"quid fuit, ut tutas agitaret Daedalus alas,Icarus immensas...."
"quid fuit, ut tutas agitaret Daedalus alas,Icarus immensas...."
"What's the matter? Are you considering, Mr. Cory, whether the caesura be intended by the poet to indicate a pause for daydreaming?"
"Icarus immensas nomine signet aquas."
"Icarus immensas nomine signet aquas."
"You have the quantities correct, and may now construe."
"'Why should Daedalus have——'"
"'Should'? 'Should'? I see no subjunctive, Mr. Cory."
"I was construing freely, sir."
"Why?"
"I thought it sounded smoother so, in English."
"Fiddle!Fuit, not being subjunctive, cannot be so translated."
"'Why was it that Daedalus safely moved his wings——'"
"Mr. Cory, one light fugitive moment if you please. Concerning the wordtutas: is this an adverb?"
"No, sir."
"If Ovid had wished an adverb he would have written——?"
"Tuto, sir."
"Yet he used this strange wordtutas, which is——?"
"An adjective, sir.Tutas,-a,-um, meaning 'safe.'"
"Light breaks." Mr. Hibbs filled his clay pipe, deliberately maddening his tortured nose. "The source, incidentally, of a dreadful English word, 'tutor'—I suppose from some woeful misguided conceit to the effect that a tutor can hold his charges in safety, Master Reuben, from the perils of error—wharrmphsh!—within and without. An adjective, then, and plural, I presume. The case, Mr. Cory?"
"Objective, Mr. Hibbs."
"Could it by any remote chance agree with—hm——"
"It agrees withalas, sir."
"Oh! How we do see eye to eye at times!Tutas alas.I could even imagine it meant 'safe wings,' 'uninjured wings,' something like that, if an adverb had not gone flying past my aging benighted head. Now concerning this wordagitaret. Did I hear you translate it as 'moved'?"
"I did, sir."
"Had you considered the word 'agitate'?—excellent,Ishould have thought, and taken direct from the mother Latin."
"I did, sir, but the present-day meaning seemed unsatisfactory."
"Why?"
Reuben discovered he had pulled down his underlip. Mr. Hibbs had striven for three years to break him of the habit, but Reuben, as now, was often unaware he had done it until it was too late. He let it back gently without the usual comforting pop. "To me," Reuben said, "the word 'agitate' suggested fluttering. I might translate: 'Why was it that Daedalus fluttered safe wings?'" He glanced up, honestly feeling as apologetic as a puppy caughtin flagrantewith a ravished shoe. "To me, sir, Daedalus was no butterfly."
Ben knocked his Ovid on the floor and scrambled after it. Reuben guessed he was trying to divert the lightning, but Mr. Hibbs paid the uproar no heed at all, staring at Reuben with a twitching nose. You could never quite predict Gideon Hibbs: the next moment might be hell, or sudden sunshine, or merely another sneeze.
It was sunshine. Mr. Hibbs relaxed, a wrestler overcome, and laughed, a large generous bray. "You have a point, Reuben. Oh yes!" He fumbled for a kerchief and blew the inflamed organ mightily. "Well, but I'm not content with so flat a word as 'moved.' Benjamin? Considering the wriggles you perform at your desk (and I declare only a young backside could endure it) you ought to be able to offer some word conveying the sense of a sustained and powerful motion."
Shining with relief, Ben said: "'Plied'?"
"Why, excellent!" Mr. Hibbs tensed in astonishment. "'Why was it Daedalus plied uninjured wings?'—mph, comes out in English as iambic pentameter, bless me if it doesn't. Satisfactory, Reuben?"
"Yes, sir, I like that. 'Why was it Daedalus plied uninjured wings, but Icarus marks with his name the enormous waves?'"
Out of a suspended hush, Mr. Hibbs sighed. "Benjamin, proceed. If possible, without butterflies. Let us leave the butterflies to Reuben."
Reuben thought with care:He means no harm by that, none at all....His eyes idly compelled the carved B—R to grow immense and blurred, and he listened to Ben's voice:
"nempe quod hic alte, demissius ille volabat;nam pennas ambo non habuere suas."
"nempe quod hic alte, demissius ille volabat;nam pennas ambo non habuere suas."
"Quantities correct, Benjamin. Construe."
"'Surely it was because Icarus flew high, and Daedalus lower; for both wore wings that were not their own.'"
"Eh, Benjamin, doing uncommon well today. High time of course—I am not prepared to consider this the millennium." Mr. Hibbs could seldom bear to leave a compliment undiluted. "Well, gentlemen, I suggest to you, these particular lines are something more than an exercise in grammar and prosody. I think, no more of theTristiatoday. Your grammars if you please—this afternoon it shall be Cicero of course."
"Sir"—startled, Reuben saw his brother rising, not quite knocking over his little desk—"sir, may I ask a favor?"
Mr. Hibbs' lank features froze, but not completely. "Yes, my boy?"
"Last night, sir, I wrote out a translation of the lines inDe Finibusthat you assigned us for this afternoon. I—wished to know if I could do so without aid. I mean, sir—Ru hath helped me often at other times, being swifter at these things, so I—so I didn't tell him of it. And if it be satisfactory, Mr. Hibbs, may I go to Boston this afternoon?"
Mr. Hibbs stared at the paper Ben handed him, like a man hit by a chunk of firewood. "Done without aid, ha?"
"It was, sir. I even waited till Ru was asleep, for fear I'd give up and ask him for help after all."
