"He spoke of a big red-haired man jabbering to himself in French, and a
fat, short man they called Tom, and--and a gray-haired man with a broken
nose and a great purple patch covering all the left side of his face.
Sir, I asked myself, could that be anyone but Matthew Ledyard that was
carpenter of the _Artemis_? No one of the_Schouven_went aboard the ketch
except that one man who agreed to join them. Some must have remained
aboard the--_Diana_. My God, sir, I had thought Ledyard loyal as any man
could be----"
"The devil with Ledyard. He described no others?"
"No others."
"Did he say if any of them was young?"
"Sir, sir, I asked him that, and he said--he said no." Then neither Sam
Tench nor Reuben was quick enough to catch the old man, who fell like a
broken spar and struck his head against the doorframe, and for more than
a month thereafter could not speak at all.
Reuben walked in the mist, remembering. No stars; the May moon, not
visible, lent a faint pallor to the enfolding vapor, or he imagined it,
so that he walked in a darkness not complete. He could have followed
this path through the back fields, he supposed, if he were wholly blind.
He moved slowly, pausing many times, though not in need to assure
himself of direction, remembering.
The war went on of course, in its far-off way; it always had. It seems
we snatched ourselves a helping of glory at some place called Ramillies;
but that was very long ago, two years ago, 1706. Throughout the fighting
weather of last year, one heard, my lord Marlborough had put in the time
in the Low Countries doing nothing in particular....
A certain order had been established at the house in Roxbury by the end
of the summer months of confusion. Four friends--Reuben was well aware
of it--had built a sort of wall of defense around a youth who was
legally not yet a man and an old man who could scarcely move or speak:
Amadeus Welland, William Heath the captain of the sloop _Hebe_, Sam
Tench, and Gideon Hibbs. Reuben was formally apprenticed to the doctor;
Harvard, by Reuben's wish, vetoed. On a morning when, according to his
own tortured speech, his mind was very clear, John Kenny wrote out in a
wild but readable scrawl his desire that Welland, Heath, Tench and Hibbs
be appointed trustees for his affairs while he remained disabled; the
court allowed it, giving Tench a limited power of attorney. The
warehouse and wharf were mortgaged, and rented to Mr. Riggs of Salem,
the most merciful of Kenny's creditors.
Reuben discovered with no surprise that it was quite simple to get along
without five pairs of shoes; also to tend the garden and scythe the lawn
at odd moments without the aid of Rob Grimes. Hibbs too had been obliged
to find employment with another family at Roxbury whose son and heir
required cramming, but he continued to live at Kenny's house, insisting
on paying for his room and board, nagging Reuben to continue his
Greek--was not Hippocrates a Greek?--and trying to drive a little more
general learning into the boy, but underhandedly as it were, under the
pretense that he was merely keeping up with his own studies at the
borders of philosophy. The sloop _Hebe_, unmortgaged, ran her small
profitable errands between Boston and Newport like a dog who will go on
herding sheep or guarding the house into the shadows of old age, not
even asking for a pat on the head. Even Rob Grimes strolled over
occasionally, pecking peevishly at odd jobs and refusing pay for it; he
ceased perhaps only because Kate was singularly short and cold with him.
It seemed to Reuben that by spending a lifetime in contemplation of
human love and loyalty, you might learn one or two things about people,
but not their limits. One could simply note: under certain conditions,
certain members of the human race--most, maybe--are capable of supreme
goodness. The Preacher Ecclesiastes was old, weary, holding some unreal
scale of value; disappointed, like enough, because these bewildered
passion-ridden beings fell so far short of his private image of the
godlike. You could not watch Amadeus Welland making grave monkey faces
under his wig for the hilarious comfort of a sick child, and say that
all is vanity. That was no fair example, because Amadeus was not as
other men; so consider--well, Kate Dobson, who called herself common and
stupid, and would be spending uncalculated kindness to the day she died.
The Preacher's namesake was loyal too. Through all vicissitudes he
remained a beat-up yellow tomcat, charging not a farthing for the
privilege of scratching him under his evil chin....
The same human race included that devil Shawn, the bronze butchers who
fell upon Deerfield, a smiling murderer with one eye. Of course.
Sometimes also Reuben speculated: If they--Heath, or Hibbs, or Tench, or
even dear Kate--if ever they knew that I am a monster, a _lusus
naturae_, a two-headed calf, a moral leper so outlandish and beyond hope
of forgiveness that, were my nature known, even the children in the
street would be a bit afraid to throw dead cats and dung--what then?
Would there then be any part of this earth where Amadeus and I might go,
and not be hated, driven, feared, utterly condemned?... The thought came
only in the darkest hours; seldom if ever when he was with Mr. Welland,
the world excluded, the ugly pockmarked face an unfathomable essay in
the beautiful, the moment blazing or peaceful as sun on summer grass.
