"I thought so. I thought so, Ben."
"If you'll call Manuel aft, whose eyes are good as mine----"
"Manuel is it? Have I time for the witless, when--but I may have been
deceived. Not there, you say, and I'm believing you. Nothing?"
"Nothing. Sometimes, Mr. Shawn, I've been fooled at night by a whale's
spouting. The spray of him seems to hang in the air a while, and I
suppose moonlight may lend it the look of a sail." Shawn laughed a
little, his breathing slower. He seemed not annoyed that an untamed pup
should be instructing him concerning sea-born illusions. "Well, do you
take the helm again, and this'll be your bearing, steady as she goes."
"May I ask, Mr. Shawn, is this course for Martinique?"
"It seems to be gone and that's the truth, and yet I could have
sworn--what? Martinique? Why, if my reckoning is right, her present
course maintained will bear her a very far way to the east of
Martinique."
"Nothing before us then but the South Atlantic."
"The Line, the South Atlantic, and the Horn. No more waiting. No more of
this petty cruising about. No more--piracy. Do you hear me?"
"Less than a year ago I might have jumped at the sound of that."
"Not now?"
"You're not speaking to a boy now, Mr. Shawn."
"'Deed so, friend? When did that happen?"
"Who can ever say? It happened.... Mr. Shawn, I've asked you a dozen
times, and have been refused, and now I say again: I wish to go in that
cabin and speak with Captain Jenks."
"And I'll be telling you for maybe the hundredth time, Ben, he is not
captain of this or any other vessel.... Ben, with all the charity I've
seen in you, can you not hear a man acknowledge his error? I said, no
more piracy. I have done wrong, almost betraying my purpose. I say
now--and this is like something you once said to me yourself--henceforth
I will not lift my hand against any man except to defend my life and my
purpose. Jenks?--why, I think he can be released, and you too if it must
be so. I shall be forced to put in at some Brazilian port for water and
provisions, and there, I think--well, we shall see. Can I say more?"
"Yes, you could, Mr. Shawn, because I'm asking you again: Why do you
hold him at all? Mills says you question him continually, and he answers
nothing."
"That's true." Shawn gazed steadily northward, at the open sea. "Answers
nothing, and will any man hold such a silence with nothing to hide?"
"_Hide_, Mr. Shawn? Captain Jenks, hide?"
"Must I say again, he is not captain now?... Ben, did you know I spent
more than a year in that sorry city of Boston?"
"No, how should I?"
"Oh, you might've.... More than a year, seeking support for the greatest
venture a man's spirit ever conceived. I was ignored, laughed at,
brushed aside. I sought out the merchants, for behind all the pious
canting they've become the rulers of your Boston and I suppose you know
it. Sought 'em out one after another, and spilled my heart, the while
they looked at my poor clothes and shuffled their feet and remembered
important business. I sought audience with your Governor Dudley
himself--Mother of God, would he even admit me to the bloody presence?
Queen Anne's man, body and soul.... Somehow, Ben--and mark this, I pray
you--at some time that miserable year, the story was passed about that I
had been with John Quelch. And--why, damn their souls, so I was, for a
while. I did ship with him, being penniless and starving, and escaped
him as soon as I might. He was evil, Ben, a common pirate, it was right
he should hang. I served him briefly, I did that, having no choice, and
the rumor of it was made a cause why I should be persecuted, ignored,
laughed at, brushed aside. Compassed about.... And still, didn't I ask
far less than was asked by Cabot, Drake, Magellan? A trifle of support,
mind you, a tiny fleet, a sound crew, a charter to explore--don't you
see any man of them might have compounded his fortune a hundred times
and written his name in history beside my own? But would they? You know
the answer, and they shall know the whole of it too, in time.... And
somehow, Ben--while I went from one to another wearing my heart
out--somehow a few of them did finally understand a little of what I so
recklessly told concerning this venture. Certain of them began to think:
Why not the venture without the man? You see? Have you ever heard of
such a thing as stealing a man's dreams?"
"What has this to do with Captain Jenks?"
"Surely it's plain? The man you childishly call Captain was one of those
who began to ask themselves: What if this wild, shabby, tedious Irishman
hath glimpsed something of value after all? What if there _are_ new
lands for the taking in the western sea, and why should this miserable
noisy Sligo man, this old Shawn, why should _he_ have any part of it?...
Why, I couldn't believe this of Peter Jenks myself for a long
time--never came to me that he was one of 'em, till he hired that man
Hanson in the room of me--and that in despite of your great-uncle."
