_Chapter One_
The shadows of westward-rolling cloud obscured the calm of Polaris and
the other stars, and the May moon. Reuben Cory had looked out not long
ago from John Kenny's window, noticing a ground-mist over the lawn,
ghosts of it rising toward his eyes; a feeble thing like the random
smoke of a fire dying out, but later it might increase, filling all the
still air above the village, above the city in the north, above the
harbor and that house in Dorchester where Charity at this moment might
be watching the sea through her own window of loneliness. John Kenny's
voice had drawn Reuben back to the island of lamplight by the bed, and
Reuben had resumed his watch there, trying to interpret the sound. It
was vast labor for John Kenny to speak at all; the effort flushed his
sunken cheeks, twisted his lips loosely downward to the side; after such
toil it was necessary to wipe his mouth, and Mr. Welland had recommended
cooling his face with a damp cloth. Reuben had done this, skilled with
months of practise; now he sought to analyze in memory the blurred
fragment of speech. It had carried the inflection of a question. The
word, most probably, was "long." Certainly within the stricken flesh a
mind and a self were poignantly awake, needing an answer. The brown eyes
retained much alertness. Sometimes, when the old man was asleep--as he
was the greater part of the time--one could imagine that he would wake
naturally, frown, say something half-kind and half-sharp, clearly,
looking down the nose.
Trusting to insight--since thought must move in the atmosphere of doubt,
and is often free to claim that this guess is truly a little better than
that one--Reuben spoke slowly and plainly: "It is a year, Uncle John,
since Ben went away." A thought of the ground-mist touched Reuben again
as he settled in his chair and reached for the book on the bedside
table. Doubtless it would increase; men would grope in it cursing; the
tower of South Church would dissolve away, shadowing forth some remote
day of demolition, and in the harbor no ships would move.
Uncle John could still make some motions of his head within a narrow
range, enough to indicate yes or no, agreement or denial, satisfaction
or protest. Reuben saw it stir, the waxen chin lowering a fraction of an
inch, the gray owl tufts rising the same tiny distance from the dent in
the pillow--a nod. The guess must have been fair. Reuben saw the flush
fading, the deep wrinkles around the eyes relaxing after travail. Uncle
John could also move his right leg and arm, and until about a month ago
had used the right hand to feed himself. Kate fed him now, or Reuben:
the paralysis of his stroke had not advanced, but that right arm seemed
too weary, too skeletal, and the old man had finally appeared willing to
be delivered from that exertion.
"Uncle John, I've thought all winter long that Ben might come back this
spring. It is May. The wild flags are out in the marshes. I know we
cannot put any trust in a mere hope, but I keep the thought in my mind.
I feel certain he is alive, and will come home when he can."
The eyes watched, with intelligence; as Reuben was aware, nothing in
response to what he had said was worth the effort of speech; acceptance
of the message was enough. Reuben held a volume of Montaigne near Uncle
John's right hand, so that if it wished the hand could rise and turn the
pages, indicating a part to be read. When sleep would not arrive, Uncle
John seemed to enjoy such reading, and Montaigne was his usual choice.
At times Erasmus, Locke, Sir Thomas Browne, Virgil--more often
Montaigne. The blurred eyes lowered, the hand groped among the pages for
a while, and tapped the beginning of the essay "Use Makes Perfect," as
Reuben had almost known it would, and fell away.
Familiar with the text, Reuben could read without much thought for
anything but slowness and clarity in his voice, remembering to keep his
face turned toward the old man. Reuben and Mr. Welland were convinced
that since the stroke of last July, Mr. Kenny's deafness had thickened;
he could hear plain speech and hear it well, but it was apparent how
closely his eyes followed the motion of a speaker's lips.
"'... A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, necessity
and such like accidents, but, as to death, we can experiment it but
once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.'" Natural enough,
Reuben thought, and perhaps good, that Uncle John should so often wish
to hear this essay, in which Montaigne would have it that one must train
for death as for a voluntary act. Not unnatural anyway, for one whose
task of dying had begun months ago and might continue yet a long time.
"'... with how great facility do we pass from waking to sleeping, and
with how little concern do we lose the knowledge of light and of
ourselves....'"
Kate would have been distressed by it. She clung, at least outwardly, to
the thought that John Kenny would recover. Reuben supposed that when she
was alone with herself, not sustained by those who loved her enough to
reinforce the fantasy, she knew better.
"'Of this I have daily experience: if I am under the shelter of a warm
room, in a stormy and tempestuous night, I wonder how people can live
abroad, and am afflicted for those who are out in the fields: if I am
there myself, I do not wish to be anywhere else....'"
