The noise floated to them faintly, puzzling in the wind, a hallooing
with an insane note of cheerfulness. Reuben felt a scattering coldness
across his cheek--rain, or sea-scud torn by the east wind from the
surface of Gallows Bay. Grimes mumbled: "Can't hear it now----"
"Hush!" said Reuben savagely. Then: "It's to the left."
"You mean the marshes, boy?"
"Yes. Give me the light, old man!" Grimes yielded it without a murmur,
and Reuben ran, unthinking, sure-footed, avoiding the hummocks and the
marshy hollows, shouting: "Where are you? Where are you?" Then he could
see his brother fifty feet away, upright in grotesque dignity on a small
sodden peninsula of land not much broader than the spread of his feet.
Between him and Reuben was a muttering of wind-tormented marsh water,
and a smooth patch of featureless gray unaffected by the wind. Ben took
a wavering step. "Don't move, you damn fool! Look down!"
"'M a damn fool," said Ben agreeably, and swayed back from the
quicksand, grinning at Reuben's light. "Fact 'm drunk."
Reuben laughed. "That I know. Don't move your feet. Stay as you are till
I come to you." Laughing still, he picked his way along the edge of the
water and the foulness, to the narrow strip of solid ground that Ben's
luck had found for him in the dark. "Pee-yew!" said Reuben, and clutched
a handful of Ben's shirt. "With such a breath why walk? Why not float,
friend?"
* * * * *
"Was trying to. Was trying to find Polaris. Too dark. Besides I'm in a
'culiar condition."
"Lean on me. Firm ground here."
"Wherever thou art."
"I shall remember that, and thou wilt forget it."
"I forget nothing, Reuben. I _was_ trying to find Polaris."
"Well, a'n't it the nature of the children of Adam to hunt for the North
Star on a cloudy night?"
"Very sound. One of thine evenings. Yaphoo!"
"All evenings are mine. But don't weep."
"I'm laughing, boy. A'n't I? Oh, Ru, I was so confused. I thought--I
certainly thought----"
"What, Ben?"
"I thought it was wilderness."
"That wouldn't make thee afeared. That wouldn't make thee weep."
"I thought everything was wilderness."
"Well, what if it is?"
_Chapter Five_
In the sunlight on Reuben's bed sat two male images, the smaller one all
orange-gold, the larger cross-legged and brighter than rippling gold and
ivory, with brown hair, and a heartless voice saying: "This I was
waiting to observe. Note, Mr. Eccles, the motions of the creature's
head, how they creak. Are these actual sounds of pain, or only noises of
some mechanism which creates an illusion of animation?"
"Alas!" said Ben. "I am not fit to rise and murder you--yet."
"It speaks. Note that, Eccles. Note the bleared eyes, how obscene! Will
you go to the kitchen and fetch a pot of coffee for it?" Mr. Eccles
yawned and filed his yellow paws. "Unfeeling animal! Have you no pity?
Must _I_ wait on the needs of this moaning monster?"
"Some day when _you_ feel like dawn on the battlefield, I'll stand on
your stomach and read aloud every word of _Magnalia Christi Americana_."
"You heard that, Eccles?--how it appeals to my humanity and in the same
breath threatens my life? I must act." Ben watched the golden image
rise, slip on a dressing-gown, and stand over him in the enormous light.
"Puh, what a breath even now!" said Reuben, and stooped suddenly to kiss
his forehead, and vanished out of the room.
Moving his head with care, Ben met the contemplation of Mr. Eccles, who
had nothing to offer. Uncle John was accustomed to explain that the cat
derived his name from a merchant Levi Eccles of Plymouth who looked and
behaved just like him. But to the boys privately, after he had come to
know them a little, the old man admitted this was an _ex post facto_
invention. He took them into his study and opened his much-worn Bible;
over Reuben's shoulder Ben had read familiar words: _For that which
befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth
them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one
breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is
vanity. Ecclesiastes iii: 19._
Reuben was displaying a different mood altogether when he returned with
a pot of the blessed stuff--quiet and no longer much amused, or at least
not showing it. "Drink deep, sufferer, and tell all--if you wish."
