"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 Pare, 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.