Reuben gazed deeply into the swirling black midgets that had been the text of Ovid; he instructed himself:It doesn't matter. It does not matter. Seeing that he will go—
"No objection," Mr. Hibbs was saying vacantly—"no objection to the two of you helping each other: I expect it and you profit by it, but I can see, I understand, Benjamin, I—uh—commend your industry and the sentiment that must have prompted it." His voice trailed away under the threat of another sneeze, and Reuben knew that he must speak.
"It's quite true, Mr. Hibbs. I knew nothing of it till just now."Was that good enough? Did I snarl, or squeak?...
"Of course. This translation is—not bad, Benjamin. Some errors, but nothing that cannot be caught up—uh—tomorrow. I'm assuming your great-uncle hath nothing against it, or you would mention it, being"—the sneeze arrived and passed on—"being an honorable boy. Yes, you may have the afternoon. No precedent, of course."
"I understand that, sir, and thank you."
There was grammar, there was logic, there were Greek verbs, there was in the air a warm premonition of luncheon. Mr. Hibbs tucked his books under his arm and marched upstairs, where he would allow himself a five-minute meditation before the meal. He was willing to explain this exercise without embarrassment. It was not the same as prayer, but a contemplation of nothing, a device for clearing his mind of trivia in the hope of perceiving a moment of truth.... "Ru, why don't you come too? You could easy catch up the work if he gives you the afternoon, and he would—for all his barking you know you can twist him any way you please."
"No, bub," said Reuben lightly—but he was afraid to look up from his desk at the puzzled kindness he knew he would see. "There'll be a tag end of the afternoon when Pontifex hath done his worst, and I—wish to do something else."
"Something else?"
"Oh, I—nothing too important."
Ben looked hurt. "About the Cicero—haven't I leaned on thee too much, Ru? I never did think to wound thee, doing that."
"I'm not wounded! I"—careful, Ru Cory!—"I commend your industry."
"Ru!"
"I'm sorry. About this afternoon—you remember Mr. Welland?"
"Welland? Oh, the doctor?"
"Yes, I—he knows so much—I met him by chance the other day, when you was in Boston——"
It was no use. What had seemed clear a little while ago, a lamp in a parting of the mist, was now once more submerged in fog, and Reuben lost his way in a tangle of half-exasperated words, trying to reassure Ben that a wish to see Mr. Welland had nothing whatever to do with being ill.
Older and neater than neighboring houses, the Jenks house was shielded from them by a coach house, and on the other side by a small fenced-in garden. Such aloofness would not save it if flames like those of 1679 or '91 ever raged into this western quarter of the city, where many still owned the forbidden wood-framed chimneys and hoped for the best. Fires in the past had usually started near the docks. That might be the reason why Captain Jenks wished to keep the breadth of the town between him and the ships that were his daily bread.
Approaching the house, Ben had been sharply aware of second-floor windows, feeling eyes in a way remarkably like fright if only it weren't absurd to be frightened at calling on a girl. Now he held back his hand from the knocker, studying the garden with unstable dignity, suppressing a hope that nobody was at home. He admired the grape arbor, enlivened already by a white and brown of buds, and noted here and there the brave glow of daffodils. Flagstone walks suggested a trust in permanence.
He remembered other doorways, how they had stood between him and the unknown. Three years ago one had opened, himself and Reuben standing in rags on the threshold and unable to speak at all to the face with owl-tufts, for John Kenny had answered the door himself, looking down his nose. "To what have I the honor—oh, my soul! Your mother's look, the both of you—come in out of the cold!" Not until hours later, when they were washed and fed and settled in the room where they now lived, did John Kenny speak of his sister's letter announcing their tragic death in the jaws of the beast, a passing hard example of the infinite wisdom of God. He had answered the letter, he said, with the proper sentiments. Very much later, weeks later, Mr. Kenny's own conscience moved him to write another letter even more stately, explaining that the boys appeared to be abundantly alive and would remain with him until of man's years. This letter was never answered by Rachel Cory; after three years, it seemed unlikely that it ever would be. That doorway had opened on years of change, as all years are, but Ben held a private notion that the century really turned then, in March of 1704: for himself and Reuben an end to flame and trouble except for whatever stirred within—and this only natural, since any boy or man is a volcano with a thin crust and knows it.
Ben sounded the knocker. Now he must remember to take off his hat after the door opened, not before—supposing it ever did.
It opened. In Puritan gray and white, she of the brown face was regarding him with amiable recognition. Ben had started to claw his hat at the first rattle of the latch; he checked that, and was now able to remove it, not gracefully but at least without dropping it on her shoes. All this the slave girl observed with calm, secure in cool gravity, a well-trained servant waiting for him to speak, but there could be no doubt about that flash of welcome. "Mistress Faith Jenks—is she at home?" He spoke so softly he could hardly hear the noise himself.
"I think so, sir." Again a sparkle shared, as if she had said aloud: "Of course she is, Ben Cory of Deerfield, but I must make a show of going to find out." In her actually spoken words Ben heard a puzzling foreign quality: thethwas almost at. "Will you come in, Mr. Cory, the while I inquire?" The foreign stress altered his name to something like Coree. But she did remember him, name and all.
Clarissa showed him through the entry—he knocked over no furniture—into a parlor dim with heavy drapes at the windows such as Ben had never seen. Mr. Kenny liked his windows casually plain to the world. Clarissa moved to the drapes with the grace of a wild being incapable of clumsiness. She said: "Let's have more light."