Here in the mist, the fear touched him as an almost trivial thing, an
arrow missing the mark, a fire burning somewhere else, a lesson glimpsed
further on in the book. _Blessed be the mask--and yet I hate it, will
ever hate it, wearing it only because I wish to live, remembering it was
not worn in the time that some have named the Golden Age._
If I am a monster--who seem to myself a young man not incapable of the
earthly virtues, who love the sun and rain as well as any man and would
never willingly do a dishonest thing or hurt anyone, who need and
rejoice like any man in all the harmless glory of the senses--then who
made me a monster? If I am evil, who set the standard whereby men and
women are to be judged? Let Mr. Cotton Mather tell me God did so and
will punish the transgressor: I am not interested, nor is Amadeus, who
doth believe in God after his own fashion.
Reuben knew he was near the beech tree. He put out his hand to find the
amiable tower of it and leaned against it in the mist, remembering. I
stood here last year, having made certain discoveries. A good
day--April, I think. Ben rode home smiling. A long time ago.
It was never possible to hold away for any long stretch of minutes the
knowledge that Ben was gone. One schooled the mind to repeat that
lesson, though it might whimper and snarl miserably in repeating it: _He
is probably lost._ Then, the lesson driven home once more, he turned
usually to Vesalius, or _Micrographia_, or _Neurologia Universalis_
(Ben's gift!), or the collected works of Ambroise Pare, or the _Severall
Surgical Treatises_ of Richard Wiseman, because Mr. Welland said it was
time for him to acquire a small preliminary hint of the enigmas of knife
and suture.
"But _why_ do so many die after trifling minor surgery? Don't we all
suffer small cuts and bruises repeatedly and take no harm by it?"
"We don't know. Doctors despise surgery; send 'em to the filthy barber
surgeons, and they die. I no longer send anyone to the barbers, Reuben.
If surgery can't be avoided I stumble through it myself, trying to
follow the methods you'll read in that book of Pare's, with these grim
little tools--that's splendid steel, by the way, I care for 'em like an
old housewife--and I've lost very few under the knife, but I can't tell
you why. Why, maybe they're so bemused by the wig that they stay alive
so to have another look at it...."
At other times it was scarcely possible to drive the lesson home at all.
Then in partial retreat from the unbearable he permitted the dream of
Ben's return--telling over this complex year as it might be told to him,
polishing those whimsical or naughty inventions that used to be rewarded
by the startled stare of his gray eyes and his rocketing laughter.
Reuben knew such fantasy to be a drug, but yielded in times of need.
"You see, Ben, not to put too sharp a point on it when likely it was
dull----" No no! Not that way, seeing he may have truly loved her. "You
see, Ben, doubtless because their fortunes went down with ours, Captain
Jenks being lost or presumed lost--why, she married. Some ancient
December blossom"--revise!--"some man named Hoskison, a merchant of
Salem where she now liveth, but her mother and Charity dwell with the
mother's brother at Dorchester, the said Charity being a most sweet
maid, little Benjamin, and greatly changed, who hath not forgotten
thee."
And so she is, he thought, strolling sure-footed away from the beech in
the deep quiet of the mist--so she is; and he wondered in passing
whether any self ever lived that was not divided by contrary hungers.
Occasionally with Charity--when she sat close by him, or pushed at his
chest with friendly impatience, or rubbed her cheek on his shoulder in
her impulsive way that was half child, half woman--occasionally Reuben
could be reminded of those needs the world allows. Never enough, he
thought; never complete; never the sure and hearty answer that Ben, for
example, would have known.
And never, in fact, quite free from a sense of the pressure of the
world, of the command to conform and be like all others; and since to
yield to that nagging, to conform and be like others at whatever
sacrifice, is to lose oneself in the meanest of all vanities begotten of
fear, it is not acceptable to the lonely.
Charity came often to Roxbury, lending Kate a hand in the kitchen as
well as the sickroom. She did so even more often after the move to
Dorchester, for her uncle allowed her to ride about a good deal--much
more, some said, than was at all fitting, safe or decent for a young
girl. She was calmer at fourteen, not so much given to fits of temper,
at least not at Roxbury. Reuben seldom saw her in her mother's company,
since Madam Jenks at Dorchester had submerged in a stately retirement,
letting it be known that she was not long for this world, the which was
merely a place of trial for the life to come, and blessed reunion with
One Who Was Gone and, though the best of men, had never quite understood
the palpitations of her heart, and was even given at times to profane
thoughts and actions, for the which he doubtless repented in the end,
and was taken to the Lord, a good provider with all his faults, and
sometimes fluttered in her chest so that she could scarcely breathe at
all, but were in no sense connected with her overweight, which was
slight and for that matter incomprehensible since she ate like a very
sparrow, and suffered also from insomnia and risings from the stomach.
Some day, Reuben thought--oh, some day perhaps that other world ought to
be explored, if only for the sake of the slow, strange enterprise of
trying to learn a little about the human race. Amadeus would probably
say that it ought.
