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?"