"Thank you," Ben said. She glanced at him quickly, startled maybe by the thanks, then flung the cloth open and lingered briefly, a golden hand raised to the drapery, the round of her cheek lovable in the sun.
Ben realized he was rudely staring, in a sudden loss of blindness. He automatically damned himself for shameful thoughts—he came here to call respectfully onFaith Jenks!—not to yearn and lust after a slave wench who doubtless owned not even a last name. In his confusion he could no longer look at Clarissa. He heard her murmur some pleasant word about sitting down and making himself at ease. She was gone, and the room cold.
Clarissa's hand—now Ben could not even scold himself. He could not escape the sweetness of a golden hand, pink-palmed, shining in sunlight as a part of sunlight.
Seated and short of breath he tried furtively to clean an over-looked fingernail with a thumbnail, an operation tinged with futility. On the wall a sampler confronted him, not very well made—Kate would have sniffed—asserting:And thine ears shall hear a voice behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. Isaiah, xxx; 21.Ben Cory ventured a modest alteration in the angle of his chair.
He remembered he did not know the religion of the Jenks family; had stupidly failed to inquire about it of Uncle John. What if Faith were strongly devout?—it was likely. What if she discovered with shock that he had not seen the inside of a meeting-house since coming to Roxbury?... He fretted at the fingernail, borrowing trouble. Could a man dissemble, hiding essential doubts from a woman if he loved her? Shabby bargain: for my pretense, your love. He gave up the fingernail as a lost cause, and begged the moral dilemma to go away a while.
Slowly, as it may dawn on a wanderer in the forest that he is under examination from a thicket by the feral unconciliating eyes of a Something—bear, catamount, Indian, he doesn't know, doesn't exactly wish to know—so it dawned on Ben that he was being studied from the hallway, in perfect silence, by a square lump of girl and a smaller lump of yellowish dog.
Following her inclinations, the mother of Charity's dog might have conceived and born a spaniel, but she must have been tempted by the Devil in the shape of a terrier. The snuff-colored result had been amended by years of overeating into a hairy sausage too close to the floor. His silky ears were tolerable spaniel, his eyes all spaniel in foolish sadness, blurred in the iris like some old human eyes. When Ben smiled, a wag disturbed the squirrely tail; he shambled up to analyze the smell of Ben's feet and pronounce it fair. Charity nodded. "He worships you. I foresaw it plain. Most uncommon for Sultan to worship anyone."
Ben studied Sultan in some alarm. He was lying on Ben's shoes, true, but it looked more like sleep than worship. "Often he growls with menace"—Charity approached, awkward in a shapeless brown frock that did her no good—"the which he was prepared to do when we ambushed you."
"I'd've gone straight up in the air. A perfect ambush."
Charity planted her feet far apart and hid her hands behind her back. "Did you play Inj'an when you was young?"
"Oh, I did, Mistress Charity, my brother and I. Used to sneak off to the woods where we were forbidden to go, which was wrong of us."
"Why?"
"The woods were dangerous—real Inj'ans."
"I've seen real ones—not wild, though." She came nearer, not by walking but by a side-to-side evolution of spread feet, carrying her like a statue on small wheels. "Christian Indians, talked English all piggedy-gulp."
"I remember an old Indian at Deerfield, supposed to be a Christian. A Pocumtuck. Wore a cast-off bodice for a breechclout, and was alway——" Ben remembered the failing of Captain Jenks—"was alway a little foolish."
"Faith is dressing her hair different, the which you're obliged to notice or she'll be in a taking, the which I think is poo."
"I'll be sure to notice it, Mistress Charity."
"Be you"—Charity jerked her head; upstairs Ben could hear a muted ripple of women's voices—"in love withher?"
Ben evaded. "Charity, I've met her but the once."
No good. "I thought a person alway knew."
"Oh—maybe they do and I'm just foolish."
"I guess you are, but very wonderful."
Maneuvered thus against a lee shore with the broadside raking him from bow to stern, Ben mumbled: "'Deed I'm not."
"Not poo," said Charity, sinking him....
"Do you go often to church, Mistress Charity?"
"We're Church of England."
"Oh, so was my mother."
"Then a'n't you too?"
"Well—my father was not a member of the congregation at Deerfield, and my Uncle John is not a churchgoer, nor—nor am I."
"Um. Thought everyone was obliged to go."
"My Uncle John says it was so, years past. Now, if everyone went there wouldn't be meeting-houses to hold 'em.... Do you like going?"
"Mr. Binyon was very wonderful."
"He is—no longer with you?"
Charity shook her head and sighed. "I do treasure his memory. He thundered, as with the voice of many waters."
"He—uh—died?"
"Nay, he went back to England. Later they said his steps went down unto the—that is, he joined—well, somebody. I don't just know. Mr. Mitching is not wonderful. He whuffles. In fact he is...."
"Poo?"
Charity came quite close, and seemed perilously near to smiling. "Yousaid that—but I'll never tell. Nay, I do hold in my heart many things that Mr. Binyon—thundered—but mustn't speak of him, and yet I do sometimes, because everyone says I own the nature of a heedless brat."
"I don't say so."
"You are different. Mr. Binyon spoke as with the voice of angels. Somebody said he was forty—he didn't look so terrible old.... Were all your people killed at Deerfield, Mr. Cory?"
"My father and mother. My brother escaped, with me. He's fifteen now, and I'm seventeen. And you?"
"Thirteen in May. A sad time—nobody will ever listen."
"You don't mean you're going to be thirteen forever?"
"Do not be poo...."