Never with Charity of course. Reuben was aware that Charity, very much a
woman this last year, did not regard him as a potentially aggressive
male, but as a friend who could be trusted to listen with kindness,
share a moment of mirth, speak with intelligence about the fantastic
pictures she still liked to draw, and even take her part against those
restrictions of a woman's world that chafed her to rage. Besides, there
was that day in November, soon after the move to Dorchester, when
Charity Jenks threw her snarled-up sewing all the way across Kenny's
library and flung herself crying into Reuben's arms, to speak of a
sorrow until then unknown to him. A servant of theirs, a French-born
slave Clarissa, had been sold to New York when the household was broken
up, seeing there was no place for her at Dorchester--and that girl, said
Charity, had been her real mother for years and years, and was the only
friend she would ever have. "You have me," said Reuben, and was startled
to watch her considering that, sniffling, accepting it and seeming
remarkably comforted. A few minutes later she was speaking, for the
first time freely and shamelessly--about Ben. And then of the house at
Dorchester, which was near the shore. She had found a place where
tumbled rocks made three walls excluding the land, the fourth side open
to the sea--you could look out for miles on a clear day, and could
hardly fail to see any of the ships that came into Boston out of the
south; she'd draw him a picture. She did so; and then this spring, about
a month ago, Reuben had seen that lookout for himself, making a harmless
conspiracy of the secret approach to it, since otherwise tongues would
have wagged and clattered. It had seemed to him, in the fair sun of that
spring afternoon, beyond reach of a thunderous high tide but not beyond
the reach of the spray, that Charity was almost happy, though not in the
same way or to the same degree that he had been happy himself for some
moments, even hours, in the past year....
Well, it would be no simple or pleasant thing, to tell Ben about Faith's
marriage. Do it quickly, lightly, ready to go along with whatever mood
took Ben at the news. Then later, maybe, the wedding could be described
in--_in harrumphitatis Reubencoribus_. "I did endeavor, little Benjamin,
to place my spirit in such posture as to snap up any unconsidered
morsels of hymeneal sanctity that might be flipped my way when the good
and just Eliphalet Hoskison re-entered that holy state in manly pride
and a gingery-yallery weskit"--Revise! Leave out most of Hoskison; to
Hell with Eliphalet Hoskison and the ivory buttons on that
hemi-spherical weskit!--"but my chaste resolution, sir, was overruled,
and barely indeed could I repress the cachinnations of a lewd nature and
subsume the concupiscent, when my perspiring attention was led astray by
observation of a touching yet not wholly tragical prodigy--prodigal
tragedy--of nature. Nay rather, in these latter years I have come to
regard it as a pastoral or even, mm-yas, a comical-historical-pastoral
interlude, the which I will elucidate if you perpend. The dominie who
wedded those twain was not, little Benjamin, a tall man, and on the top
he was bald as a baby's bottom--for this I can summon witnesses if need
arise. Now as he stood before us in the ultimate or perhaps the
penultimate prayer, it was required of him to lower that benevolent
denuded skull, and I did behold, advancing unto the pinkish radiance
thereof, a small fly. A fly, sir, buffeted by the gathering winds of
October and, I think, lonely. He circled the dull glow thrice, I saw it,
and thrice flew away, and yet once more returned--drawn, do you see, to
the services in spite of original and later sin--and circled a last time
resisting the call, unrepentant, naughty in mortal pride and unredeemed,
but in the end lit softly upon the holy ground. There did he scrub his
forelegs, Benjamin, and listen, taking thereafter a few sprightly steps
toward a certain silvery fringe, the which must have indicated to him:
'Thus far and no farther!' Strait is the gate and few that enter,
mm-yas. Frustrated and remote indeed from a state of grace, he did flirt
his saucy wings, and listen, and scrub his middle legs, and bravely
attempt another region of the fringe where he was again baffled and cast
down. _Fiat justitia, ruat caelum!_ I watched him returning to the
center, broken (as I thought) in spirit, not one of the elect yet
loathing his sins and mourning after the pardon of them, but there most
delicately--O Ben, Ben, as a fellow sinner I foresaw this and my bowels
yearned for him--there most delicately did he lay down a mild brown
memento of his presence as a representative of the secular arm. Thereat
he shuddered but the act was done, _ad majorem lignocapitis humani
gloriam_. He listened then as it were with an absent mind. He cocked his
red head at me as we listened, and I knew then, Benjamin, I knew from
the shameless manner of his conversation that mercy and salvation had
passed him by. He sampled the pink surface with an heretical tongue and
thought little of it. Lost even to the sense of decorum, he r'ared up
behind and scrubbed his ultimate legs--furtively, however, you
understand, like any other boy in church. And then at last (in fact at
very long last) he rose up and buzzed away--relieved but not saved, not
saved at all, by the resonance of an Amen."
Later. Mm-yas--much later, if at all....
He walked in the mist, no longer remembering but in the here-and-now,
coming at length to the cottage, where he would have tapped on the
window, but Amadeus Welland came to him across the lawn out of the mist.
"I slept a while but was restless. A turn around the garden--sends me
off sometimes. Is it one of his bad nights, Reuben?"
"Nay, not bad, in fact I thought him rather cheerful, as far as one can
guess. I read to him, his usual Montaigne, and then a little from the
_Religio_ because he seemed to be listening and enjoying it. When Kate
relieved me I think he was not far from sleep. Ah, how long, Amadeus?"
"No one could possibly say. I once knew the apoplexy to leave a woman
quite motionless and yet alive for six years. Others go in a few
moments, a few weeks. And there are remissions, don't forget. It's no
mere word of comfort to say that he might recover his speech, even the
use of his left side, or partial use. I've seen that happen. Or it might
be that when he falls asleep tonight, or some night, he won't wake."