"But----"
"Whisht, Ben! You'll be telling me your great-uncle gave me no promise
hard and fast, but I know men's hearts. But for Jenks, I'd've had my
way, and glory in it for Mr. Kenny as well as me, don't you doubt it. It
wasn't to be. When he took on that agent Hanson, sure my voice was plain
enough, I could see how they'd been planning it all the while. You see
now, don't you? Had I not taken _Artemis_ from him, Jenks would have her
now the other side of the Horn, and Boston would never see her again.
But I, Ben--why, I shall give her back the name of _Artemis_, and I'll
send her home, when she's taken us to the new country...." In the
silence Ben caught the glint of something--merely the copper farthing;
at length Shawn spoke again, quietly: "True, Ben--nothing before you now
but the Line, and the South Atlantic, and the Horn. Nothing below you
but the Atlantic. And once on a time wasn't I a boy of your age who
believed that God was over me?" He was moving away. Ben thought he might
be weeping, but his voice often sounded so when his eyes were dry. "And
over you, over all that breathe. Oh, but in those days I was that young
and foolish you wouldn't know the misguided thoughts that would seize
hold of me and deceive, for the voices I heard then were not God's
voice, they were far other. Maybe even now I'm not certain of anything,
except that I cannot die until I've looked again on the color of the
western sea." He returned swift and silent out of the shadow and stood
close to the helm, eyes level with Ben's; no taller than Ben. Not even
as tall, perhaps. "What now? Why did I say that, Ben? Why did I say, the
_color_ of the western sea?"
Ben supposed his right hand could flash away from the tiller to his
belt, if it must. "How could I know why you say any of the things you
do?"
"Ah? But you must sail with me, all the way. Will you not say it? Will
you be forcing me to destroy you? Then I'll be alone, Ben. These men
with us--what are they but phantoms, all of 'em? Knife 'em, they'd bleed
smoke--not blood, Ben--smoke, and drift away downwind. None aboard but
you and me, now that's no lie...."
But Ben, for sheer pity and disgust, terror and bewilderment, self-blame
and homesickness and again pity, could not speak at all, and Shawn moved
away, himself like smoke, past another black shadow by the mizzen that
must have heard all he said; at this Shawn snarled: "If the wind
changes, Mr. Marsh, you needn't be calling me--I shall know it."
Under Ben's hand beautiful _Diana_ ran southward, cutting away the miles
with a timeless whisper at her bow; but during the night the wind fell
off, the air growing dull, silent, and in the morning dead. The sun rose
on sails become slack, bemused in idleness on a mirror sea.
* * * * *
"I wondered, in fact, that she had not long ago destroyed herself in one
of those seizures."
"They seldom do, Reuben, though often they injure themselves. She is
nearly forty, that woman we saw today--I've known her bite her tongue
and bruise herself, but nothing worse. As a rule they die somewhat
young. It's as well you saw her so--the condition is not too rare and
you'll encounter it again."
"And the books?"
"Have nothing to offer but speculation and bad advice. Nothing I've
tried ever had the slightest effect.... What's that?--I mean the one
that called from back there in the pasture."
"Red-winged blackbird."
"I wish I knew 'em all, the way you do."
"Brought up with 'em in the wilderness, Amadeus. But nobody could know
them all.... Do the books tell anything of the cause?"
"Nothing worth your notice. Speculation, most of it not based on
clinical observation. And (as you suggest) without at least some
knowledge of immediate causes, treatment's only a blind groping. We must
try it of course, because sometimes a guess is correct. But somehow we
must also push back along the chain of causes--widen the area of
light--somehow.... As you may or may not know, there are many going
about in the world far madder than that poor epileptic, who is not
really mad at all but merely drops into her fit from time to time, and
usually comes out of it unharmed. A fearful thing to watch, Ru--I dare
say you still feel it in your stomach. But some of the forms of madness
that don't so loudly announce themselves are much worse."
"The world may be a mad place, Amadeus, but there go the peeper frogs. I
told you they might, on such an afternoon."
"So they do. You don't suppose----?"
"If we continue to the pond, they'll stop. However, should we then squat
patient in our boots, the thing might be done--imitating boulders, you
know. We might, as it were, rock ourselves into the semblance of a
natural outgrowth."
"Who now hath plumbed the depths of a contumelious paronomasia?"
"Ha!"
"That log looks more comfortable."
"If the ants on it are black, yes. If red, no."
"They look black, the few I see. Is there a difference?"