"He's a much better student than I, Reuben is."
"I can read, by the way.... Was your mother very beautiful?"
"Why—yes, Charity, she was. Everyone should be able to read."
"I thought so because you are beautiful."
"Now, Charity! You ought not——"
"I know. Alway, everything wrong."
"Not that, but—oh, never mind.... What do you like to read?"
"Not romances. Faith reads those, by the way."
"I've read but a few." In Mr. Kenny's helter-skelter library, Ben had had a glimpse of Aphra Behn and her long-winded imitators; he had rather enjoyed the swashbuckling ofOroonoko. "Our tutor keeps us so hard pressed with the classics we can't read much else."
"Um ... Mr. Cory, is it true that swallows spend the winter at the bottom of frozen ponds and streams all naked of any feathers?"
"Nay, I've heard that but don't believe it. They must go south like so many others and return in the spring."
"Um. All the same I drew a picture of some of them under the water all naked of any feathers, and another on the brink—he hath just risen and put his feathers on again." She gulped and stuck out a blunt jaw. "I draw many pictures, when I ought to be sewing. I like cooking if I can cook what I like."
"But sewing is poo?"
"You too would think so, had you been obliged to do it. Would you wish to behold the picture I made of swallows under the water all naked of any feathers and one on the brink?"
"Yes, I would, Charity."
She whirled like a doll on a revolving pole and marched away. Sultan moaned and followed, a slave to duty with a backward glance of apology.
Ben heard other footsteps and rose, too soon, and bowed—too soon, so that he was bent in the middle when Faith entered, grave and shining and young, preceded by the bulk of Madam Prudence Jenks, who clearly did not expect a hand to be kissed or shaken but held both pale things curled below the twin billows of her bosom and entered the room thus, rather like an angel looking for breakfast, and allowed Faith to help her into a chair, and loomed in it, rather like an angel disappointed but willing to wait. "'Tis most agreeable of you, Mr. Carey, to call upon us in our simple afflicted seclusion."
Uncle John hadn't mentioned that the Jenks family was secluded, afflicted, or simple. The drowned gaze of Madam Jenks suggested she had risen from a rest of ages under water, for the purpose (imposed on her by others) of viewing Benjamin Cory; if he proved not too detestably in need of correction, she might submerge. Ben mumbled how happy he was to meet her. For all their damp opacity, her prominent eyes were not at all blind.
Faith's gold-brown hair lay in soft spirals above her ears; on the coils rested a cap, no such cap as Puritan custom approved but a trifle of frivolous lace—the Mathers would have hated it as one of the stigmata of popery. Her dress today was dead-leaf brown. To Ben it looked uncomplicated and demure, its very plainness encouraging the eye to rejoice in what it held. Surelyshecould never become gross and overblown, the damask fading to an underwater bleach, dugs swollen to down pillows!
"How charmingly you've done your hair, Mistress Faith!"
"Oh, la, thank you, sir—I merely toss it together so to have it out of the way." (And thankyou, Charity!) Hands chastely folded, Faith watched him with unmistakable radiance; as Ben dared to meet her eyes she blinked both of them. Ben's heart floated over shining fields. He must have said the right thing. In fact, as matters looked now he could perfectly well sit down; it might even be expected of him.
With larger sternness Madam Jenks repeated: "Most kind of you to call, Mr. Carey, seeing we have not been much about since our loss, the which one must suffer with fortitude required of us by the Lord in his infinite mercy, very kind of you." A parchment contraption appeared magically in her hand; she fanned the pallid orb of her face in a motion grave and hypnotic.
Faith patted her mother's arm where folds of baby-creases narrowed to a tiny wrist. "Mama, I think Mr. Cory never met Uncle James." Faith's charming double wink instructed Ben not to be even slightly dismayed by sudden Uncle James: she would see him through.
A red enameled comb projected from Madam Jenks' tight-bound hair like the comb of a hen, bobbing so unstably that Ben's anxiety climbed notch after notch. "He did not know James?" Madam Jenks shook her head, but nothing happened. "A pity, seeing he was ever a worthy influence to young and old and would have profited much by knowing him, but God disposes." Pronouns, Ben noted, counted for no more than ripples, to be brushed aside by the lady under full sail. Solidly abeam of him, cutting his wind and threatening to broach him just when he was trying to claw off to windward, she seemed to be conveying a message: that Benjamin Cory or Carey must have found it extraordinary difficult to maintain the Christian virtues with no assistance from Uncle James.
"My father's brother-in-law," Faith interpreted. "He died last year, Mr. Cory. Mamma thought you might have met him."
"Hadn't the honor, ma'am. I'm sorry to learn of your affliction."
"He resteth in the Lord," said the fat woman, and beamed. "Lived in Cambridge. I trust your grandfather is well?"
"Yes, ma'am, very well these days." (What was the use?)
"I join you, Mr. Carey, in praising, for that mercy, the Dispenser of All Things." Madam Jenks went on to pronounce the weather changeable; Ben agreed; Faith expressed intelligent neutrality. Small silence spread like a blot of ink.... "I understand you intend going to the college this year, Mr. Carey?"
"Yes, ma'am, my brother and I."
"Preparing for the ministry, I presume?"
"Neither of us would appear to have the call, Madam Jenks."
"Indeed.... Do you enjoy the Boston air?"
"I don't think I've ever heard it, ma'am."
"Your pardon, sir?"
"Nay, I—begyourpardon—I must have misunderstood."