"He said once--if I rightly understood the words, but he was excited,
trying too hard to speak, and so they were difficult--he said he could
not die until Ben comes home."
"Well.... The mere thought of it might do much to keep him in this world
a while. Nobody understands the power of the mind over the flesh--or
ought I to say, over the rest of the flesh? Or the power of flesh over
the mind. We don't know, we don't know."
"I know it is May, and a misty night."
"Yes, and thou art here."
"And I think I enjoy the misty nights, Amadeus, mm, even the nights when
the moon's down as much as the others, and I've wondered why, and I
think I know the reason. I enjoy them because I know that, while others
are sometimes afraid of the dark, I am not. I can tell you, I can tell
you surely, I'm not afraid of anything in nature. Am I speaking
nonsense, I wonder? Why, before a lion my flesh would cringe and squeak,
I don't doubt it, but somewhere, Amadeus, somewhere in here there's a
part of me would hold calm and yield nothing even to the thought of mine
own death."
"Have I not alway known that, in thee?"
"You have?"
"Yes."
"So again I learn something.... I'm tired."
"Come in then and rest."
"Yes, that's my wish," said Reuben, but he knelt and took Welland's
hands and rested his forehead in the warmth of them.
"Art thou in need of me?"
"You've taught me how tomorrow is another region, so let it be--I'm not
part of it tonight. I shall be forever in need of you."
"But there will be years...."
"When you die before me, a thing I do accept because I must, I shall be
in need of you still, and will bear the need, and laugh sometimes, and
work as you've taught me, and grow old--I swear I'm not afraid. I told
my brother once I would sail with him to the Spice Islands. Where do
children go, Amadeus?"
* * * * *
"Matthew, you may call me an old fart, you that's no bloody lamb
yourself, but I can remember when I was a boy in Gloucester. More and
more I remember it, the decent way of living there and the little
houses--no easterly ever shook them houses, Matthew, tight to the ground
the way they was, they a'n't got the wit to build no such way in Boston.
Good, that it was. Eh, I remember that low-tide smell in my mother's
kitchen, year 'round, call it a stink if you like, not me, you might say
I was born to it. That was a good life--if a man could live Godfearing,
not go whoring after strange inventions, listening at the Devil in his
left ear."
"Oh, 'vast preaching, Joey, I got no heart for it."
"I a'n't preaching. Oons, I was only crowding thirteen when I first went
on my father's sloop. We was to the Banks, good luck all the way, home
with cod to the gun'ls. Weight of one more fish scale would've sunk her,
my father said, and said it was me brung him the good luck. Me! That's a
futtering laugh, that is, all the same he said it. I'll trouble you for
that bottle.... Dried-up scarecrow, five good teeth in my head, you got
to remember I was young one time.... I can't think how I ever come to
listen at that man, and me a watchman, all done with the sea or
should've been. Now don't betray me, Matthew Ledyard. Don't never let it
out I said such a thing. I got no wish to die at _his_ hand, and far
from home."
"You look young now--being it's that dark a man can't see his fingers."
"Now that's not comical, Matthew, that's not kind.... Matthew."
"Yah?"
"Moon'll be up in an hour.... What if we don't go back to the ketch?"
"You fool, he means to clear out of here on the morning ebb."
"I know that."
"Well? Orders was to row back no later 'n moonrise. It was a favor, to
leave us stay on the beach this long so to stretch our legs and catch a
nap off shipboard--knows we got a bottle too. He wants them water kegs
no later 'n moonrise and the fruit too, though I can't say that's good
for nothing but to make a great slosh into a man's belly, let 'em say it
keeps off scurvy if they like, I won't eat the bloody muck and never had
no scurvy.... Joey Mills, don't be more of a damn fool than you can
avoid."
"A man could hide on this island. He'd maroon us--willingly."
"And him breaking his heart for a year because he's short-handed?"
"But Matthew, he's jumpy here as the Devil in a gale of wind. He's got
no love for the Bahamas. Call him mad, but he means all he says. Could
he get him another vessel good as _Artemis_--ha! _Diana_--and enough
hands for safety, he'd be off and away after his daft dreams to the
other side of the world. He'd hunt for us here, yah, but not long."
"Long enough to find your gandy-shank back'ard end sticking out of a
bush and sink a hook in it. And we'd live on what? Fruit and clams?"
"I seen goat tracks back there a piece this afternoon."
"Luff, you bloody beggar! You're stern-heavy. Got your old arse spread
to a following wind, let 'er freshen and down you go by the head. Tell
you what he'd do. He'd say to that fat swine Tom Ball: 'Down!' he'd say,
and down would Ball go on all fours and come rooting up the whole island
for you like the hog he is."
"You sure to God hate that man, don't you?"