"Oh, my friend! How did you survive till I came to you?"
"Don't know."
"Yes, they're black.... By the madder ones, you mean the raving kind?
Those with wild delusions?"
"Those, and others. I was thinking of the quieter sort, who are seldom
called mad. Men and women eaten up with suspicion. So that--I think
you've never encountered this, but beware of it if you do--so that
everything happening within their purview must be bent to the shape of
that suspicion; and to hear them talk you'd suppose the whole world was
allied in conspiracy against them. I'd guess that such a state of mind
is begotten of a most fearful vanity. And what evil is commoner than
vanity? Of course that particular sickness of the mind is only one of
its fruits. How seldom do you find anyone who hath ever attempted to
look on his own life with something like the eye of eternity! But
without at least some detachment, vanity is bound to grow."
"As for example the seeming humility of proper Christians?"
"Oh, that, yes--but don't trouble thyself too much about that. It would
seem they need it. Well, and there are those madder ones devoured by
jealousy, spite, greed, and fears of a hundred kinds, mostly groundless.
It's no-way true that all is vanity, but I think you may say that vanity
is the source of nearly all the saddest things in human nature. Nay, I
think our poor wench with the fits, by comparison with many respectable
souls, is quite sane."
"And so what is madness?"
"Do thou tell me, thou who gavest me once a definition of health that
serves me still."
"A--a gross exaggeration of some natural activity of the mind? 'Lilies
that fester....'"
"I'm pleased I made thee discover the Sonnets. Yes, that might serve....
But the hunger for verifiable knowledge--now there's an activity of the
mind, natural I think, but sluggish or nonexistent in most men, and in a
few like thee and me, very intense: are we then mad?"
"If such hunger for knowledge became painful or annoying to others,
Amadeus, I am sure we would be called mad."
"Mm-yas--thought I'd caught thee, but (as usual) I'm caught instead. So
consider--would you say there are _any_ activities of the mind that
would not deserve the name of madness if sorely exaggerated?"
"Maybe none. That hunger for knowledge could become a thing _I'd_ call
madness, if the pursuit of it caused a man to neglect too many other
matters--such as sunlight and peeper frogs and Charity's pictures and
the brightness of a swallow flying."
"I'll agree. I dare say anything out of proportion may become a madness.
Even generosity. Even love."
"But Amadeus, I do ever think that love is not a thing, but more like a
region where we travel. Something of that I said once to Ben. I can't
remember when it was, and he may not have understood it--I'm sure I said
it badly. Like a region, where we travel with--oh, some vision, some of
the time. As sleep is like a region, and waking. Do I still say it
badly, Amadeus? I mean that no one can give his friend a handful of
sunlight, but may walk in it with him, and so love him."
* * * * *
After scant and haunted sleep, Ben woke to stillness where motion should
have been. Stumbling up on deck long before the beginning of the
forenoon watch, he saw Shawn on the quarterdeck deep in a stillness of
his own, ignoring Tom Ball who muttered at him, and Joey Mills who stood
by the helm but had nothing to do there, for the _Diana_ had lost all
way, the sails were dead rags, and if some profound current still moved
her there was nothing to tell of it in this deathlike air under a brazen
sun.
Ben remained forward, to avoid Shawn. Matthew Ledyard was lounging near
the bow with nothing to do. His stare was not unfriendly; he even wished
Ben a laconic good morning. Maybe he wanted to break his custom and
share a word or two out of his permanent gloom. Like Ben, in these
tropic days Ledyard had discarded shirt and jacket, wearing nothing
above his belt but a kerchief around his head to moderate the sun and
hold sweat out of his eyes. His gaunt chest was darkly tanned; it had
never seemed to Ben that the purple splash on Ledyard's face was
particularly ugly--once you grew used to it, it was a nothing, no more
than another man's scar or mole. Unnecessarily Ledyard said: "We're in
for a calm."
For several days a carrion reek had corrupted the air of the forecastle,
and the murky hell-hole of the galley where French Jack prepared his
strange offerings. Likely more barrels of the salt cod had gone bad and
ought to be hunted out. Mr. Ball claimed the whole dirty cargo was
spoiled and should be heaved overside, but French Jack explained that
cod smelt that way anyhow; in spite of the pride of a Boston man, Ben
was inclined to agree. With no breeze to sweep the nastiness away, the
stench overhung the deck also, as though the _Diana_ herself were
exhaling corruption in a mortal sickness. To come up into this from the
fetid forecastle was for Ben like waking to a continuation of nightmare.
