Wilderness of Spring Part 48

On a May night a year ago, when Reuben and Gideon Hibbs and Mr. Kenny had searched the water front, such a mist had hung low on the sullen water of the harbor. That mist too had grown after a while, a white tide rising over the warehouses and idle docks, blotting vision, smothering and diffusing the nervous beams of lanterns and the sounds of frightened voices wiry in the throat. Every plank bore a slime of dampness; the cordage of sleeping s.h.i.+ps was dripping with a whisper of slow tears.

Night transformed the water front to a labyrinth dreary, foul and perilous. Seldom any freshly illuminated face looked back at you bravely there at night, unless it might be that of a drunken man too sodden to be afraid. The smooth fogbound water of the bay had possessed no voice that night except at the piling of the wharfs where, fumbling and muttering secretly, it encountered the transitory obstruction of the works of man.

_Where are you? Where are you?..._

Constable Derry had lent the searchers a st.u.r.dy man from the Select Watch. It was that man who discovered the floating corpse, its arm caught in a tangle of rope that had most unreasonably been knocked or thrown off a dock not far from Mr. Kenny's, and he identified the broken old man as a watchman hired by that wharf's owner Mr. Harkness. Waked and summoned in the saddest hours of the night, little Mr. Harkness danced up and down on the dock in rage. "She was _here_!" he fumed. "I paid forty-six pounds for her, and that only last week." "This man, sir----" "Yes yes, my watchman, poor devil. I tell you she was _here_!

Went aboard of her myself." Tactfully Mr. Derry's man extracted the information that Mr. Harkness was referring to a sloop, a swift rangy craft of twenty tons--gone, but by Mr. Harkness not forgotten.

Reuben had taken no part in this inquisition. Until that hour it had been possible to imagine that Ben had ridden away somewhere--say into the countryside, to think, cool off his disappointment; he could even be waiting for them at Roxbury. Hibbs and Uncle John seemed still able to cling to something like that, to suppose that the poor dripping ruin on the dock, its head crushed in the back, had nothing to do with Ben and that devil Shawn. Reuben could do so no longer. _Where are you?_ The question could be directed nowhere except into the rolling fog and the dark.

The following day, after dragging out the remainder of a crazed sleepless night, Reuben felt it merely as the confirmation of something known, when he learned that a stevedore had brought Mr. Derry the decisive sc.r.a.p of truth. This man had been near Harkness' wharf a little after sunset when a well-dressed youth and an older man in a green coat had come by, the boy leading a brown mare. The man was talking a spate, and cheerfully, about some good luck. "No great thing, a fis.h.i.+ng venture, but I'm content, I say it's the smile of fortune on me, now that's no lie, so come aboard a few minutes anyway and drink to it." He chattered much more the roustabout could not remember, and the boy said very little, but presently offered him a s.h.i.+lling to mind the horse, saying he would be gone not more than half an hour. Then the two had gone out on Harkness' wharf or maybe the one beyond it. The stevedore had been puzzled by that boy, who seemed downcast and confused; might have been weeping not long before; drunk, the stevedore thought at first, but he smelled no liquor when the s.h.i.+lling changed hands. It had grown quite dark by then, the lamps of s.h.i.+p Street lighted but not sufficient to make the strangers' faces plain; the stevedore would know the man in the green coat again, he thought, but maybe not the boy--handsome though, his lip a bit in need of a shave, and very young.

"When they was going the man in the green coat winked at me, Constable--you know, meaning-like, like as if he meant to say it was a boy's troubles and we was all young once and took things hard...." More than the half-hour had pa.s.sed; the stevedore found a hitching post for the mare and went in search, finding nothing at Harkness' wharf except a lumber-barge, although he thought he remembered noticing a small sloop moored there during the day. He took the mare to a public stable and returned to search further, but learned nothing and gave it up in disgust until the morning brought him the news of the watchman's murder.

That, for nearly three months, had been the sum of knowledge....

Soft-voiced in the room behind him, not moving now with the bounce and ease of a year ago, Kate Dobson was saying: "Do you go and sleep now, Master Reuben. I'll bide with him the rest of the night."

"Did you sleep enough yourself?"

"Well enough. Ah, the doctor!" she said, and smiled at his finger tips pressed on her fat wrist. The message from her elderly heart was slow and sound. Once or twice Reuben had detected a fluttering in it; tonight he found nothing out of the way except that variability of pace which Mr. Welland described as not unnatural. Kate accepted this sort of thing as a game to be played with the tenderness of maternal indulgence. Yet again it might be that when she was alone with herself, thinking perhaps of Reuben Cory in the here-and-now and not so much of the twelve-year-old boy who once collapsed in her arms at the end of a long journey, she knew better.

Reuben's hand sought the sampler that hung by the door in line with Mr.

Kenny's vision, touching the truth of the dark leaves, the fine-st.i.tched perfection of the slanting letters: _Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori._ Kate had not been able to finish it until after the old man was struck down. Mr. Kenny could see it there, had held it, groped at it with the right hand, smiled in his distorted fas.h.i.+on, mumbling blurred sounds of pleasure and thanks. It seemed to Reuben that for this labor of years she ought to have received his elaborate courtly declamation mingled with airy nonsense and a pat on the rump; she never would. She was not wholly satisfied with the sampler even now: she said some of the ivy leaves were too big in contrast to the letters. _Omnia vincit amor_--but love is a wider region than was spoken of in the Eclogues.