"My inquiry was in reference to the Boston air. Do you enjoy it?"
"Oh, very much...."
By some transition which Ben heard but didn't understand—the instant of kaleidoscopic shift was blurred for him by a gleam of merriment in Faith—Madam Jenks was comparing cats and dogs. "'Tis true a cat is a tidy beast and of value if she be a good mouser, but one can feel no affection for them."
"Why," said Ben, "our big yellow cat——"
"They are treacherous," said Madam Jenks. The comb was rising. "Now a dog is a faithful animal instant ever to his master's needs, for it would appear the Lord hath prepared him for the service of man, and I am trying, Faith, to recall the name of a small dog Mr. Jenks owned, you must remember: I mean the one that was two before Sultan, or was it three?—with a white ear."
"You must be thinking of Prince, Mama."
"No, my dear, seeing that Prince was the one that fell down the well, and Goodman Jennison spent the better part of a forenoon attempting to rescue the poor brute and had no white ear to be sure."
"Rags?"
"Faith, Rags was black, and was given to us by Mr. Riggs when his good wife was taken to the Lord, and was obliged for business reasons to go to Newport for some weeks, and certainly had no white ear, and was indeed rather ill-natured, in fact we were obliged to give him away, since he did not return from Newport until some damage had already been done to Goody Jennison's herb garden, the which I regret."
Ben wondered how long Charity had been standing in the hallway, a paper clasped to her square breast and Sultan lying on her shoes. She might have been waiting for Ben to smile, since when he did she dislodged the dog with a backward step and brought him the paper, ignoring her elders.
"My word, Charity!" Faith spoke kindly. "Mr. Cory doesn't wish to look at pictures."
"He told me he did," said Charity flatly, and laid the paper on Ben's knee, leaning close. "This be the one with feathers restored."
"Oh, I see." Confusedly, Ben saw more than that. It had never occurred to him that lines of ink on paper could move and sing. A stream glittered with fragmented ice. Ben could feel the vulnerable pride of the swallow twitching a pert forked tail, tilting a round head toward distant cloud. And how should Charity have made him actually hear the slow yielding of a brook to the coming of spring? Those naked things huddled under the water—swallows maybe, or squirming babies, ambiguous, blind. The eye clung to them, not in laughter.
"Charity," said Madam Jenks, "I believe Mr. Carey would prefer to look at pictures another time."
Charity tried to ignore that. In nearness she was all little-girl softness and warmth, electric. Little?—thirteen.
"Charity," said Madam Jenks, "go and aid Clarissa with the refreshments. You should have remembered it before."
Ben blurted: "Charity, this is beautiful."
"Charity," said Madam Jenks.
Charity inhaled carefully. "Very well, Mama, I will leave the room."
The red comb popped. Ben had been half-prepared for that, and for the deferential scramble he now performed. Under cover of the commotion Charity vanished with the picture, Sultan gloomily following.
"Thankful heart!" The comb restored, Madam Jenks fanned herself. "Ah well, a difficult time of life I suppose. You have no idea, Mr. Carey, the hours of grief and dismay, I have sought guidance on my knees, the which she'll be the death of me yet considering the palpitations of my heart, nevertheless when the Lord calls me to my long home I shall certainly go."
"Mama!" Faith murmured. "I'm sure in a few years she'll learn poise and manners. 'Tis only a passing thing. Why, when I was her age I'm sure I was difficult too."
"Nay, my darling, never intractable, never strange, alway a consolation to me. Faith is my great comfort, Mr. Carey, you've no idea."
"I'm sorry she plagued you, Mr. Cory."
"But—truly she didn't. Anyway, that picture—"
"Art," said Madam Jenks sadly. "When I think how Mr. Jenks and I have striven to teach her womanly ways, and all to no purpose, and then such dreadful passion if she be crossed in the lightest particular, even in these trivial childish notions of art, the which she could not have got it from Mr. Jenks or myself, good heavens!"
Charity said from the doorway: "I heard that." Sultan had given up trying to sleep; he leaned against her leg and whined.
"Oh, Charity, Charity—I suppose you never even went near the kitchen to help Clarissa."
Charity's square face had gone dull red to the eyelids. "She said she had no need of me. Mama, I brought that picture to Mr. Cory because he did ask to see it."
The red comb popped. Ben gathered it up again, but could not immediately return it, for Madam Jenks needed all her powers for speech. "I should have supposed, Charity, that at your years you might have acquired some trace of manners if not of gratitude, the which I do not ask although a child of thirteen is certainly capable, and never no unjust correction nor harsh words if not wholly yielded up to depravity, the which——"
"Mama, I am becoming exceedingly wrathful."
"Charity," said Madam Jenks, "we willnothave one of your Times. I forbid it. Go to your room, after all the effort your father and I have made, and that continually."
"Don't you bring Papa into it and him lying up there dead to the world!"
"Charity!" That was Faith, rising, then kneeling quickly by her mother, whose round face had gone gray as ash.
"I will go away forever," said Charity in a sudden loud rage of tears. "Even as Mr. Binyon. I tell you my steps will go down unto the Whore of Babylon!"
"Reuben, I've thought occasionally that the game hath something in common with the course of living. The opening—that's a preparation like youth, and I alway thought, if a chess player might truly understand the opening no other player could defeat him—a'n't that so? Still, it is too complex, the possibilities too near to infinite, for any mind to hold 'em all, and so the best of players will inevitably fumble the opening, at least a little, missing some bright opportunities, the result a compromise with what might have been. Then the middle game—action, struggle, changes of fortune, more opportunities lost, and a few fairly grasped at the just moment."
