"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.