The eyes watched. It was possible, Reuben felt, that the hidden self was
listening to his voice as much as to the voice of Montaigne: this would
remain in the region of doubt, a thing not to be known. He read on
without weariness to the end: "'Whosoever shall so know himself, let him
boldly speak it out.'" But Reuben thought: Who under the North Star hath
ever known himself to the depth? May one not most nearly approach it by
gaining a glimpse of the self in the thought of one other?--but this
will happen only in the rarest moments of the journey.
John Kenny could sometimes speak with considerable clearness--clearness
at any rate to one who had spent much time in learning to translate the
thwarted sounds. He did so now. Kate might have been confused; Reuben
found no difficulty in receiving the message: "If you will, Reuben--at
the proper time--let it be known--with what peace--an infidel can die."
Reuben knew that the light convulsion of the distracted lips thereafter
was a smile, in itself a major achievement. He smiled in response and
set Montaigne aside. "I'll read from _Religio Medici_--shall I, sir?"
The eyes pondered; the right hand moved gently back and forth, which
meant: "Yes, read at random or as you wish."
Reuben read, seeking out words he desired because he had known them at
other hours and in another voice, but not unmindful of his listener's
preoccupations so far as a boy of sixteen could hope to guess at them:
"'Further, no man can judge another, because no man knows himself: for
we censure others but as they disagree from that humor which we fancy
laudable in ourselves, and commend others but for that wherein they seem
to quadrate and consent with us....
"'... It is an act within the power of charity, to translate a passion
out of one breast into another, and to divide a sorrow almost out of it
self; for an affliction, like a dimension, may be so divided as, if not
indivisible, at least to become insensible. Now with my friend I desire
not to share or participate, but to engross, his sorrows; that, by
making them mine own, I may more easily discuss them; for in mine own
reason, and within myself, I can command that which I cannot intreat
without myself, and within the circle of another....
"'... I love my friend before myself, and yet methinks I do not love him
enough: some few months hence my multiplied affection will make me
believe I have not loved him at all....'
"Elsewhere in the essay," said Reuben, and closed the book, "I think Sir
Thomas was somewhat entranced by his own music at the cost of reason."
The eyes watched, probably with kindness; Reuben searched for the motion
of another smile and decided, but doubtfully, that he had seen it. The
eyes grew less alert; soon the old man might fall asleep. "I once asked
Mr. Welland how good a doctor Sir Thomas Browne is thought to have been.
He didn't know. But he hath told me, sir, how in the time since Sir
Thomas wrote, less than a hundred years, the art is much advanced. I
can't but think it must go further in another hundred, as more of the
unknown yields to inquiry." The eyes were patient, interested, kind; and
drowsier. At length they closed, Mr. Kenny's face settling into the
tranquil imitation of death, his breathing shallow, not uncomfortable.
Reuben returned to the window. The mist had grown to a veil over all
things.
Light from this window penetrated the whiteness as far as a budded maple
on the lawn. Whorls of thicker vapor passed through the light, small
disturbances in the ocean of mist that would now be over all the
village, perhaps over all the coast as far as the Cape and out beyond.
As in the larger ocean, life groped about on the bottom in a purposeful
blindness.
On a May night a year ago, when Reuben and Gideon Hibbs and Mr. Kenny
had searched the water front, such a mist had hung low on the sullen
water of the harbor. That mist too had grown after a while, a white tide
rising over the warehouses and idle docks, blotting vision, smothering
and diffusing the nervous beams of lanterns and the sounds of frightened
voices wiry in the throat. Every plank bore a slime of dampness; the
cordage of sleeping ships was dripping with a whisper of slow tears.
Night transformed the water front to a labyrinth dreary, foul and
perilous. Seldom any freshly illuminated face looked back at you bravely
there at night, unless it might be that of a drunken man too sodden to
be afraid. The smooth fogbound water of the bay had possessed no voice
that night except at the piling of the wharfs where, fumbling and
muttering secretly, it encountered the transitory obstruction of the
works of man.
_Where are you? Where are you?..._
Constable Derry had lent the searchers a sturdy man from the Select
Watch. It was that man who discovered the floating corpse, its arm
caught in a tangle of rope that had most unreasonably been knocked or
thrown off a dock not far from Mr. Kenny's, and he identified the broken
old man as a watchman hired by that wharf's owner Mr. Harkness. Waked
and summoned in the saddest hours of the night, little Mr. Harkness
danced up and down on the dock in rage. "She was _here_!" he fumed. "I
paid forty-six pounds for her, and that only last week." "This man,
sir----" "Yes yes, my watchman, poor devil. I tell you she was _here_!
