Wilderness of Spring Part 28

"I could present you. Maybe a word from him would be of use?"

Shawn shook his head again and murmured: "The thought is kind, but look again, the way the time's inauspicious. Mr. Dyckman is the worse for drink, Beneen. Some other time."

Ben looked again, astonished, to find Jan Dyckman gazing directly at him without recognition, eyes rigid and damp. The eyes moved jerkily away and with dignity viewed a coin that Mr. Dyckman would have liked to raise from a wet spot on the bar. He must have been drinking elsewhere, to be so far gone. Abruptly Shawn was asking: "Have you ever had a woman?"

"Why, no, I--no, Mr. Shawn."

"And don't I remember that time of life, the ache of it? Ah, steady as she goes!--the fear too, boy, but devil any need of that. I'll take you to a house, and you agreeing."

"I--don't know. I suppose I ought to start soon for home."

Shawn seemed not to hear. "It's orderly is the place I'm thinking of, above a cordwainer's on Fish Street and next door to a grog shop, the which is convenient. Four girls and the madam--O the fine flow of conversation in her cups! She's that rambling you wouldn't know the thing she'd say. I'd have you hear how she was betrayed by an earl in London town, the way I'm thinking she was never no closer to England than a comfortable pile of sacking, maybe forninst a warehouse on one of the wharfs out yonder, but it's the fair fine tale." Ben fidgeted. "As for the rest, Beneen, a stallion will need but a moment to cover a willing mare, and in such a house they are willing. I recall a half-ugly wench who would be doing anything you like at all." Shawn laid a finger along his old-ivory pockmarked nose and smiled diamond-like. "I had her once--wasn't it like sinking into a warm dumpling fresh from the oven?

One of the others is handsome but cowlike--I'm a-mind to try her, though I fear she'll be watching a spot on the ceiling and do no more for a man's entertainment than if he was a wind at the door."

Ben pressed damp hands on the table to check a shaking in them, knowing with exasperation that Shawn must have seen it. Vague sounds at the bar gave him an excuse to turn away. Tom Ball and Jan Dyckman were leaving, Dyckman moving like a giant wooden doll, every step a separate achievement. When at length Ben turned back it seemed to him--but everything now was confused, the ale in him mumbling I-will-I-will-not--it seemed to him that Daniel Shawn was settling in his chair as if he too had just swung about, or risen perhaps, resuming his former position in the same moment when the one-eyed scarecrow stood up (not drunk at all) and stalked in the wake of Ball and Dyckman out of the tavern.

As he pa.s.sed Ben's table the thin man shot one downward glance. To Ben in the cold-hot worry of I-will-I-will-not it was like being jabbed by an icicle, and he could not even summon his wits to think about it, for Shawn was saying kindly: "It's the fresh air you need, Beneen, and I'm thinking of the old saying, a man's not quite a man till he's tried that bit of a doorway. So shall we go?"

Reuben left the cottage with the green shutters before the sun had entered the smudge of horizon clouds. He took the path across the back fields, his muscles lazy with the spring, his mind blazing.

Mr. Welland had not appeared surprised that Reuben should wish to study his art. He had not probed for motives; had not even inquired whether such ambition harmonized with Mr. Kenny's plans; had offered no large generalities of grave counsel. Alertness was the word: as though the doctor had caught something more than Reuben's words, and must listen sharply within his own universe to interpret the message.

Reuben had lived through a heavy time while Mr. Welland gazed at the completed chess game, his monkey face a stillness. Then--"Yes," said Mr.

Welland, "you and I must be friends. Yet I have never taught...."

The doctor spent much time laying the chessmen away in their plain box, the stillness remaining, his lips pursed, a dim frown coming and going.

He carried the box to a drawer of a battered cabinet, then stood before the single bookcase in his surgery, stoop-shouldered, elderly, pinching his small chin with thumb and forefinger. "Mm-yas--Vesalius. Not the most recent but still the best." He spread the tall book open on his desk. With the appearance of impatience he nodded for Reuben to come to him.

"This is a man," said Amadeus Welland. "You've glimpsed him, clad in garments, and in a skin--itself an organ of first importance, but forget it for the moment and look on him here, flayed. You can imagine, I suppose, what these are--these flowing, overlapping bands?"

"Muscles, surely?"

"Yes. Place your left hand by your right armpit, here, now draw your right arm leftward; what bunches under your fingers is this, here in the drawing, and the name of it is _Pectoralis major_, and you may find some little trouble in remembering it."

"I will try to remember it."

"I am glad you said 'try.' I have spent fifty-three years striving to overcome that vanity wherewith all men are born. You'll also try, and succeed, in remembering the names of all the other muscles in this drawing, and in this one where the fella turns you his flayed back, and in all these other drawings further on. You will reflect that muscles, while of major importance, are not more important than all the organs that live below them in their manifold occasions--since these also you must remember, all of them, their names, their functions so far as we know them, the many changes that will affect them in youth and age, sickness and health. Here, for example, is the diagram of the bony frame that bears us. When my own studies began I had first to learn these bones--all of them, naturally, their names, position, function whether in action or repose--mm-yas, as you will. I do recall my teacher once struck me across the face with a dry bone called the radius--this one--because I called it the ulna, for the which I later praised him--with reservations."

"Reservations, sir?"

"It was possible for him," said Mr. Welland lightly, and took snuff. "It would not be possible for me to strike--a student. Fi-_choo_-shoo! And here, sir, is a representation of the human heart...."

