"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."