"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."