He was in a mood to fume and curse at anyone--particularly at Shawn, and
that not for the large and just reasons, but simply for a certain
standing order that forbade any of the hands to sleep on deck. For
Ledyard, however, Ben managed a smile and a grunt of agreement. "Hope I
may spend some of my trick aloft."
"Ay--stinks, don't it?" And Ledyard startled Ben exceedingly by adding:
"Like a dead man's dream it is. A fair hope gone rotten."
Ben grew alert. Ledyard had never said anything like that to him before.
"Maybe it'll be as bad at the masthead. This morning I believe we could
stink out Father Neptune himself. Is no one aloft?"
"I was. Captain called me down. Seems dem'd foolish even to him to keep
a lookout now--if we're becalmed so's everything else that might be
about." He glanced aft and continued, a murmur in his smallest voice:
"Cory, him and Mr. Ball was just now speaking of breaking out the boat
and towing her. Understand that? Take at least six men at the oars to
move her. Six men in a boat, in this sun, nothing to their bellies but
p'ison stew or salt cod.... Step further away from the hatch, will you?"
He lounged away to the bow, and Ben followed him as casually as he
might, noticing how, with no way on her at all, the Diana had at some
time since the wind died turned completely about, her lifeless bow
pointing homeward to the north. Ben stood with the blaze of the morning
sun behind him and watched the fire of it on the battlefield of
Ledyard's face. "You might say, Cory, if so be he wants to kill all us
mis'able scrannel hands, us buggerly rascals, that's what he'll do. Just
get us out there at the oars in the sun, to tow the old bitch, that's
all it needs." His browned sturdy arms spread out along the rail,
Matthew Ledyard looked much like a man crucified, his dark face
unflinching in the sun. "And I wonder would you be out there too--Mister
Cory? Pulling an oar? With your charmed young life, so even the tropic
sun won't strike you down? Or back here on the deck belike, so to sail
with Captain Shawn when the rest of us is maybe dried up and burnt too
black to stink? Or will you now be trundling aft to tell the Captain
what old Ledyard said to you?"
Ben dropped his hand on the man's iron wrist. It did not move away.
Ledyard's intense stare did not seem to be one of wrath, for all his
words. "I have never carried tales to Shawn and you know it."
"Ya-ah--maybe I do know it. Maybe I wished to learn if you could ever be
angered any way at all."
"I can." Ledyard's heavy brows lifted; his brown eyes in the sun
squeezed down to little fires. "I can, and since you're a-mind to speak
to me at last, I'll say this: the hope was never fair, it was rotten in
the beginning, and I told him so. He lets me live because he imagines he
can change me into one like himself, no other reason. He cannot. As for
me, I swallow the puky food and haul on the ropes and jump to Marsh's
orders because I wish to live, no other reason. I'm not Shawn's man."
"Whose then?"
"My own."
"That'd be the hard thing to prove in the sight of God."
"And you shall be your own man, nothing less."
"Shall I so?" Ledyard winced heavily and turned his face away from the
beating of the sun at last, but Ben tightened his grip. "How could that
be, now? You don't know, boy, you don't know----"
"Why, I say it shall be."
"And who a devil's name are you? A boy--a----"
"Benjamin Cory, son of Joseph Cory of Deerfield, adopted son of Mr. John
Kenny of Roxbury, who owns this ketch. Look back at me!"
Ledyard did so, plainly with great effort--changed; certainly without
wrath, perhaps even without curiosity. It seemed to Ben that what he
must say was only something that Ledyard would surely have been saying
to himself, and for a long time. "You will believe it, Matthew Ledyard,
so now listen to me. She is not the old bitch. She is the ketch
_Artemis_ out of Boston, and the man who's a second father to me, whom
you served well for nearly the length of my life--he had a hand in
designing her. My brother and I climbed about on her ribs when she was
a-building up the Mystic River--you were there. Since those days I have
loved her, as Kenny's vessel and mine, sir, _mine_--and you were her
carpenter, and Peter Jenks is her captain." Ledyard groaned at the sound
of that name and jerked his hand away and pounded it on the rail. Ben
reached out quickly and tapped his purple cheek. "Look back at me, I
say! Chips--what's the name of this ketch?"
"The ketch is the _Artemis_," he said, harshly and choking on it. "Step
away from me, Cory, or they'll notice us from the quarterdeck."
Ben did so, instinct urging him to wait, to look away, to lounge at the
bow in the semblance of idleness till Ledyard's whisper came: "What will
you do?"
"Who would be with us?"