The coffee was a benediction; so long as The Head did not move suddenly,
all might be well. "Oh, I ran into Mr. Shawn at Uncle John's wharf--O my
God! Uncle John! Why, he must have thought----"
Reuben shook his head casually. "Beyond a broad statement to the effect
that boys will be boys, for the which he claimed no great measure of
originality, I saw no sign of severe displeasure. When he insisted on
helping me remove your smelly boots, he--chuckled: this I affirm. You
may get a few instructions this morning, but without pain. Proceed."
"Oh--a few drinks with Shawn--dinner at a tavern--I don't seem to
remember all of it." But he did.
Reuben studied his finger tip that was scratching Mr. Eccles' chin. "You
brought home some books. Over there on your dresser."
"They're for you."
"What!" Reuben was a long time at the dresser, his back turned, his
hands on the books not turning the pages. "Ben--how did you know?"
"I guessed right, then?"
"Yes! Yes, but I--why, I only gabbled. I don't see how----"
"You did. Came to me later, what you must mean. Is it a call?"
Eyes wet, face shining and troubled and amazed, Reuben turned to him and
started once or twice to speak, then said only: "Yes."
"You can--oh, damn my head!--you can be certain?"
"I'm--certain. I did go to see Mr. Welland again yesterday. He spoke of
an apprenticeship."
"Oh.... Well--well, good, if it's what you wish. What about Harvard,
Ru?"
"I don't know." Reuben sat on the floor by Ben's bed, a motion of
effortless grace that made Ben's head throb to watch it. "I must speak
to Uncle John of course. Maybe I can go to the college and study with
Mr. Welland at the same time. There'll be the summers."
Ben groped at it uneasily, with some small confusion of envy.
"Pills--pills and sick people and----"
Reuben shook his head. "It's not like that, Ben. I mean, that is only
one part of it, and for the rest--I can't explain it because I don't
know enough, but of a sudden, after a long time of not knowing what I
desired, there is this, and I do seem to be certain."
"But for myself, I've not found it."
"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.
"You mean nothing happened?"
"Nothing much.... No, damn it, nothing--I spilled at the gates. I think
maybe I didn't really wish to go. Mr. Shawn----"
Reuben's words raced and ran together: "Well, the devil fly off with
your friend Shawn, and couldn't the son of a bitch stand by you and you
so drunk? Do you know you was stepping direct for that quicksand?"
"I--was?"
"We might have gone down in it."
"Well--wait, Ru! It was no fault of Shawn. I left him at the house. He
was still with his wench when I was ready to go, and some-way I didn't
wish to see him then, so I came off alone."
"Oh." His face still averted, his thin hands motionless on the books,
Reuben muttered: "Sorry, Ben. The cork popped out of the bottle and I
spattered. My regrets." He started getting dressed, and Ben knew his
chatter was mainly for his own benefit: "Beware the lightning after
breakfast--Pontifex is not wholly pleased with our Benjamin, and will be
summoning the cohorts of Ovid, his _Tristia_; Ramus, his _Logic_;
Cicero, his honorificabilitudinitatibus."
"Ow-ooh!"
"What--coach wheels?"
"I thought that was my head."
"No," said Reuben, and flung open the window. "Something's afoot."
"If on wheels, how should it be--ow! Shut that arctic window, you bloody
worm!" But as Ben tried to creep under the covers, Reuben hauled a
corner of them over his shoulder and marched to the door with it, his
good humor restored, peeling Ben raw to the April breeze. He wadded the
bedclothes into a spherical snarl out of Ben's reach, heaved that into
the closet, barked in some satisfaction, and ran downstairs. Ben could
plainly make out the squeak and rattle of coach wheels from the driveway
before the house. He leaped for his clothes--unwisely, considering his
head--and paused to reflect on the uses of sobriety.
* * * * *
The fat horses were lathered, blowing in relief at the halt. From the
parlor window Reuben saw the girl alight before the coachman's hand
could aid her, a square small maiden in a hurry. As Kate Dobson opened
the door he heard fright, determination and embarrassment in the throaty
voice: "I must speak with Mr. Kenny--'tis most urgent."