"Ben," said Reuben, "do be a good boy and eat your bacon."
"Mm," said Ben, and smiled, and ate it.
Kate's unnatural silence was like a crying. Reuben made a private note
to find out, if possible, what ailed her. The dregs of his coffee were
still good for a bit more lingering.
You could not--in simple nature you could not listen to all the
surrounding voices explaining and re-explaining, accusing, justifying,
probing, forever contradicting one another and seldom pausing for an
answer. You could heed only a few. Which ones? How to choose?
Love will choose some of the few, the nearest and surely the most
important (including Kate). (_The most important, why? Query noted, for
future consideration._) Caution will select a few that must be heard,
for reasons of safety and self-defense. And some will be chosen by
native curiosity, which Mr. Welland described last Saturday as one of
the rarest of all virtues.
Other voices speak outside the region of individual contact, some of
them urgent. _Micrographia_; the old voice of Hakluyt if only because
Ben loves it; Scripture, if only because the world is so obsessed with
its thunderings; many others--even Ovid. Mr. Welland spoke of the
dramatist Shakespeare; Uncle John has one volume of him--_note: find and
percontate, immed._ These voices are not altogether unlike the near
ones--more methodical, because the pen, unlike the voice, need not move
in dizzy haste to get everything said before someone interrupts; more
methodical and not so much given to hemming and hawing and
conversational fluff; but these voices too are engaged in explaining and
re-explaining, commanding, blurred sometimes in flurries of
contradiction. Sometimes (Michael Wigglesworth for example) they sound
downright embarrassed and peevish, when the stubborn universe they speak
of is so plainly not as they describe it.
Since not all voices may be attended, since some of them lie and many
more speak loudly in the absence of knowledge, one must wait, Reuben
guessed, for the sudden inner waking, the unsought recognition, the
mind's clear declaration: This voice--(_Why did you say to me, "Run,
boy! Run!"--why?_)--this voice is speaking not merely out of some
other's need to assert, but speaking to _me_, and I understand what it
says--some of it....
If we create the present by living it, then right and wrong are
man-made. I will accept the verdicts of others in this matter if they
seem reasonable to me, and just--not otherwise.
It was once proposed to me on excellent authority that the judgments of
the Lord are true and righteous altogether. It seems to be necessary to
hear much nonsense while waiting for the sound that rings true. I may be
deceived again, many times, but I say it shall not be from any scared
wish to believe.
_Am I correct, Mr. Welland, in supposing that if doctrines of right and
wrong are man-made, learning begins now?_
* * * * *
Ben struggled through Tuesday morning's Greek and logic without serious
discredit, and picked up only a few minor fresh scratches from the
thorns of Latin grammar. He could not quite win clear of a mental shadow
that had haunted him since waking after a dream not plainly
remembered--a foreboding uneasiness something like that of a child who
has wandered into a strange and exciting room: he has not been
specifically forbidden to enter here, but knows he has not been granted
permission either; presently someone may arrive and with the cool
finality of adults chivy him back to the nursery where the toys have
lost all magic.
In the afternoon Ben achieved brief glory, encountering an area of _De
Finibus_ in which Reuben had drilled him so briskly that error was
nearly impossible. After this victory the deadly hour hand, the slightly
less cruel minute hand, appeared to be creeping with better speed toward
the beautiful moment of three o'clock, when Mr. Hibbs would snap his
books shut, blow from the tops of them a little imaginary dust, and go
away. Ru said once (a dreamy voice coming out of the dark of the bedroom
when Ben thought he was asleep): "If I live to be old, I shall alway
consider that the immortality of the soul sets in at three o'clock post
meridian."
A resolution to go once more into Boston had grown today, less like a
rational decision than like the climbing of a fever. With the lessons
concluded, he would not, like a schoolboy, ask permission: he would
simply go, as casually as Ru had been strolling over to Mr. Welland's
cottage lately; if there should be consequences of disapproval from Mr.
Hibbs or Uncle John himself, Ben supposed they would not be serious--in
any case he could meet them with a man's calm, surely?