"I believe I like that, Mr. Welland. And the end game?"
"The end game, if one may arrive at it—some die young, you know, some from a Fool's Mate, or blind chance may overset the board—but if one may arrive—oh dear! Oh dear me! That knight, through my poor wall of pawns—dare say it's all up with me. I will try this. What next?"
"This, sir. You left a hole for my Bishop too."
"So, for my sins, I did. Brrr!... Well, this."
"Check!"
"Blast!... If one may arrive at the end game—as I certainly can't here, my friend—'tis not unlike old age, a time demanding some coolness and precision and the summary of the ending, which is no simple matter of victory or defeat or draw, I think."
"I like the simile, but I'm not sure living is a game."
"It is not, Reuben. I'm pleased you find the flaw. It will remind you that any simile is a mischancy nag to ride. Ride him easy, perhaps for entertainment only, and be ready to jump off before he blunders into the ditch on the left which is markedreductio ad absurdum. If I said, however, that living is a journey, would that be a simile?"
"No, sir, I call that a fair description, no flight of rhetoric."
"Mm-yas.... Let's see what remains for me here. I will try what the poor Pawn can do, creeping into the breach, but I fear little David hath here no slingshot."
"Well.... Well, I'm afraid he did leave it at home, Mr. Welland, for this is checkmate."
"Ow!"
"Ben would say I had scuttled him, nautical language being ever on his lips these days. He plays carelessly—in chess, I mean. And in living, with the carelessness of generosity. But he'll win his end game."
"So much of what you say this afternoon ends with Ben! He's very close to your heart, is he not?"
"Oh, we—were alway close."
"And went through much trouble together, I know, which it would seem hath strengthened the tie, but with those of a different nature it might have done the opposite. I had two brothers, Reuben. We drifted apart, as they say—one lives now in England, the other died some years ago. After childhood we were—oh, let us say like friends, but with strangely little to say to one another. Cherish what you have—devotion is not quite the commonest thing in the world."
"This noon, sir, I tried to tell him something. It should have been a simple thing to say, but I lost myself in a most wonderful tangle of misunderstanding—yes, and finally gave it up like a fool, though later I thought of a dozen different ways I might have said it plainly."
"Mm-yas—a little strange. You speak clearly to me, as clearly as anyone I can recall meeting, of any age."
"Well—well, I told him I intended coming here, and he at once supposed that I thought I was ill, and then in reassuring him that it was nothing like that, I somehow lost track of what I had meant to say, which was—which was, sir, that one of my reasons in coming was to tell you that I wish I might study medicine. Or at least hear whatever you might tell me of such an ambition."
"Oh.... That was only one reason, Reuben?"
"Only one of—of many."
"Continue, Reuben."
"I'm confused about many things."
"So am I. But it's a good reason, seeing two candles are a trifle brighter than one."
"And you said to me that you and I ought to be friends."
Alone outside, dizzy from the rapidly quashed insurrection of Charity Jenks, Ben heard a meeting-house bell remote and jangling-sweet, reminder of Lecture Day, and did his best to assume that appearance of godly gravity which Reuben sometimes described as the likeness of a boiled onion.
Clarissa had been the superior force employed in putting down the rebellion, Ben wasn't quite sure how. The brown girl was just suddenly there, swift and cool, and Charity was both comforted and outflanked, with no reinforcements, not even from the Whore of Babylon—still it seemed to Ben that the honors of war were mighty close to even. After that, Ben could concentrate on restoring the red comb and, under a diminishing surge of pronouns, make polite excuses for departure, refreshments forgotten. He lingered on the doorstep, a startled youth saying softly: "Phoo!" Then he weighed anchor, made sail, and stood on at about three knots, close-hauled.
Next time, of course, everything would go smoothly. He might even be allowed to speak with Faith alone. Meanwhile, the memory of her double wink helped him to repair the fabric of sentiment....
Where to? Uncle John would have left for home; riding, too, and Ben was afoot, for yesterday his mare had gone slightly lame. Ben tried to recall if he had promised to be home by supper-time; he thought not. With the better part of a generous monthly allowance in his breeches, Ben thought: Why return at once? Soon of course, but....
He accepted casual turnings, coming out unexpectedly on Treamount Street near Queen—which led to the Town House, and later became King Street, wandering toward the dock where the ladyArtemislay sleeping. Under the declining sun the city took on a grayness like antiquity.
Ben knew it was not old. Uncle John once called it new and raw—and took the boys into his study to show them a tray of coins, the metal greenish, almost shapeless. "The antiquary asked but a trifle: few value them. This tetradrachm of Athens—you can find the owl of Pallas if your eyes are as good as mine used to be—why, Sophocles could have used it for wine or bread. Consider though, gentlemen, how many things must be vastly older than coins of the classic age; for example, the hills of New England."
The gray city was without silence, as a river cannot be wholly silent. Did true silence ever come to the open sea?—say, in that time when the shipProvidencein her passage to Recife lay becalmed? No lightest air, Uncle John said, no ripple; sometimes a long heaving rise and fall; sometimes a burst of silver as a flying fish broke the mirror quiet; sometimes a black triangle of fin, cruising. The sharks made no commotion of haste. Ship sounds, a few—a creaking when a swell raised the ship in her dreambound stillness and let her fall. Human sounds, including prayer. Knife brawls, Uncle John said, in the middle period of the calm....