Went aboard of her myself." Tactfully Mr. Derry's man extracted the
information that Mr. Harkness was referring to a sloop, a swift rangy
craft of twenty tons--gone, but by Mr. Harkness not forgotten.
Reuben had taken no part in this inquisition. Until that hour it had
been possible to imagine that Ben had ridden away somewhere--say into
the countryside, to think, cool off his disappointment; he could even be
waiting for them at Roxbury. Hibbs and Uncle John seemed still able to
cling to something like that, to suppose that the poor dripping ruin on
the dock, its head crushed in the back, had nothing to do with Ben and
that devil Shawn. Reuben could do so no longer. _Where are you?_ The
question could be directed nowhere except into the rolling fog and the
dark.
The following day, after dragging out the remainder of a crazed
sleepless night, Reuben felt it merely as the confirmation of something
known, when he learned that a stevedore had brought Mr. Derry the
decisive scrap of truth. This man had been near Harkness' wharf a little
after sunset when a well-dressed youth and an older man in a green coat
had come by, the boy leading a brown mare. The man was talking a spate,
and cheerfully, about some good luck. "No great thing, a fishing
venture, but I'm content, I say it's the smile of fortune on me, now
that's no lie, so come aboard a few minutes anyway and drink to it." He
chattered much more the roustabout could not remember, and the boy said
very little, but presently offered him a shilling to mind the horse,
saying he would be gone not more than half an hour. Then the two had
gone out on Harkness' wharf or maybe the one beyond it. The stevedore
had been puzzled by that boy, who seemed downcast and confused; might
have been weeping not long before; drunk, the stevedore thought at
first, but he smelled no liquor when the shilling changed hands. It had
grown quite dark by then, the lamps of Ship Street lighted but not
sufficient to make the strangers' faces plain; the stevedore would know
the man in the green coat again, he thought, but maybe not the
boy--handsome though, his lip a bit in need of a shave, and very young.
"When they was going the man in the green coat winked at me,
Constable--you know, meaning-like, like as if he meant to say it was a
boy's troubles and we was all young once and took things hard...." More
than the half-hour had passed; the stevedore found a hitching post for
the mare and went in search, finding nothing at Harkness' wharf except a
lumber-barge, although he thought he remembered noticing a small sloop
moored there during the day. He took the mare to a public stable and
returned to search further, but learned nothing and gave it up in
disgust until the morning brought him the news of the watchman's murder.
That, for nearly three months, had been the sum of knowledge....
Soft-voiced in the room behind him, not moving now with the bounce and
ease of a year ago, Kate Dobson was saying: "Do you go and sleep now,
Master Reuben. I'll bide with him the rest of the night."
"Did you sleep enough yourself?"
"Well enough. Ah, the doctor!" she said, and smiled at his finger tips
pressed on her fat wrist. The message from her elderly heart was slow
and sound. Once or twice Reuben had detected a fluttering in it; tonight
he found nothing out of the way except that variability of pace which
Mr. Welland described as not unnatural. Kate accepted this sort of thing
as a game to be played with the tenderness of maternal indulgence. Yet
again it might be that when she was alone with herself, thinking perhaps
of Reuben Cory in the here-and-now and not so much of the
twelve-year-old boy who once collapsed in her arms at the end of a long
journey, she knew better.
Reuben's hand sought the sampler that hung by the door in line with Mr.
Kenny's vision, touching the truth of the dark leaves, the fine-stitched
perfection of the slanting letters: _Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus
amori._ Kate had not been able to finish it until after the old man was
struck down. Mr. Kenny could see it there, had held it, groped at it
with the right hand, smiled in his distorted fashion, mumbling blurred
sounds of pleasure and thanks. It seemed to Reuben that for this labor
of years she ought to have received his elaborate courtly declamation
mingled with airy nonsense and a pat on the rump; she never would. She
was not wholly satisfied with the sampler even now: she said some of the
ivy leaves were too big in contrast to the letters. _Omnia vincit
amor_--but love is a wider region than was spoken of in the Eclogues.
Reuben wandered downstairs with no desire to sleep, and closed the front
door behind him and walked out alone into the mist....
Remembering Deerfield. Mist lay there sometimes in the early mornings of
the end of winter or the beginning of spring, over the low ground by the
river, or within the palisade, until a strengthening sun dissolved it
away from the brave small houses, the training field, the little
dooryard gardens; and Mother liked gray mornings, but Jesse Plum said
they worsened the Pain in his Back, and Father looked on them mildly as
no worse, no better than others-because, said Joseph Cory, every day was
a new-minted shilling to be spent as reasonably as one might....