He tried (from two o'clock on) to lay it out serenely as a plan of
campaign. One: he must speak with Faith again--briefly, soberly, a man
of affairs saying a temporary good-bye. Two: he must interview Uncle
John at the warehouse, in the cool atmosphere of business affairs, and
pray for a definite answer, on the grounds that the time of _Artemis'_
departure must be quite near. At this point the plan hazed up a
little--Uncle John seldom stayed at the warehouse later than five
o'clock. Well, Molly could make fair time into the city, and he would
not remain long with Faith--he spent some effort here, defining a few
poignant answers he would make to what she would say. Still, he had
better prepare a second line of approach: if Uncle John had already left
for Roxbury, he would seek out Captain Jenks himself, no less, beat
down the devils of fear and self-consciousness so to put the matter
plainly to the iron mountain and get an answer. After all, Jenks wasn't
so bad. Honest and human. In fantasy Ben saw a gleam of rugged
friendliness (respect?) in the little blue eyes....
Better have a third line. If Uncle John had left and Jenks could not be
reached, lost in liquor or otherwise unavailable, then he could--oh,
hell, ask around at the wharf anyway, find out when _Artemis_ was
expected to sail, since it seemed that Uncle John was unwilling to tell
him. Tom Ball ought to know. Maybe he would run into Daniel Shawn again,
and could, at the very least, learn whether Shawn was to sail as mate.
On Sunday, Uncle John had been immune to approach, shut up in his study
the better part of the day; yesterday evening he had displayed an
impossible mood, his manner testy and faraway, his foot tormenting him.
But with a plan of campaign you could always accomplish something.
Couldn't you?...
He found it infuriating that as three o'clock drew very near the whole
thing seemed more and more like a fever. His breath was difficult; he
looked into damp palms and thought: What the devil am I contemplating?
Running away? _From what?_ Good God, not from Uncle John Kenny, the soul
of generosity! _From what?..._ He watched the inexorable dwindling of
the pie-slice made by the hour-hand and the minute-hand as ten minutes
of three became five minutes of three. At three minutes of three he felt
downright sick, and then jumped like a fool when the dry uncomprehended
monologue of Mr. Hibbs ended with a quite familiar snap of a closed
volume. He sat still, demoralized, watching Mr. Hibbs stride away;
waited for inner quiet and was again grotesquely startled when Reuben,
in one of those warm moods which Ben nowadays found almost as strange as
his moods of withdrawal, came behind his desk and leaned over to lock
thin arms under Ben's chin and murmur: "What's the matter, Mooncalf?"
"Nothing, Ru--nothing. I think I'll go into Boston."
"Oh." Reuben broke the contact; Ben had found it vaguely comforting as
well as disturbing. Reuben came around the desk, and re-established
nearness by placing his hands over Ben's, hands thinner and smaller, but
harder, sometimes even stronger. "Would you," said Reuben presently,
"care to take a creeping crawling student of medicine into your
confidence, not that the ancient creature wishes to intrude, but----?"
It was not always possible to look directly at Reuben. He saw too much,
or if he did not, his quiet intentness made it seem that he did. The
faces of others were apt to make it plain enough that they were not so
much concerned with you as with themselves; Reuben (who surely thought
about himself as much as anyone) somehow could put that preoccupation
aside, and make you believe that nothing mattered to him at the moment
except that jumble of thought and image and desire which you had grown
accustomed to calling your Self. And it was, Ben thought, no illusion:
the boy did search, and he did care for what he found. Ben fumbled for
an evasion: "Student of medicine for sure?"
This proved to be no evasion after all, for Reuben smiled, and used the
question itself as a part of the effort to illuminate the self of Ben
Cory. "Yes, truly, and I wish you could find the same kind of certainty,
Ben, because it's good. Why, I almost think, Ben, that anything could
happen to me now--anything, no matter what--and though I might be hurt
as much as I would have been, say a year ago, I could defend myself
against my trouble, whatever it was: I could go and study another page
of Vesalius' Anatomy. Or the books you bought for me. They wouldn't
fade, I think. They wouldn't betray me.... Find something like that,
Ben. Suppose you did change your mind about it after a while, at least
you'd have it for now."
"But when I search myself I don't find it. I only...."
"Only what?" Reuben tightened his hands, relentless.
"I only wish--oh, I wish to God Uncle John would allow me to sail with
_Artemis_."
Reuben let go his hands, and perched on Mr. Hibbs' sacred desk, swinging
his feet, drooping a little, boyish and old, perhaps no longer
searching. "You put it to him a few days ago, did you not?"
"Mm--he wouldn't say ay or no."
"You know Uncle John would find it difficult to disappoint thee."
"I am not a child."
"No," said Reuben, and with nothing in his voice to contradict the word.
"What about this afternoon, that is what's left of it?"
"I thought I might see Uncle John at the warehouse. Ride home with him
maybe."
"Ay, might be easier--he's a rather different man there at the office."