"Two gods he has, his belly and his other purse. Why wouldn't I? Wasn't
it Ball mostly that set me against the Old Man? Begun it the day after
we come into Boston last year, and now I know that him and Shawn was old
friends reunited and Shawn had set him up to it, but then I thought Ball
was an honest cod. Sought me out, he did--come to my house, drank up
with me, praised the wife's cooking, things like that. And begun
dropping little things in my ear to turn me against the Old Man. One
evening he told me Cap'n Jenks laughed behind my back about my--my face,
my mark. Lies, all lies, but it wasn't till it was far too late that I
knowed it must be all lies, and Shawn set him up to it so to win me over
to his God-damned venture. I could run a knife in Shawn, but that Tom
Ball, he ought to be tried out in one of French Jack's kettles--slow,
for the lard.... Suppose we don't go back to the ketch. Suppose we
stayed alive, and sometime an honest ship took us off. You think there's
any place in the world for us now? Boston? Gloucester? Can we go
anywhere and not be hanged? Gi' me that bottle back."
"I was thinking of Virginia."
"Virginia, he says. Her Majesty's law don't reach there, ha? Why, word
of _Artemis_ will have gone all up and down the coast for a year."
"Maybe. Suppose.... If we got to go back to the ketch, suppose we
might--do something?... Matthew, it come to me, that man Shawn made one
big mistake in his bloody life."
"Keeping the Old Man alive?"
"Ay, that, but that a'n't what I meant. Sure, only a madman would have
let Jenks live. Tell you something about that too, something I seen the
other day when I was into the cabin to carry out slops. But the big
mistake Shawn made was when he stole that boy. I'm old. I watch, I see
things. They say you can't kill a witch but with a silver bullet. I tell
you plain, if anyone ever does for Shawn, it won't be one of us."
"Why, that boy couldn't harm----"
"I know. Gentle as a May morning, and that's all you see. I see more.
A'n't Shawn tried to break him for a year now? Make him over into
something the Devil himself wouldn't own? Has he done it?--tell me that.
A'n't I heard 'em talk together, devil and angel? I say, Matthew, some
time, maybe soon, it'll come to life and death between them two, and I'm
prophesying: it won't be Ben Cory that dies."
"It could be."
"I want you should take that back. Ben a'n't for dying."
"He a'n't even full-growed.... Ah, Christ, count him in then, and what
could he and the two of us do, three against French Jack, and Ball, and
Marsh, and Shawn himself?--not to say nothing of poor Dummy, that don't
know nothing except the devil is kind to him? I'm a stout man. Break me
in half with one hand, Dummy could, grinning like a dog the while he
done it."
"Ben is kind to him."
"Ah? You think----?"
"I--don't know. But hark 'ee to this, Matthew: could somebody steal the
key to that leg-chain and turn the Old Man loose----"
"God Almighty, who'll bell the cat? Don't the key hang on a cord at the
devil's neck, and is it ever off him?... What was it you seen in the
cabin, Joey?"
"Ah.... Only him, the Old Man, that ha'n't touched a drop the whole year
long, and that devil keeping it ever at his hand--only him, not paying
me no heed at all, I could've been a breath of wind in the cabin--only
him, Matthew, lowering himself to his heels, slow, and then grabbing the
table and pushing himself up, clean off the boards, chain and all, and
down again, slow. Against the day, Matthew, against the day. Did _he_
ever go within four foot of the end of that chain? Could three men, four
men, ever hold the Old Man, if somebody was to steal the key?"
"He'd be match for three or four, grant you that. When it was over, you
he'd only see hanged with time to pray, but he'd snap my neck with his
own hands. I fit out them irons myself, Joey. I wouldn't wonder but I'll
wear the like in Hell, if there be justice. Forty years honest, that's
me. Nay, Lord, ha'n't I been in irons myself, my life long, with this
purple face? Forty years honest, and Chips for seventeen of 'em--nine
and more on the old _Hera_, seven on the _Iris_, eight months on the
_Artemis_. I'm not counting this last year, she's the _Diana_, he'll
break her heart like mine. Forty years honest--oh, I was in anger
already at the Old Man for slights and curses a good sailor would've
ignored, so I listened to Tom Ball, Shawn's pet hog, and then to Shawn
himself, his singing tongue--listened in my anger and said I'd do it,
and I did it. You think God forgives such a thing? I killed Hanson, shot
him dead, never harmed me. You God might forgive, not me. I wish I was
dead."
"Nay, Matthew, you old sod----"
"I mean it. I don't see why God didn't strike me down a year ago. I
a'n't sunk yet, but the tiller's gone. Wa'n't Shawn broke it, it was me.
I should've thought--why, should've hove to, but Christ, I let her
broach, and the sea come over me, the tiller's gone, it's clean broke
off. Anything in that bottle?... Sometimes it's on me to march into that
cabin, say: 'Here, _sir_--that neck, you been wanting it.' He'd take it.
With him loose, we might win back the ketch, grant you that. Then you
for Copp's Hill and my neck cracked a mite sooner. Don't forget it."
"All the same, Matthew, it won't be the Old Man that does for Shawn.
Nay, it won't be the Old Man."
_Chapter Two_
Driven by a southwest wind of the upper air that stirred as yet no
breath here at the island, a cloud moved toward Polaris, and would
conceal the star a while, and pass on. Ben heard no voice except of the
sea, and that unconcerned with him, a hiss and groan of breakers on the
beach, and somewhere, beyond the southern arm of the cove, a larger
mourning as incoming waves lashed an outlying part of the island's body
and fell away sighing.
