Wilderness of Spring Part 17

"I would not," said Reuben, "utter any gratuitous multiloquence which could be construed as a detraction, libel or impudicitous derogation of another man's periwig."

"I yield. You know bigger and sillier words than I do."

"Then will you tell me, sir, what on earth you were looking for over there by the pond?"

"Mm-yas," said Mr. Welland, "the pond. Why, I've been longing for years to learn how peeper frogs peep. Don't have much time to ramble--difficult for a doctor to break away, but now and then I do, with the excuse of hunting for herbs. I heard 'em peeping hereabouts, thought at last I might catch 'em at it. No such thing. They hide when I peep at 'em, and devil a peep will they peep. Why's that?"

"Too near them, sir, and not still enough. You should have sat well away from the water, with no motion for at least a quarter-hour."

Deliberately Mr. Welland took snuff from an enameled box, and sneezed, a light explosion with a double after-echo. "Fi-_choo_-shoo!... Mr. Cory, I take it they have peeped in your presence?"

"Oh yes. The little throats swell up enormous and they shake all over."

To soften the blow Reuben added: "I'm sure they would for you, Mr.

Welland. Merely a matter of making yourself look like a rock."

"At my age I'm to imitate a boulder--boulder and yet more bold."

"Paronomasia," said Reuben. "The ultimate in wit."

"Boo! You imitated a rock rather well yourself. I never heard a sound.

When I first saw you I thought I had to do with one of the Little People."

"Ah! The invisible world!" Daringly Reuben made horns of his fingers and waggled them. He was very happy, no longer much concerned to wonder why.

"Might I ask further, why you don't find it strange that I should spend my declining years endeavoring to watch frogs peep?"

Reuben considered. "I think everything is interesting."

"Oh!" That was a startled sound, without laughter. Mr. Welland looked away from him so long that Reuben's pleasure clouded over. He could have gone too far; said something wrong; happiness and friends.h.i.+p could tumble, an air-castle in ruins. Mr. Welland was holding out the snuffbox, closed. "Try if you can discover the catch. If you can I'll tell you who gave it me."

Reuben studied it, aware he was being tested in some way that went far beyond the trifling problem. The box was of ebony, the sides covered with intricate carving of grape leaves. The enameled picture inset in the cover displayed a naked goat-leg fellow plucking a cl.u.s.ter from a vine. Since pressure on the carving brought no result, Reuben methodically tried lifting the leaves With a thumbnail until one yielded and the box was open.

"Mph!--most persons spend half an hour and give it up. Well, it was given me--worthless keepsake, he said--by Sir Thomas Sydenham, when as a young man stuffed with mine own importance I called upon him at London.

He was most kind. Corrected my quant.i.ties, I recall, when I ventured a Latin tag in what he tolerantly called my vile colonial accent. He died, I believe, in the year of the revolution, 1689--so you see, Reuben, time and change, and we grow old somehow." Reuben thought: But he is not speaking to himself in the far-off way of the old; he is speaking to _me_, and for _my_ sake.... "Perhaps you never heard of Sir Thomas?"

"No, sir, I never did."

"He hath been called the English Hippocrates--an exaggeration, but a great man certainly, I think the greatest in medicine since Harvey."

"Harvey?"

"There are gaps in your learning after all. I'll be happy to tell you about Harvey if you like. About Signor Malpighi too, who as it happens discovered the presence of the capillaries by dissecting the lung of a frog. Not one of your frogs of course. Some Swiss or Italian frog, unknown benefactor of science."

"Did you think, sir, I was all vain because I like to make comical noises with big words?"

"No, sir. On reflection--no; I did not think that."

"I've been called--oh, flippant or the like, because it seems I do now and then laugh at the wrong time."

"Who calls you that?"

"Oh!... My tutor for one, but meaneth no harm by it. Actually he's very kind, and I suppose I try him badly, but then by chance I'll p.r.o.nounce some Latin quant.i.ty correctly or come unscathed through the horrid jungle of some Greek verb, and he forgiveth all."

"M. Cory, I have been sitting here fearing that perhaps _I_ had laughed at the wrong times, and that you might regard me as--mm-yas, flippant or the like."

"I do not."

"In that view of the case, perhaps you and I ought to be friends."

"As a matter of fact," said Reuben, "I thought we already were."

South of Boston Neck the road to Roxbury entered a desolate mile between the waters of Gallows Bay on the east and a waste of salt marsh. Here the smell of the sea was all about you; above, a meager crying of gulls in the windy daytime. Near Roxbury the salt flats and Gallows Bay were partly hidden by woods and rocky knolls. Lights were said to wander this mile of road at night, not fireflies nor lanterns of vessels on Gallows Bay, which had honestly earned its name.