"It--seems not wrong to you, that I wish to sail?"
Reuben was long silent, drooping, looking into his empty hands. "Ben--'d
I ever recount to thee the story of the woodcutter's stupid son who
tamed a lion?"
"Woodcutter's son--I don't think so. Is it from Aesop?"
"No. Well, that's nearly the whole tale already. He found it as a cub.
They grew up together, played together, the lion learning not to
unsheath his claws, the woodcutter's son trying to roar like a lion, but
'tis said he made only some poor squeaking sounds that carried no great
distance. They were yet friends when the lion was full grown, but then
the poor brute in some manner sickened, fretted, vanishing at whiles and
returning unwillingly, until at length the woodcutter's stupid son did
arrive at one moment of wisdom, and took his friend into the forest and
said to him, 'Go thy way.'"
"I am no lion."
"Marry come up, I am a shade more learned than that woodcutter's son.
Ben, I'm only trying to say I don't think anyone should try to possess
you, as I suppose Uncle John does, as maybe I've done--but if you wish
to sail, if it's your decision and your heart in it, d'you think I'd
impede you? Supposing I could?"
"No, I don't think you would."
"And I will not," said Reuben, and jumped off the desk. "I'm for Mr.
Welland's, by the back fields. Best change thy jacket, Ben--that one
beareth the slight saffron memory of an egg which hath gone before. I'll
saddle Molly for thee, meanwhile."
When Ben rejoined him in the stable, Reuben had nothing more to say,
except the light random murmuring that Molly enjoyed. Ben led her out
into the yard--not in sight of Mr. Hibbs' window. Reuben said again,
unnecessarily: "I'll go by the fields, you by the road."
As Reuben held the bridle, Ben was bewildered at his reluctance to set
his foot in the stirrup. "Ru, what ails thee? It's not as if we were
saying a good-bye."
"No. Why, man, if you sail, I also--well, I hope it turns out as you
wish. I believe Uncle John heeds what you say, more than you suppose.
Why the knife, little Benjamin?"
"Oh, I might be in the city after dark. I rather missed it that other
night, coming home."
"Well, tuck it under your britches, can't you?--so to look less like a
bloody cutthroat and more like my little brother?"
"Very well.... Ru, I don't know how to say this--lately I've been
some-way troubled about thee."
"Oh, why, why? Have I two heads?--but don't answer that."
"As if we no longer understood each other--my fault, I think."
"It is not. It is not even true." Reuben still held the bridle, his face
stiff and white and smiling. "No cause for trouble about me. I am one of
the fortunate, didn't you know?"
"I don't understand."
"I own a shield. I walk in the woods. I read the _Anatomy_ of Vesalius,
and the books you bought for me. And I told you, Ben--they do not fade."
"Ay, there's that. Still, if I live to be a thousand I don't suppose
I'll ever understand you."
"Must you, Ben?"
"I try."
"I have never understood another, and yet I think about them as much as
you do."
"But--oh, I _don't_ know how to say it--I don't think I meant that kind
of understanding. There's more than one kind...."
"Ben, you'd best hurry a little if you're to have any time with Uncle
John at the office."
"Yes," said Ben unhappily, and was in the saddle looking down, more than
ever reluctant to be going away. "I'll tell you after supper, what he
says. Ru, what was that?--you started to say that if I sail, then you
also--?"
Ben had spoken softly, in his confusion. He supposed Reuben had not
heard, for he did not answer, and that was a discourtesy Ben had never
known him to employ. Ben saw him rub his hand along Molly's fat neck.
"Be a good horse," said Reuben, and was gone, walking quickly around the
stable, the shortest way to the back fields.
* * * * *
The cottage with the green shutters sat comfortably under the dignity of
twin elms--like its owner mild, and quiet, and rather old, carrying age
as an elm does with rugged awkwardness, with many scars, without pomp
and circumstance.
Reuben had learned the inside of the cottage--simple, on the same stark
plan as the house in Deerfield, with two main downstairs rooms and a
garret, but where the Deerfield house had owned a small lean-to off the
kitchen, Mr. Welland had a larger annex, more solidly built, which he
called the surgery. It was also his reception room for patients, his
library, his study, his room of contemplation. The gray striped lady,
Goody Snively, who kept the cottage rather constantly supplied with
kittens (often yellow), lived here in a box of her own beside the
wood-box at the fireplace. Very few patients ever came to Mr. Welland
here at the cottage, so few that he did not try to keep precise hours
for them, but it was understood that he would ordinarily be at home in
the late hours of the afternoon. Most of his work was done in visits
that often took him a considerable distance to outlying farms. A small
stable stood separate from the cottage, home of the brown mare Meg, who
carried Mr. Welland on his labors in all weathers, all times of day or
night. He claimed that Meg was a better diagnostician of the purse than
himself, being always restless outside the houses of wealthy patients,
who were invariably the slowest to pay his charges. That puzzled Reuben.