Most of the shops near the Town House were closed. Ben lingered at a bookstall, his eye caught by a row of titles on the bottom shelf of an outdoor rack, his mind disturbed by the sudden partial clarification of a memory. That noon Reuben had certainly been trying to tell him something. Not that he was ill—Ru had really been exasperated at that notion—but it did have to do with Mr. Welland. Ben importuned his memory for his brother's words. "He knows so much ... to study ... if I might...."
A call? All of a sudden Ru wished to study medicine? Ben squatted before the books—certainly medical, and mostly Latin—and the guess acquired confidence until Ben was fretting at his own stupidity: the boy could hardly have meant anything else.
"Harvard, sir?" asked the bookseller from the doorway, a squatty man who must have been nobly redheaded in his prime.
"Not yet. This autumn, probably." (Why did I say that?—no probably about it, when Uncle John says I shall, and I can't disappoint him.)
"I know the look, sir. Closing soon, but don't be hurried, look about.... Student of medicine?"
"Not I, sir, but my brother is a learned man of divers interests." Intending it as a jest for private enjoyment, Ben felt no impulse to chuckle at the pompous utterance. Not even a lie—oh, not amanmaybe, if one must be precise about chronology; but not exactly a boy either.
"Ah!... All sixpence on that shelf except the one from Oxford. For that I must have two shillings—'t a'n't badly worn, you see."
Immediately desiring it, Ben sniffed. It was in English, not Latin—Anatomy of Human Bodies, published in 1698, only nine years ago. Ben turned the pages. The flayed and dissected subjects in the copper engravings wore a look both rigidly embarrassed and amused. How unlike Charity's naked swallows! And yet how like them too, for these artists, with the coolness of great skill, were certainly trying to convey——("What is truth?" said John Kenny.) Ben sniffed again. "Some pages gone."
"I know. Two shillings is cheap all the same."
"Why, damme, suppose my brother wishes to know the very things told of in these lost pages?"
"Must even look elsewhere. However, merely because I like your face—oh, what if I do die in the almshouse?—buy it for two shillings and you may add a sixpence book for nothing, and I'll tie the both of 'em in a piece of string dissected, sir, from the very rope that hanged Johnny Quelch."
"Done!" Ben grabbed the next volume at random—Neurologia Universalis, by Raymond de Vieussens. It looked fat. "And tie 'em in any string, or do you take me for a mooncalf?"
"Anything but that, old friend! Can't tempt you with Johnny?"
"Why, man, Quelch swung there till he rotted and the rope too, and what would I want of his furniture?"
"Only what they say, you know—bit of hanging rope—wonderful fine tonic for the vessels of generation."
"They say that, do they now?"
"Ah, they do, but at your age why should you need it?" He winked, and gurgled, and scratched his armpit, and tied the books in a common string. "I venture you wouldn't believe the number of old men have gone away from here, sir, skipping, sir, with a hank of the rope that hanged Johnny. I must have given away a league of it. You don't mind, I hope, if I talk a certain amount of shit?"
"Thrive on it," said Ben, and snapped a finger at his hatbrim affectionately, and walked away with his parcel, curiously happy.
On King Street the water-front smells thickened. Ben turned into Fish Street where they became a miasma, but dominant always was the salt cleanness of the sea. Here a few sodden faces appraised Ben's good clothes and youthful slimness, as if debating how much the garments might fetch, supposing he were dragged down an alley, coshed, and stripped. Ben missed his knife, which he seldom wore nowadays, admitting that it would never have done to wear it for his call at the Jenks house. No one offered him any trouble; that might have been different at a later hour, when the widely separated lamps would do no more than emphasize the blackness.
Artemisrested high in the water, unloading done, her new cargo not yet aboard, her empty rigging lonely against the late sky. Debating whether to go up the plank, oppressed by a shyness of inexperience, Ben heard some stir of leisured voices below the forward hatch. "... opportunity, for a man like yourself...." The words received some grumbled answer. Ben wandered away disconsolate to perch on a mooring-post and argue that there was no reason at all why he shouldn't go aboard. The last of the sunlight dissolved in a thickening of cloud-wrack on the horizon; a small southerly breeze was shifting to the eastern quarter when an ancient tricorne hat appeared over the side—Mr. Shawn about to step ashore, frowning a moment at sight of Ben, but relaxing at once and smiling, coming to sink in an easy squat by the mooring-post, careless of the old green coat that settled around his feet. "I'm after passing the time with the watchman, wishing I could make the man talk of something but fish. O to listen to the long Gloucester face of him, and he with scarce a sight of Gloucester the twenty years past by his own telling!" Shawn's knife gouged a splinter from the planking and went to whittling under big knowing hands. "Will it be a truce to studies, Mr. Cory?"
"A short one, sir. Mr. Hibbs gave me the afternoon."
One end of the sliver grew to a delicate fishtail. "Boy—look at that bowsprit line. Mother of God, will your mind's eye see her under a fair wind?—a following wind, say, to belly that fores'l, to make her lean toward the faraway like the goddess she is, man? Do you see it?"
"I think I do. I've never been under sail, Mr. Shawn."
"You will, one day."
"It seems not to be my great-uncle's wish."
"Then maybe not till it's you with the full years of a man, but you'll be going." Shawn frowned at the shape growing under his fingers as if he faced a strong light but would not turn away. "Maybe it'll destroy you, maybe not, but whatever time you'll be going, and you that young, why, Beneen—may I call you so?—you'll see places I'll never live to see at all, now that's no lie."