Reuben wandered downstairs with no desire to sleep, and closed the front door behind him and walked out alone into the mist....

Remembering Deerfield. Mist lay there sometimes in the early mornings of the end of winter or the beginning of spring, over the low ground by the river, or within the palisade, until a strengthening sun dissolved it away from the brave small houses, the training field, the little dooryard gardens; and Mother liked gray mornings, but Jesse Plum said they worsened the Pain in his Back, and Father looked on them mildly as no worse, no better than others-because, said Joseph Cory, every day was a new-minted s.h.i.+lling to be spent as reasonably as one might....

Remembering--one sometimes winces at the scar of a minor wound--a house where the judgments of the Lord were true and righteous altogether.

Remembering a narrow gray face advancing in the snow:--If I had died then, who would walk in this fog in this year's May? Mm-yas--a might-have-been universe for each event that might have been. Should I reach out to that maple, the cosmos will wag one way; another if I do not. Notice, gentlemen, the astonis.h.i.+ng power of Reuben Cory!

Philosophy, I vow Mr. Hibbs would enjoy it in all solemnity, bless the man, but likely it'll slip my mind before I see him again. A boy ties a string to a pulled milk-tooth and keeps it a while in his pocket, then somehow loses it....

Remembering a midsummer evening--July, the windless heat a burden of fever; lightning, too distant to be heard, startling the black sky over Cambridge or some farther place in the northwest--and the coming of a messenger on a lathered horse to Mr. Kenny's house. Good news comes often quietly, arriving like dawn; bad news like a rabid beast leaping for the throat. That horseman was merely gentle Sam Tench, the clerk who had labored so long and dustily in Mr. Kenny's countinghouse that he seemed like an outgrowth of his three-legged stool, but scrambling down from a sweaty horse and panting his news on the doorstep, he was Fate, if you like, since the word he bore came direct from Her Majesty's frigate _Dread_, newly arrived at Boston for provisions and sundry errands of state and war.

On a morning in early July, in open waters west of the Bermudas, the _Dread_ had picked up one Pieter Van Anda, single survivor of the sloop _Schouven_ out of Amsterdam, who had clung all night to the smashed fragment of a mast. The _Schouven_ had been attacked by a fast ketch flying no flag, boarded, plundered, her captain and most of her crew butchered in a rapid engagement where no quarter was given--but later, before the sloop was set afire, the mad captain of the ketch had harangued, even pleaded with the three who still lived, to throw in their lot with him, for he was bound to the other side of the world as soon as he could acquire two or three other vessels as good as his own, and was in need of good men. The sloop was worthless except for her provisions and so must be burned, but would they not go with him? One consented; the other and Van Anda, then expecting nothing worse than being set adrift, would not; they were thrown into the sea. This, the tall, sweet-voiced, black-haired captain told them--they being crushed against the rail of the sloop by four men who seemed not mad but merely rabble of the baser sort, pirates--this was an evil thing he did and he knew it, but the end he served was beyond their understanding, and could he allow them to bear witness to his acts before the time was ripe?

Perhaps the sea would be kind, at any rate he must do as his inner voice commanded and could do no other. As he told them this, he rubbed a copper coin, and his blue eyes spread into black, burning into them.

"And since I cannot be trusting you now, Mother of G.o.d, the time's past for any change of heart, and so G.o.d keep you, gentlemen"--and the sea (said Van Anda) in its most furious mood was surely kinder than such a man.

The ketch carried two small guns--six-pounder falconets, Van Anda thought--handled with great skill or great luck, for the first shot, delivered with no warning as the ketch glided to windward of her, sliced off the _Schouven's_ mast and left her in a welter of confusion while the ketch's boat shot across the gap and the pirates boarded her like starved rats. The _Schouven_ carried only seven hands; it was soon over. An infernal vessel, Van Anda said--the airs had been light that evening, the _Schouven_ making not much more than steerage way, yet the ketch ran down on her out of the eye of the late sun as if the Devil himself had lent her a capful of wind. Clinging to that fragment of the mast, Van Anda had seen her for a while, speeding southward, in the light of sunset and of the burning sloop. A beautiful, wild, unnatural thing, her bowsprit low-slung, her figurehead a white maiden, her name _Diana_.

The _Dread's_ lookout had seen the fire, too, from several leagues'

distance, and the frigate hurried off her course to inquire about it.

The blazing sloop filled and sank during the night; it was dawn, the breeze still fitful and contrary, when Van Anda was found. His story told, the frigate beat to southward a while in the wrath of vengeance.

In the evening a fore-and-aft mizzen was sighted, far south, and found again in the morning. At that sunrise the _Diana_--if it was she--cracked on all sail and by evening was hull down, though the _Dread_ was bearing all canvas, a mastiff groaning in pursuit of a greyhound. The _Dread_ found empty sea next morning and was obliged to put about for Boston.

John Kenny asked: "Did this Dutchman speak of others?"

"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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sure himself of direction, remembering.

The war went on of course, in its far-off way; it always had. It seems we s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pa.s.sion-ridden beings fell so far short of his private image of the G.o.dlike. 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 gra.s.s.

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 G.o.d did so and will punish the transgressor: I am not interested, nor is Amadeus, who doth believe in G.o.d after his own fas.h.i.+on.

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, polis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sing 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.