The ketch now named _Diana_ had been careened for scraping, a labor
completed yesterday, wearisome in the sun. Comfortable again in the deep
water of the cove, she rode at anchor, waiting on sunrise that should
summon a breeze, and rouse the man who ruled her (if he ever slept) and
send her out wherever his desire commanded. The tide would be running
fair an hour after dawn.
Her shadow begotten of the May moon stretched long across the still
surface, in nearness sharply edged, then vague, then melting in the
blackness of open water far out. The May moon, approaching the full,
would be illuminating the letters on the starboard side. If Ben leaned
over the rail he could glimpse the black sprawl of them: DIANA. But Ben
Cory still thought of her as _Artemis_.
This was one private way to keep alive the integrity of a self. Another
was to inquire: Where does the self end and the universe begin?...
Manuel was aloft. Manuel loved sleep, and could sleep anywhere, he shyly
told Ben once--even at the masthead. But his fawn eyes would likely be
open at present, searching the harmless night. If he drowsed up there,
or if Captain Shawn or the second mate Marsh merely imagined he had,
Manuel would be whipped, and then obliged to swab away any red drops
that might have spattered on the sacred deck. A year ago Shawn had been
quite kind to stupid Manuel. That ended after Cornelius Barentsz of the
sloop _Schouven_ had been hanged, and Manuel had furtively tried to cut
the body down from the yardarm.
However balmy the weather, however empty and flat the sea, a
twenty-four-hour lookout must be kept on the _Diana_: Shawn's law. Even
in harbor the men stood watch and watch, having learned not to grumble
in the presence of Captain Shawn, who might seem not to hear the words
at the time spoken, but would nurse them in his bosom a week or so, and
bring them forth and quote them gravely while Ball or Marsh corrected
them with a rope's end. The deck must shine spotless as a duchess's
drawing room; the brass must be dazzling, the ropes coiled exactly so,
and the powder dry.
Judah Marsh and the hunchback mute who possessed no name but Dummy were
somewhere aft, idle as Ben. Marsh never invented work when nothing
needed to be done. This was not from laziness, certainly not from any
charity: human beings were simply not so important to Judah Marsh that
he could derive much joy from dominating them. He executed Shawn's
orders for punishment with satisfaction; the sight of Manuel bleeding
deepened his fixed smile; but he seemed to find no pleasure in ordering
big soft Manuel about and watching him fumble at meaningless tasks.
It was not in nature, Ben thought, that a creature could be devoid of
all common impulses to mirth, compassion, generosity, recognizable lust,
interest in his fellow men, and still walk about on two legs; but there
Marsh was, unquestionably spewed up by the human race. Some man must
have begotten the thing, some woman borne it in pain and maybe loved it
a while. Marsh would not even eat like a man, but like a peevish dog,
gulping the tedious food and returning to his one-eyed vacancy. For
Daniel Shawn Ben had been obliged to learn hatred, a waiting, despairing
hatred that even now might hold some tormenting elements of love or at
least of searching. Before the stalking dead man Marsh, Ben could only
recoil, watchful, glad that, except for the necessary rule of the
starboard watch, Marsh let him alone.
Ben expected nothing to be required of him till after sunrise when the
tide turned. Then it would be up anchor and away, if Shawn's intention
held. It often changed. Shawn was in no triumph these days, after a year
of frustration and trivial actions with nothing gained.
The tide should turn at about seven bells. The mate's watch would tumble
up early to lend a hand at breaking out the anchor and making
sail--unavoidable since, after a year, the ketch was still woefully
undermanned. As always at such times, the mate Tom Ball would remind the
men that better times were coming with the next prize--more hands,
better food, another vessel maybe, riches to burn, and best of all
probably a bit of amusement at the expense of the Spaniards and their
women, say at Campeachy or Merida. They paid scant attention to that
noise now when it came from Mr. Ball, though the mere word "money" gave
Ball's thick Devon voice a special fruitiness as if the taste of it
comforted him all the way down to the gut. ("Money is the thing, Ben
boy," he said once with damp and genuine friendliness, pawing amiably at
Ben's shirt. "Got gold, you got everything, take an older man's word for
it--good food, good smocks, safe old age. Gi' me the money, other cods
can have the glory." Then finding Ben's stare to be an incomprehensible
cold lance, he grunted with the pained astonishment of a man who wants
to be liked, and spat overside, and pushed his hands against the sides
of his paunch to settle it better on the burdened pelvis, and waddled
away.) Manuel might giggle at Ball's belching oratory, but French Jack
would only shrug without chattering, and Matthew Ledyard's
purple-stained face would freeze into a peculiar quiet. When Captain
Shawn said nearly the same thing (without the women and Spaniards),
standing tall in his green breeches and green sash, in that favorite
spot of his where his left hand could stroke the larboard falconet while
his other rubbed the copper farthing, they still listened. Or they
seemed to. While pronouncing such words as "our company," "our
enterprise," Shawn's splendid voice could briefly make it seem that the
men gathered to hear him were indeed a company of some consequence, and
not a tatterdemalion handful of sharkbait committed to the guidance of a
lunatic dreamer.
Ben tried to lose himself in the tranquillity of black water out yonder,
to make some temporary truce in the private struggle. A battle with
arithmetic, in a way: how does one youth steal a vessel from seven grown
men--not counting Manuel, who was rather less than a man?
