misheard, and a man died for nothing! But it can't be so."
"Voice?"
"You wouldn't know. How many times did you strike?"
"I don't know."
"I do. Thirteen. And he didn't die till morning. He lived to speak."
"He's dead enough now, and never spoke of me. He never saw me nor Tom. Tom got the rag on his eyes and I came at him from behind. Thirteen, was it?"
"It was. Judah, I think you've never been as close to your Maker as you be this moment. You bungled that thing. He suffered, and no need, and now it seems there was no profit in the thing at all."
"Easy, Shawn! We'll take Artemis the easier and him not there."
"True enough. All the same I'm trying—while you're here so near the rail and a weak puky thing too—I'm trying to recall if you had any part in persuading me to it."
"You're mad, Shawn. You know I never...."
"I think you hadn't. God help you if ever I'm receiving different instruction!... Come below, Judah. I'll show you something. I'll discover if there's any juice in that leather heart at all. Mind the hatch, you clumsy son of a bitch! And go in front—I'm not so green you'll ever find yourself behind me with a rag over me eyes.... Hath he been quiet, Dummy? Shake your head for ay or no. Dummy's a good man, Dummy is. Mind if I'm touching your hump for luck, Dummy? And that headshake is ay?—good enough. Look here, Judas——"
"Judah."
"Touchy, man? Look here, and look well. Nay, drink first, there's something left here, and don't cut your stupid eye at me! I'm drinking first from the same bottle, am I not? I say, drink it!... Now look here: this is the mortal image and presentment of a man, Judah. O the quiet sleep! Look on this chin, rounded like a woman's and firm with all the fair power of a god! But you can't see, you haven't the eye to see or the mind to know. Look on this hand, how firm already, and will it not be all the nobler when its wondrous jointure is acquainted with the rope, and the leap of a tiller and the burning of salt and wind? This is a man. This is the man who'll go with me, and be my friend, and stand by me in the new world when the rest of you are stinking carrion. And yet it hurts me a little, that I should be taking him away from his brother who loved him.... Go back on deck, Judah. Your one eye sees nothing. Go back on deck. Well, lively, man! I'm following.... Come for'd. We must have a feather under the bow."
"You're drunk and raving. I've no mind to go for'd unless you make it an order, Shawn, and take care how you do it."
"Then bide here aft, seeing I care nothing what you think or do, and your one eye blinder than the one that's gone.... Any lights, Manuel?"
"No, sir."
"That's well enough. She'll be far ahead. Belike we sha'n't see her till a certain day when we're standing on and off outside Sherburne. We'll see her then, Manuel, boy, but she won't see us until the time I choose. And Tom Ball and French Jack aboard her, they'll know the time I choose, they'll see us come out of the north long before the others do, I don't care who's aloft. Good men, those, Manuel. Can you hear the water, Manuel? What does it say, Manuel?"
"I don't know, Mr. Shawn."
"But I know. It saith, there be many islands."