Remembering--one sometimes winces at the scar of a minor wound--a house
where the judgments of the Lord were true and righteous altogether.
Remembering a narrow gray face advancing in the snow:--If I had died
then, who would walk in this fog in this year's May? Mm-yas--a
might-have-been universe for each event that might have been. Should I
reach out to that maple, the cosmos will wag one way; another if I do
not. Notice, gentlemen, the astonishing power of Reuben Cory!
Philosophy, I vow Mr. Hibbs would enjoy it in all solemnity, bless the
man, but likely it'll slip my mind before I see him again. A boy ties a
string to a pulled milk-tooth and keeps it a while in his pocket, then
somehow loses it....
Remembering a midsummer evening--July, the windless heat a burden of
fever; lightning, too distant to be heard, startling the black sky over
Cambridge or some farther place in the northwest--and the coming of a
messenger on a lathered horse to Mr. Kenny's house. Good news comes
often quietly, arriving like dawn; bad news like a rabid beast leaping
for the throat. That horseman was merely gentle Sam Tench, the clerk who
had labored so long and dustily in Mr. Kenny's countinghouse that he
seemed like an outgrowth of his three-legged stool, but scrambling down
from a sweaty horse and panting his news on the doorstep, he was Fate,
if you like, since the word he bore came direct from Her Majesty's
frigate _Dread_, newly arrived at Boston for provisions and sundry
errands of state and war.
On a morning in early July, in open waters west of the Bermudas, the
_Dread_ had picked up one Pieter Van Anda, single survivor of the sloop
_Schouven_ out of Amsterdam, who had clung all night to the smashed
fragment of a mast. The _Schouven_ had been attacked by a fast ketch
flying no flag, boarded, plundered, her captain and most of her crew
butchered in a rapid engagement where no quarter was given--but later,
before the sloop was set afire, the mad captain of the ketch had
harangued, even pleaded with the three who still lived, to throw in
their lot with him, for he was bound to the other side of the world as
soon as he could acquire two or three other vessels as good as his own,
and was in need of good men. The sloop was worthless except for her
provisions and so must be burned, but would they not go with him? One
consented; the other and Van Anda, then expecting nothing worse than
being set adrift, would not; they were thrown into the sea. This, the
tall, sweet-voiced, black-haired captain told them--they being crushed
against the rail of the sloop by four men who seemed not mad but merely
rabble of the baser sort, pirates--this was an evil thing he did and he
knew it, but the end he served was beyond their understanding, and could
he allow them to bear witness to his acts before the time was ripe?
Perhaps the sea would be kind, at any rate he must do as his inner voice
commanded and could do no other. As he told them this, he rubbed a
copper coin, and his blue eyes spread into black, burning into them.
"And since I cannot be trusting you now, Mother of God, the time's past
for any change of heart, and so God keep you, gentlemen"--and the sea
(said Van Anda) in its most furious mood was surely kinder than such a
man.
The ketch carried two small guns--six-pounder falconets, Van Anda
thought--handled with great skill or great luck, for the first shot,
delivered with no warning as the ketch glided to windward of her,
sliced off the _Schouven's_ mast and left her in a welter of confusion
while the ketch's boat shot across the gap and the pirates boarded her
like starved rats. The _Schouven_ carried only seven hands; it was soon
over. An infernal vessel, Van Anda said--the airs had been light that
evening, the _Schouven_ making not much more than steerage way, yet the
ketch ran down on her out of the eye of the late sun as if the Devil
himself had lent her a capful of wind. Clinging to that fragment of the
mast, Van Anda had seen her for a while, speeding southward, in the
light of sunset and of the burning sloop. A beautiful, wild, unnatural
thing, her bowsprit low-slung, her figurehead a white maiden, her name
_Diana_.
The _Dread's_ lookout had seen the fire, too, from several leagues'
distance, and the frigate hurried off her course to inquire about it.
The blazing sloop filled and sank during the night; it was dawn, the
breeze still fitful and contrary, when Van Anda was found. His story
told, the frigate beat to southward a while in the wrath of vengeance.
In the evening a fore-and-aft mizzen was sighted, far south, and found
again in the morning. At that sunrise the _Diana_--if it was
she--cracked on all sail and by evening was hull down, though the
_Dread_ was bearing all canvas, a mastiff groaning in pursuit of a
greyhound. The _Dread_ found empty sea next morning and was obliged to
put about for Boston.