When Reuben next glanced at the clock in Mr. Welland's surgery, another hour had pa.s.sed. "There will be times," said Mr. Welland, removing a gray cat from a cus.h.i.+on on a three-legged stool by the western window, where she had slept through the lesson, so that he might sit on the stool himself with the late sun behind his shoulder--"times, I guess, when your eyes grow tired in candlelight; other times when you'd much prefer to go outside and play--as you must do fairly often, but not of course at times when you're unable to remember, for example, _all_ the occasions when laudanum may be given and those when it may not. And so on, Reuben, and so on and so on--I've merely mentioned a few things that come first to mind," said Mr. Welland, and rubbed his eyes. Reuben could not see his face very clearly against the light....

Crossing the back fields, Reuben pa.s.sed through a clump of trees, and from the other side could look across a better-known field to the roof of Mr. Kenny's house. He leaned against a beech, discovering that he was hungry, that it would be enjoyable to pester Kate for something unauthorized in advance of supper. The wind had s.h.i.+fted behind him, now easterly; the broad hard body of the beech was a friend.

There was too much: Reuben knew he could not immediately bring order to any such welter of new impressions and discoveries. Hungry, yes, but let that wait; and the questions about himself that he had timorously half-intended to ask Mr. Welland--let them wait too. Too much for now--like a runner exhausted, he must rest, and was even reluctant to go on to the house. Better for the moment only to stand here in the failing daylight, friendly with the beech and needing (for the moment!) no other friend.

Rising from that stool, disturbing the cat again and taking pencil and paper at his desk, Mr. Welland had made a few light loving strokes.

"You draw with great skill, sir."

"Thank you--practice. And this woman's breast I have drawn--beautiful, you would say?"

"Yes, it is."

"Yes, I should think so, to anyone, although I fear my poor sketch claims only accuracy and not art. But 'tis beautiful, as you say, the thing itself--maketh one to think of the lover's kiss, or of a child's mouth here drinking life." He began another drawing. "This is what I have seen not once but too many times, when this organ is afflicted with certain kinds of destroying tumor." Reuben watched, shaken and sickened but refusing to turn away until the doctor sat back from his desk, murmuring: "You understand, Mr. Cory, I am merely trying to frighten and demoralize you with selected sc.r.a.ps of truth."

"I killed a wolf once," said Reuben Cory, refusing to look away.

"Tell me of that."

Reuben told of it, reluctant to meet the doctor's look because of what the man had said a while ago about vanity, but finding no great difficulty in the telling. After all it was not brag. It had happened.

"I shall speak to Mr. Kenny," said Amadeus Welland. "Perhaps an apprentices.h.i.+p? Or better a year or so of preparation, to determine for yourself if this be really what you wish, in such time as may be allowed from your other studies--which are not to be neglected, Reuben, not ever, you understand? Show me a man of medicine who hath found himself too busy for other fields of learning, and you will have shown me an educated d.a.m.ned fool."

"I can't----"

"Reuben, if thanks be appropriate, let them wait. I may have done thee no service. I have only pointed out one or two signposts on a most heartbreaking journey. But if that is the way you will go--I am fifty-three, Reuben, not very successful and not at all loved here in Roxbury--if that is the way you will go, I'll go with you as far as I may."

Ben Cory ducked his head to clear the doorframe, unused even yet to being rather tall, following Daniel Shawn with the precarious poise of a man of the world. The room in many ways resembled a cavern, its air stale-scented and much used, with bat-rustlings from other chambers. The shriveled woman squeezed his damp hands, twittering, her pink cheeks like summer apples as they look after a winter in the cellar, powdery and dull within but retaining a characteristic cloying sweetness. "Any friend of yours, Mr. Shawn--ooh, look at the great gray eyes of him!"

Mistress Gundy patted the pleat of her lips every moment or two, maybe enjoying a silent burp. "What do I call you, dearie?" She trotted away with small bobbing steps, to plump into an armchair and smile and sigh.

"Cat's got his tongue, la. So he loseth nothing else, no harm done, ha, Mr. Shawn? What do I call the pretty young gentleman that's lost his pretty tongue, Mr. Shawn? Won't have anything lost in _my_ place, and me trying so hard to keep everything agreeable, ha, Mr. Shawn?"

"Just Benjamin," said Shawn, and straddled a chair, watching the old woman with somber upturned eyes, a darkness in him. Ben thought, with alcoholic irrelevance, that if Shawn were to reach out and squash poor Mistress Gundy with a twist of a sailor's thumb, she would pop like any defenseless bug, but none of them need be astonished, Mistress Gundy least of all. But at one time she had been a child, a growing maid....

"Just Benjamin will do," said Shawn, and spat in the fireplace.

"Oh, marry will he, I'm sure." Mistress Gundy giggled and remained genteel.

"Anything new here, Nanny?"

"A'n't it alway new, Mr. Shawn?"

"That it is not, and never was unless maybe for Adam, the poor sod, and for a boy the first time but not the second. Nanny, I'm wanting Laura for the boy. For meself I don't care--anything that'll bear me weight a moment."

"_Mister_ Shawn, such a manner of conversation! Will you not mend, sir?"

He only looked at her. "Well, Master Just Benjamin, dearie, Laura it shall be, and she so fresh and lovely, I'm sure, you'll be most content, I'm sure."

Ben cleared his throat, mindful of Shawn's rambling advice in the evening street. "Would you wish something to drink, Mistress Gundy, that we might have sent up from next door?"

"Nay, I knew he'd find it, and with pleasant speech!" She cut her eyes at Shawn to make that a reproach, but he was remote, observing only the embers, or the South Pacific. "Well, dearie, 'tis early on in the evening for it, but since you speak of it and so pleasantly, a trifle to wet the whistle would not go amiss." She patted her lips. "For my part, sir, ever since I resided in London I have been partial to a bit of hot b.u.t.tered rum of a chilly evening, to settle the rifting-up and keep out the cold. It's the Boston air, sir. Never do I grow accustomed to it, that I never."

"Yes," said Ben.