"Bide the time then. It will be soon. I must speak with Mills and do one
or two other things."
Ben spoke quickly--already he heard the commotion of Dummy lurching up
from the forecastle with his monkey, and he was dizzy with the first
full understanding of what had taken place. _Well, damn it, I was
wishing to make things happen!..._ As he moved away from Ledyard the
man's whisper followed him: "Don't forget, those are the words, Mr.
Cory--Matthew Ledyard went back...."
The monkey had begun to ail when the fruit gave out, after the _Diana_
left the Bahamas, although she had endured other periods of poor eating
without harm. This morning she looked half dead in the great hairy
cradle of Dummy's arms. Dummy squatted with her at the foot of the
mainmast, crooning hopelessly. Sometimes in the last few days she had
swallowed a bit of sea biscuit if Dummy chewed the miserable stuff first
to soften it. This morning she would not, but only shivered in spite of
the sullen heat and twisted her wise black head away from the repulsive
mass. Ben on his way aft paused to consider them, aware that of the two
sorrowful ape-faces, Dummy's held the greater pain. The little black
beast was merely dying.
She had been lively and delighted with her new home after her capture
from the _Schouven_, learning every corner of the ketch--including the
galley, where she could engage in shrieking encounters with French Jack.
Since she returned continually, and never got anything there except
missiles and rhetoric unsuited to the tender sex, Ben deduced that
because of her streak of hoyden she must relish war for its own sake.
Jack never once scored a hit. Best of all she loved soaring in dizzy
flights all over the rigging, and hanging by her tail from the
crosstrees to contemplate the sky and the ocean and the ways of man. She
would come quickly down out of that for Dummy if he smacked his lips,
but not for anyone else--except, occasionally and with the air of
granting a favor, for Ben.
Now it seemed likely that her airy journeys were ended. Dummy gazed up
at Ben with the grieving eyes of an ape-mother, and Ben could find
nothing worth saying, but touched his finger to the tiny black bullet
head that paid him no heed. Dummy smiled in his loose bewildered way,
and Ben moved on.
Joey Mills was scuttling down the short companion ladder. Ben wished to
detain him, but Shawn had noticed Ben and called to him. Ben whispered
hastily: "I've spoke with Ledyard--he'll inform you what passed between
us. Tell him I said he was to do so--and wipe that surprise off your
face, quick!" Ben climbed to the quarterdeck, not glancing back to see
how much Joey had understood. Shawn in this reeking glare of morning
light looked old. No wrinkle, no scar of smallpox was spared, and none
of the white dust at his temples. His hand had a fine tremor and he
needed shaving.
"Mr. Ball," he said in a voice of weariness, "go below and get your
breakfast."
"Yea, sir--but it be'n't yet eight bells, and you'm not eat a bite since
yesterday noontime."
Shawn spoke with ugly patience: "I said go, and will I be explaining? I
wish to speak with Cory alone."
"Yea, sir." Ball made a vague motion at his forelock, and waddled past
Ben with a glance of remote dislike, muttering under his breath.
Shawn watched Ball's back out of sight. "Even he would desert me, had he
anywhere to go. He was not so fat and sullen when he sailed with John
Quelch--and escaped Quelch when I did--and listened when I told him of
the western sea, and seemed, like you, to be understanding it. I suppose
time's gone over all of us, and I alone faithful to the vision. Did I
not say they were all phantoms, all but you and me?"
"You wished to speak with me?"
"Cold, cold. It's the cold good morning I get from you."
"Did Judah Marsh have visions, Mr. Shawn?"
"Oh, Ben, Ben! Marsh is a tool to be used, a thing with a cutting edge
in the shape of a man. And Manuel is a lump of muscle, a sort of poor
engine for pulling ropes, in the shape of a man, and Dummy another, with
hardly even the shape. They're all phantoms, all but you and me."
"At this moment, your thing with hardly the shape of a man is grieving
like a mother over his pet that's like to die in a day or so."
"So? Well, what should that be to you?"
"Much, I find, Mr. Shawn. And I suppose no one ever found it comfortable
to cease being a boy."
"Hm? Your mind's running in strange courses. Maybe it's true you've come
to be something like a man. Wisha!" said Shawn, and tried to
smile--"nearly as tall as me, now that's no lie." His hand came out in
an abortive gesture of friendship, and fell to his side. "Dummy, Ben, is
what I made him. I found him on your foul Boston water front, sweeping
and carrying garbage in a warehouse. I sat down by him with a length of
rope and showed him sailor's knots, and he grinned and took the rope and
showed me he knew them too. Then, seeing he knows well what you say for
all he can't speak, I told him of the new countries in the western sea,
and the vision did strike fire in him--Mother of God, I saw it! Plainer,
more honest than I've seen it in many a man who hath all his wits and
the power of speech. And I said to him: 'Will you sail with me then?'