"You'll learn," said Mr. Welland. "Your great-uncle is one of perhaps
five exceptions to the rule that I can remember."
Mr. Welland kept no servant, and no one came in to clean or cook for
him. He took most of his meals at the ordinary down the street; messages
were left for him there more often than at the cottage. In the cottage
he maintained a monastic neatness--no dust, no clutter, very few
possessions and those necessary, functional and in good order. "It's not
difficult," he had explained on Reuben's first visit, "but a servant or
woman-by-the-day would make it so, and by the way, Reuben, my house is
never locked, this door from hall to surgery never closed except when I
have a patient with me. I like simplicity, seeing it leaves one free to
consider complexity--especially that of persons who a'n't so smart as
you and me. Don't trouble to knock, I don't like it. I hate knocking. If
it's loud I jump out of my skin, if it's soft I blame it on the mice."
"Mice, with that cat?" "Mice is a general term, boy. Mice includes
everything that bothers by day or goes thump in the night. If a door
squeaks I blame it on the mice for a week before I oil it. Everyone
needs a devil, Reuben, and mice have served me bravely in that capacity
for lo, these many years. Pull up a chair and be at ease."
On this Tuesday afternoon Reuben entered without knocking, an action
that still caused him some shy discomfort, and spoke Mr. Welland's name
unanswered. The door to the surgery stood open; also the stable door, as
Reuben noticed through the window; the doctor was away, and this new
loneliness an unexpected blow. "I am most unreasonable," said Reuben to
Goody Snively, who rubbed his leg, and purred, and exercised a cat's
privilege of trotting ahead and sitting down in front of his feet as he
was about to go into the surgery. Reuben hooked her on his shoulder; she
sang casually and damply in his ear as he went to the doctor's
bookshelves and took down the Vesalius.
"_This is a man----_" well, certainly, but also not a man. A man is
motion and thought; a man is foolishness, courage, love, pain. Reuben
turned the pages at the desk, rather blindly trying to force them into
some clearness, and he wondered if there had been any truth at all in
what he had said to Ben less than half an hour ago. Vesalius had not
faded--that much was true. The mist is in the observer.
Not only now, he thought, but always, in every observation, whether made
at a favorable time or not. If I were happy, that also could deceive, a
rosy mist no easier to penetrate than a gray one. If I were calm,
neither sad nor happy--still a mist, of accepted thoughts that may be
false as fog over quicksand. "But don't you see, Goody Snively?--we know
one thing: we know the fog is there. And that, by the way, is my tender
thigh and not a tree trunk. If you regard me as a tree, I may bark."
Goody Snively retired--shocked, maybe.
The drawing before his face was lost to him a while, the room also, in a
trance not of thought but of stillness avoiding thought. Then, as the
body itself will usually shatter such a refuge with its own cantankerous
insistence, Reuben's nose itched, his hands upholding his cheekbones
grew sweaty and cramped. He gave it up and wandered about
disconsolately. He knelt by the box to which Goody Snively had returned.
Her latest kittens were quite new, their open eyes not focusing, their
legs uncertain. He lifted the black-and-brindle one of the four and held
it against his cheek, liking the harmlessly wild kitten smell; it mewed
in small wrath, and Goody Snively began to look stern, so he replaced it
at the consolation of the nipple and strolled away. He leaned in the
open doorway of the front room, the room where Mr. Welland slept.
Curious, but somehow not inappropriate, that this room like the rest of
the house should be bare of ornament. Monastic was the word, but it held
a sense of comfort too. A plain narrow bed, made up with sharp
precision. One armchair, much worn in the seat; beside that an unpainted
table, bearing a Betty lamp, a pitcher and a basin, nothing else. Two
pairs of shoes--so the doctor owned three altogether--lined up at the
side of the bed like little soldiers. Reuben thought of his own five
expensive pairs, of the days in Deerfield when he had not always owned
two pairs, of time and change and human virtue, of the froth of bright
embroidery Kate had stitched at the buttonholes of the fine maroon
waistcoat he now wore, and shut his eyes, wondering if that enameled
snuffbox was the doctor's only luxury.