Ledyard was a man; little Joey Mills had at least a memory of manhood.
One or even both might be allies, if there were any way to reach
Ledyard. But all year long, Ledyard had seldom acknowledged Ben with
more than a grunt, a stare and a turning of the back. He offered no
other unkindness; he merely made it plain that Ben's existence
distressed him somehow, while chattering Joey Mills tried to explain to
Ben that Matthew was a grieving man who meant no harm by it. Ledyard,
Ben knew, was deeply involved in Shawn's declaration of war against the
world. Ledyard had shot the mate Hanson and one of the seamen in the
taking of _Artemis_. Ben could imagine how Matthew Ledyard might still
cling to the thought of the new lands in the western sea, and might
forget (sometimes) that if ever he arrived there his own conscience
would arrive there with him, to speak with him in the night and burn
down on him in the noonday sun.
Ben had grown acquainted with a saving reasonableness in the very
monotony of shipboard, in the endless daily things that must be done for
the vessel's survival and one's own, without much thought, certainly
without argument. Not too unlike the labors of a frontier farm--but the
earth can be kind, with many shelters for one in extremity. In the open
sea you've only to glance over the rail, and understand.
There is another sort of reasonableness in the status of a slave. Maybe,
Ben thought, most men accept a little of that status because they must:
but when you begin to accept it willingly, you begin to die.
("_Benjamin Cory, I would wait for you a thousand years...._")
After eight bells, breakfast. Hardtack, and stew built on a wild slimy
formula unknown to any mortal but French Jack, and a dark tragic fluid
that Jack called _cafe arabique_. The stew originated in Bahaman goat
and wild pig, shot by Ledyard and Ball not long ago but too long for
comfort. Nothing remained of the good provisions taken in a midnight
raid two months ago on a coastal settlement at Martinique. Shawn might
try another such raid before long; if not, back to the salt cod.
Shawn had not even considered trying to dispose of that honest cargo of
Mr. Kenny's at one of the Caribbean ports where he could have sneaked in
to bargain with no questions asked. Tom Ball had urged him to do so,
waving his stumpy arms, his voice climbing to a reckless howl of
despair. Shawn merely grinned at his copper farthing, and let Tom
sputter out like a fat candle, and then remarked that one day soon they
might be most happy to own such a handy supply of dem'd wonderful fish.
Ben Cory had never regarded himself as a poet, but he thought sometimes
that if he ever saw home again, there was one original composition that
he could recite to Reuben in a decent glow of authorship. It went like
this:
Old boiled cod.
O God!
As for the _cafe arabique_, Captain Shawn had been heard to say that he
supposed Jack made it from a secret crock of hog manure hidden in the
hold. Ben more charitably suspected an infusion from scraps of old
leather salvaged maybe on the field of Blenheim.
Red-haired Jack claimed to have fought gloriously there under the
banners of Marshal Tallard until the surrender, when a great light burst
around him, and God told Jack that Louis the Fourteenth was no mortal
king but an incarnation of the fiend Asmodeus who cut up little girls
and ate them. Well--Jack could have been at Blenheim; far more likely he
wasn't. Peter Jenks, captain in 1705 of the ship _Iris_, had happened on
French Jack in Barbados, and being in sore need of a cook, had signed
him on, with Jenks' usual massive disregard of authorities and
formalities--Jack doubtless had the status of a prisoner of war, but he
was somehow at large on the island, he seemed to be declaring that he
knew how to cook, and that was good enough for Jenks. ("I say to dat
captain, I am so big man, so good man, me, I am _coq du village, coq de
la paroisse_, me. He say strong, 'You coq?' I say coq, he not know
nut'n, nor me not more. I fool, I crazy, me--he big fool, strong crazy,
go to hell.")
Somewhere, before then, Daniel Shawn might have known the man. At any
rate French Jack, as well as Ball and the carpenter Ledyard, had been a
part of Shawn's conspiracy. When Shawn took _Artemis_ by deceit in broad
daylight, it was French Jack who loomed up behind Peter Jenks with a
capstan bar and struck him down.
Ben could still see that--Jenks reeling, clutching at the mizzenmast,
missing it and going down--as almost a year ago he had seen it in
reality across a gap of shining water, the sunlight of that May sparing
Ben nothing of it as he writhed at the rope that held him and gnawed the
gag in his mouth. Everything had been well planned that day, in the
clear Atlantic, the island of Nantucket just over the rim of the world.
If Ben had been able to struggle free, a scream of warning would likely
have done no good: Jenks was down. The strangely methodical skirmish
came to an end with the prim grace of a minuet--but that was no dance,
that shifting and interweaving of pigmy man-figures over there in the
sunlight. That was plain murder, like the death of Dyckman.... Then
Manuel lashed the tiller of the sloop and came to Ben, removing gag and
rope, patting his hands, troubled in his soft way by Ben's unhidden
loathing, but grinning with a dazzle of white teeth and explaining: "Iss
good, got ship now. All be ver' rich, much gold, much women. You like
women, boy, so pretty? You like gold?..."
Very shrewdly planned, even to the tarpaulin spread over Ben and
covering him up to the eyes.