And he knelt in the filth of the warehouse and patted my boots. Poor
lump, have I not given him vision and purpose? Could I heal his dirty
monkey for him I would do it, now that's no lie. But I am not God,
Ben--only God's instrument. Now take this glass. It's there, Ben, but
when I try to bring the glass on it I lose it--it must be my eyes or
this damned blaze of light--yet without the glass I see it. Why, even
Ball saw it, but would have it a floating tree. A floating tree!" said
Shawn with thin bitterness, and smiled, and held out the spyglass.
Very far away it was, a dark smudged line at the angle of a rakish sail,
miles away over a flat sea where nothing stirred--no, something did stir
out there as Ben took the glass, a black triangle of fin cruising in
calm perhaps a quarter-mile to starboard, but Shawn was not concerned
with that, and Ben paid it no heed as he sought to bring the distant
shape under the power of the lens.
Ball was right. In the glass it was quite plainly a floating tree-trunk,
felled or uprooted by storm maybe a long time ago and swept here by the
whims of wind and current from God knew where. A single branch stood
upright at that deceiving angle; a heavier one submerged must have been
overbalancing it.
Ben was remembering an April afternoon when _Artemis_ came into Boston
harbor, and Faith stood beside him, and Daniel Shawn also was someone
new, both admirable and good. He was remembering certain acts of
kindness, of almost incredible forbearance, chess games, lessons with
the sextant, jests and tall stories told in moments of relaxation during
the long armed truce, and told without any overtones of madness or evil.
He was remembering above all the magic of a voice, and how the vision it
generated had stirred his own spirit with all the rocketing enthusiasm
of a boy and the more sober acceptance of a man--for surely, no matter
what madness and evil there were in Shawn, it was still as true as
sunrise that there must be new lands in the western sea, and some day
those would be discovered, and one could fairly trust (as Shawn said)
that all men's life on earth would be the richer for it. Remembering all
this, it seemed wholly impossible to Ben that he could actually do what
he now intended. He prayed for at least a little time of delay, and
hesitantly said: "Mr. Shawn, it seems we've swung full about during the
calm this morning. By the sun, I make it that our stem here is pointed
near due south, and so----"
"And the sail is southwest by west, and when I saw it last night it was
northwest, but Mother of God, Ben, I make nothing much of that. They
could have made a better run in the night than we did before the wind
fell away. Even if they be common men aboard her, that's possible. The
great thing--ah, have you sometimes thought me mad, Ben, until now?--the
great thing is, you see it too, and so you know I am not deluded. Now
give me back the glass. I'll try once more if I can't find her in it."
Ben knew he must no longer delay, or he could not do the thing at all.
He said: "The marks on her side will be the letters of her name--must
be mighty large to show at such a distance, I cannot quite make them
out, except there are three, and then a space, and then a D. The next
after the D may be a Y."
"Give me the glass!" Shawn snatched it and held it to his eye, but with
such wildly shaking hands that surely he would find nothing in it. The
sight of such weakness sickened Ben, yet at the same time gave him a
sense of his own power overwhelming as a wave, and of amazement that he
could ever have feared this man Shawn, or believed Shawn to be stronger
than himself.
Shawn's struggle with the spyglass was not prolonged.
Something--possibly sweat on his hands--caused the glass to slip and
fall to the deck with a sharp tinkle of breakage. Ben thought:
_Something broke in me then, and when he dies something in me will die
and no help for it._ He would have retrieved the glass for Shawn, but
Shawn stooped quickly, blood suffusing his face, and leaned at the rail
fumbling at it aimlessly, though he must have known when a shard of
broken glass fell from his fingers that the thing was smashed beyond
saving. "And didn't I know last night that I must meet them in a calm?
And alone. I was not told I would be blind also."
"Mr. Shawn----"
"Blind!" Shawn said, and hurled the spyglass far out over the flat
water, toward the black blade that calmly cruised in its wide circuit of
the motionless _Diana_.
"Mr. Shawn, Peter Jenks would speak for me, if I may enter the cabin.
Merely the sight of me would make him speak. Does he know I am aboard?"
"What? He knows it. I told him long ago you were one of us."
"Then you told him a lie, for I have never been one of your crew and
well you know it."
"But you will be," said Shawn, not commandingly but in pleading, almost
in pathos, and took hold of Ben's arm. "You will be."
Ben met the blue stare, knowing how in many ways it was truly blind, and
shook his head. "I can make Jenks speak, Mr. Shawn. You wish him to
speak, do you not?"
"What? Why, he must, if only to confess the sin. It's a very great sin
to steal a man's dream. I'd compel no man to die in it."
"What if he never did so, Mr. Shawn?"