Efforts had been made to pave the road during the last sixty or seventy years. Stones rose up and walked. Hence derived grave democratic discussion and heartburning: if you have all the rocks of New England to draw upon, there's still nothing so pleasing as a paving block to support the sills of a barn, especially if it be cut as G.o.d might have left it in a state of nature, so that no town father can lay his hand on his heart and swear it came from the particular hole where his horse broke a leg.

Ben Cory watched a soaring of white wings tipped with black as a gull drifted out of sight over the marshes. Out here the white-headed eagles came at times, lesser life falling quiet. Lordly, Uncle John called them, but said they were cowardly pirates too, and told once how he had watched them circle about till other birds rose with hard-won fish, and then torment them into yielding it. Ben wondered as the gull vanished, why he should think of the man Daniel Shawn. He had missed something Uncle John was saying, and clucked to his mare. "Your pardon, sir?"

"I was saying Mr. Jenks had three daughters, Faith, Hope and Charity.

Hope died as an infant. Charity's but a young thing...."

"Faith is--charming, I thought."

"She is," said Uncle John with total dryness. "Ben, I wish your opinion of that fat man, that new bosun Tom Ball."

"My opinion?" Flattered and fl.u.s.tered, Ben drew his wits away from the dream of Faith. "He's short of words certainly, Uncle John. He only showed me about the deck while you was engaged with Mr. Dyckman, and I don't recall he said more than half a dozen words, and that in so thick a talk--Devon, isn't it?--I missed much of it. That's not fat, Uncle John, that's mostly brawn, I believe.... I don't like it, sir, when a man stares at me long without winking. They say it's the candid way, but I feel more as if he was defying me to call him a liar."

"Eh, Benjamin, you're somewhat sharp. I don't like him either, but Mr.

Jenks calls him a good sailor. Ay, Devon, where my father was born--within sound of the Channel, he used to say, and could speak of the old country pleasantly when he was not laying about him as the Lord's own interpreter and flail...."

"You said Mr. Jenks never visits about ash.o.r.e?"

"Mph!... Ben, when you're a man grown, should you find yourself a little too fond of drink, I suggest you resist it, even sometimes at cost of being named a poor thing, canting killjoy or whatever. 'Tis a matter of being your own man. Should you find--by your own judgment, boy--that drinking interferes with that, don't drink. Did you like Mr. Shawn?"

"Yes, sir, I did like him, very much. Are you telling me indirectly, Uncle John, that Captain Jenks----?"

"I am." Mr. Kenny halted his gray gelding on a rise of ground. "I like to pause here, Ben, where you see only the roofs and little threads of smoke.... Yes, he's something a slave to it, though never aboard s.h.i.+p.

At sea he allows his men the ration and not a drop for himself. But ash.o.r.e he must fall into another sea, of liquor--drifting, helpless, I don't know what stops him from sinking altogether. Blameth it on the moon and tides--his fancy. He told me once how in the dark times of the moon at sea he goes near mad with need of it but won't yield--then I dare say it'll go hard with every man aboard. The moon's his friend in some manner--he's well enough when she's waxing full, sad and bitten by his need when she waneth, noticed it a thousand times. I told him who Artemis was in the legends of the Greeks, virgin huntress and G.o.ddess of the moon. He was pleased, and turned on my ketch a newly loving eye. A troubled man, Benjamin. Knoweth well what is right, but no one ever tells him, no preacher or any other. Having shaken hands with him at last, I dare say you can imagine why few would undertake it."

"My hand still aches.... Sir, do you think that if I--I mean when I go to Harvard, I shall know what I wish to do, that is for a life's work?"

So it was spoken, the doubt that had been nagging his days.

"I trust so, Ben." And was that all? Ben wondered--was that all the old man would say? A gust of wind full of the sea smell blew across Ben's shoulder and sent a last year's oak leaf scurrying down the road. The wind's embrace was cold, the leaf a reminder of autumn in the flood of spring. "You know I concur in the wish your father expressed in his last moments: you and Reuben must acquire learning. But then the decision must be with you. If you should decide to take up my affairs when I'm done with 'em, why, I'll be pleased, more perhaps I shouldn't say.

Trade, commerce--it's not dull, Ben, so long as one keeps the wit alive with a private philosophy. Our holy friends make great show of despising it, the while it keeps them and the rest of us fed and clothed. It might not suit Reuben--well well, let time work a little on it, boy.... If you should come to see it that way, remember s.h.i.+ps are the thing, and there our dirty Boston's got 'em all by the nose. Never be a port in the Americas to match her, never."

Daringly Ben murmured: "What about Newport?"

"Pretty little harbor. I hear they never let anybody p.i.s.s off the docks--afraid of flooding it, you know. Now New York might come to something one day, if they ever find the wit to use what nature gave 'em. Like you to see New York some time, maybe after the war, the way the river comes down wide and grand past miles of cliffs on the west.