The sloop from Harkness' wharf had stolen a long time without lights
through the depth of a May night until fog closed in around her. Then
she crept on most gently, slowly, under mainsail and jib, head on to a
leisured march of smooth rollers, her captain aware that _Artemis_ would
be fogbound too. Ben had known nothing of that. Ben was asleep.
He woke late that morning, his head throbbing wildly, in the stench of a
dark hole in a universe which was swaying impossibly back and forth, and
from side to side too, with a grand inexorable calm. In this pocket of
dimness he found he was alone with a human-like thing that could bob its
misshapen head, and grin, but not speak. He dimly remembered this
creature from some faraway evening: it was harmless. Steps led out of
the cavity to a grayness of daylight. The cavity--oh, it was harmless
too, it was the tiny cabin of a sloop, one that Mr. Shawn had been hired
to sail to the Banks for somebody named Harkness, all fair enough. But
why, Ben wanted to know, why was she at sea now, and why was his head
one great blind snarl of pain? Toward the daylight he reeled, asking
questions. Up in wet salt air, he learned that everything was
gray--under him a gray sliver of deck, above him muttering and sobbing
canvas gray with damp, before him a shaft of gray wood--that was a solid
mast, harmless, and he grabbed it frantically to save himself as gravity
dropped away from his feet, and he could see all around him one heaving
gray of ocean to the end of the world. Behind him a cackling voice
inquired: "Mr. Shawn, sir, Mr. Shawn--be that there thing a sailor?"
"Why, steady as she goes, Joey Mills! I shall make it one, Mother of
God, and you kissing his boots one day."
Ben forced himself around. In the act he lost the mast somehow, the
sloop gravely but mirthfully tossing his feet elsewhere. He fetched up
against the larboard rail and grasped it with all his power, retching.
The cackler was another mass of gray, small, hunched at the tiller, an
old man and shriveled, who observed Ben's situation with an
uncommunicating, not unfriendly eye, and cackled again and spat astern.
Shawn--the same Shawn and somehow not the same--was coming forward, the
green coat flapping about him as he swayed with perfect casual ease to
the sloop's leaning and rise and fall. "Your head'll be paining you,
Beneen, I know it and sorry I am for it, but without a bit of persuasion
you'd never have consented to come with old Shawn at all, I could see
that, the way I was forced to it entirely. O the poor landside dreams
that do hold a man, the pull of a hearthstone and the clutch of women!
You're free, Beneen--old Shawn hath set you free. Never you mind all
that now. Back below, man dear, and tell Dummy I said to give you a jolt
of rum. You'll not be standing watch the day. Tomorrow you shall,
beginning with the forenoon watch, that'll be eight o'clock of the
morning the way you measured time in the old days, man dear, the old
days you was a landsman, but now you go with Shawn, now you go with old
Shawn that knows the brave heart of you, and that better than you'll be
knowing it yourself, now that's no lie."
The Irishman was virtually singing. It penetrated the whirling agony of
Ben's head--a little. He mumbled uncomprehendingly, not understanding
with his brain, but understanding the event in his marrow maybe as
clearly as he had ever done in the year since then. Shawn watched him,
smiling, firm on the crazy deck like a weighted doll: let the world
swing upside down, that'll stay upright, no fear. "It was the drinks.
You drugged me," said Ben, not believing it, praying for denial.
"Ben, go below!" Shawn said that firmly but softly, not unkindly, and
moved away forward in rolling ease, the green back vanishing beyond the
mainsail, the dark riddle of him immediately replaced by the black
riddle of someone else. This also Ben would not believe, this gaunt
thing striding aft, its black eye-patch and its frozen smile. With no
effort, the one-eyed man of the Lion Tavern detached Ben's hands from
the rail. "Captain said go below," said Judah Marsh, and struck him in
the face.
Ben tumbled sprawling into the cabin. There Dummy supported him kindly
and fed him rum. There, presently, Ben understood how Jan Dyckman had
died. He began, a little, to understand why.
The gray haze of that day wore itself out to evening with no questions
answered except in the privacy of Ben's mind, and those without
finality. Rain was falling when he went on deck again. The headache was
receding, his body learning balance. He could not find the sun that
would have told him what way the sloop was bound. Now and then Shawn
passed him on the deck as if totally unaware of him. No one indeed
acknowledged his existence at all except a bulky black-haired man,
smooth-faced and young, who grinned at him in vacuous amiability. The
others called that man Manuel. But when Ben dared to ask him: "Where are
we bound?" Manuel shrugged and grinned and spread his hands, and shook
his head until Ben feared he might be another mute, and then said at
last: "Rain stop soon."
Manuel was right. Toward evening the drizzle ended, the overhanging
clouds receded, and a white ball appeared--low in the sky and standing,
as Ben faced the bow, on Ben's right hand. Manuel at that time was at
the helm, and Shawn stood near him, arms folded, disdaining any support.
He had been gazing off to the southwest, but now, since the blue-eyed
stare had swung around to Ben, Ben asked: "Mr. Shawn, are we tacking?"
Shawn cocked his head at Manuel in some understanding, and Manuel
grinned. "Now why would we be tacking, Beneen?"