Opening them--but still holding away thought, or letting his eyes alone
think for him--Reuben observed that one pair of Mr. Welland's shoes
bore the marks of dried mud. The man must have changed in haste with no
time to take care of them, or had forgotten. Reuben recalled noticing on
a kitchen shelf a few cleaning rags and a jar of neatsfoot oil. He
carried the yellowed shoes out there, refreshed the fading hearth-fire
and sat by it to polish them. The crackle of new wood and the noise of
his cleaning covered the light sounds of Mr. Welland returning and
putting up Meg in the stable. Reuben was aware of it as the doctor
opened the door, but the task was not quite done; he did not want to
abandon it, or even to rise respectfully: work started ought to be
finished, and as for the trivia of politeness, Amadeus Welland wouldn't
care.
"What's this, Reuben?"
"It was something to do, sir. I couldn't bring my mind properly to the
study, some-way. Besides, if this mud stays here too long it'll spoil
the leather."
"Ay, but--thou, scrubbing _my_ shoes? It's kind, Reuben, but I don't
find it fitting."
"Sir, _I_ do."
"Eh?" Reuben could not answer, nor look up when after a silence the
doctor drew a chair to the hearth and sat there spreading his hands to
the warmth. Yet he was not disturbed, nor worried--if Mr. Welland was
annoyed, that would pass. It occurred to Reuben as his fingers
(remembering Deerfield) worked the oil into the leather, that he had in
fact never felt less troubled about his own behavior and how it might
appear to another. It was simple, satisfying and natural that you should
scrub mud from the shoes of someone you loved, taking it for granted
that if the occasion ever happened to suggest it he would do the same
for you. "Each time you have come here," said Mr. Welland at last, "you
have been in some degree different, and also the same. Each time I must
become acquainted with you again, and each time, I suppose, a little
better, since I change too if only by learning."
"You remarked that living is a journey."
"Oh," said Welland, and sighed, "I fear that was little better than a
simile after all, for what is the thing that travels and cannot itself
remain wholly constant? All is change; all things flow; and what's more,
I'd no idea those dem'd shoes had so much virtue left in 'em." Reuben
could look up then and smile. "Well, Reuben, being in Boston yesterday,
I called at thy great-uncle's office and spoke to him concerning thine
apprenticeship. He is not averse to it, not at all, but would have thee
continue for Harvard, and perhaps not be formally bound immediate, but
later, if it is still thy wish in a year or so.... Pleased, my dear?"
"I--am. I would--I would...."
"What, Reuben?"
"I would study, and--serve, if I may, whether formally bound or not. I
think that is what I was trying to say. It won't fade, Mr. Welland. I
was never so certain of any other thing.... I ought to have spoken of it
to Uncle John, but rather feared to because he hath had so much to
distress him lately, the death of Mr. Dyckman, the loss of the _Iris_."
"The _Iris_? I heard about Mr. Dyckman of course, everyone has."
"A ship, that should have brought him a great return, taken by pirates
off Virginia. Ben is worried about his affairs, knowing more of them
than I do. That's one reason why he hath so set his heart on sailing and
earning his own way."
"So?"
"Yes. Mr. Welland, you and Uncle John--you are both very kind. I will
not disappoint you. I can work."
"Not exactly kindness. On my part at least, let us call
it--mm-yas--recognition, and no more of it for the present,
because--well, because the subject is complex and I must presently be
off again, almost to Dorchester, damn the luck. There was a message for
me at the ordinary. I've only time to snatch a bit of rest for me and
Meg, and a quick meal, and a--I think, a change of shoes.... He never
spoke of the _Iris_--well, he and I are not well acquainted. Certainly
he hath a marvel in that ketch _Artemis_. He was good enough to take me
aboard for a few minutes. I'm no sailor, but even I can see she's no
common sort."
"Was Shawn there? A black-haired Irishman with a green coat?"
"Why, no, I noticed no such man, but there were many about."
"You would have noticed and remembered him."
"Mm? Mr. Kenny introduced me to two or three there at the wharf--Captain
Jenks, and the mate, who was here, there and everywhere with scant time
for landsmen."
"The mate? What was his name?"
"Why, Hanson, I think--don't you know him? We exchanged some little talk
about New Haven, where he comes from, seeing I lived a year there once.
Everyone was in a whirl of last-minute business. I felt in the way.
Never knew there were so many different ropes to trip over."