"May I ask, have you spoken to Mr. Jenks, about that matter you mentioned to my great-uncle?"
"Faith, I've not had opportunity." Shawn smiled at his sliver, where now grew a rounded head and the suggestion of a face, and his knife defined deep curves of female waist and hips. "Indisposed he hath been, and not receiving visitors." Shawn drooped an eyelid. "From the little black wench I understood the condition might continue to prevail."
To Ben that seemed not funny but unkind. "Uncle John told me the Captain never drinks at sea."
Ben knew he was being studied from under lowered brows. "I meant no disparagement. May I ask what years you have itself?"
"I am seventeen, sir—last February."
"And I thinking you nearer twenty." Shawn whittled with tiny careful strokes. "Parents not living?"
"They were both killed in the French attack on Deerfield."
"Forgive my blundering! I remember hearing about Deerfield, in London. 1704 surely, and I navigator of a Dutch brig in the spring of that year, homeward bound out of the Moluccas for Amsterdam, where I left her and so to London, and was the long time cooling my heels waiting a passage for these colonies, with a thought of settling here—a'n't it the laughable way of a man never to know himself at all? I'll never settle, nowhere. In less than a month I was hunting another berth, and do be still hunting. I'll never settle anywhere till I die, and won't that be under the salt water where nothing marks the place a man's vanity ended?... Killed by the savages?"
"My mother was. It was a French officer shot my father."
"And such is war," said Shawn; the mermaid sagged in his hand. "Wars, wars, and all the time the world scarce explored! War was never no profit to a living soul, Beneen, unless it might be a king or a priest." Mr. Shawn spat off the wharf. Ben was confused, that in the moment when Shawn spoke out against the cruelties of mankind his face should be showing the color of some kind of hatred.
"Well, sir, we can hardly permit the French Louis to become master of all Europe, so to harry us and drive us out of this land too, as his forces in Canada have attempted continually."
The Irishman shrugged, watching the bay. "Canada, the way I hear, is a handful of frightened papists in a wilderness. As for the Sun King Louis, I saw him once. Six years past, before the war was renewed—the Treaty of Ryswick accomplished nothing, you'll understand, a patching-up, a pause for the licking of wounds, and so you may say 'tis all one war, and I happening to be in Paris when his solar bloody Majesty made a gracious appearance unto the multitude, I beheld a trembling dried-up monkey in velvet. That minikin shivering old man, that homunculus, that thing, master of Europe and the West? Don't they tell he's not even master of his own bowels? Faith, when he dies his empire will be crumbling like a child's mud castle in the rain as others have done before, and England would do better to wait for it, but not so, the armies and navies must be employed and good men die to no purpose, anyway that's the opinion of one mad Irishman," said Shawn, and smiled with sudden brilliance. A twist of the knife gave the mermaid a pretty navel; he held her away for admiration. "O the anatomical enigmas of the mermaid!—hey? I wonder could there be word of her in Physiologus?... Will you be in haste to return home?"
"No great haste." But with the words, Ben realized he ought to be. The sun was behind the rooftops, the wind sharp easterly.
"Would you dine with me, Ben?—that is," he asked again, "may I call you so and no offense?"
"Of course, Mr. Shawn."
"That's kind. I dread a lonely evening, now that's no lie."
Ben was startled, having meant only to agree to the use of his first name, for which Mr. Shawn hardly needed permission. Well—might not Uncle John suppose he had been invited to dine at the Jenks house, and so not be troubled? It would mean walking that ugly mile of the Roxbury road after dark, but there would be a moon later, if the deepening clouds did not interfere. Mr. Shawn was already speaking of a tavern on Ship Street. "The Lion they call it, nothing so fine, but I fear, Beneen, I am not dressed for a finer place. Hi!—that wind's pure easterly, and will that be meaning rain by morning in this part of the world?"
"Sometimes," Ben said, and discovered he was cold.
"Let us go...."
The Lion tavern consisted of one long narrow room, filled with the reek of malt, sweat, clay pipes, rummy breath, wood smoke. A line of small tables on one side was divided by a poorly drawing fireplace; on the other side of the room a bar ran from the kitchen door to a grimy window, and the smeary glass denied all memory of daylight. Pine knots sputtered above the fireplace; a lantern on the bar added more smoke but no light worth the name. Shawn chose a table within spitting distance of the hearth, ignoring two shabby customers who were exchanging an aimless rambling conversation at the bar.
At the table farthest to the rear, dark as the smoke and like a part of it, a thin man with a black patch on one eye sat by himself, smiling. Before him stood a dirty trencher with the remains of supper, and a pewter mug. He sprawled with elbows hooked on the back of his chair, arms dangling, so quiet he might have been asleep, but the one good eye was open wide and one does not sleep with a frozen smile. When the eye moved to examine Ben and Shawn with no sign of interest, the rest of his face took no part in the act.
An ancient waiter who knew Shawn by name was mumbling a good evening, flicking a rag at the table, his warty face darkened like a ham hung a long time on a rafter. Shawn seemed quite at home; after some unease, Ben found his own lungs could adjust to the haze.
Shawn approached the roast beef, which was not bad, like a man with a week's hunger. Ben finished his first mug of ale quickly, for it helped him avoid coughing; the influence of it softened the sordidness of this place; as the mug was refilled, Ben wondered why anything here should have troubled him—honest working-man's tavern, and Daniel Shawn the prince of good fellows. As for the one-eyed half-corpse, one needn't look....
Shawn's manners, he noticed, were not quite those of Mr. Kenny's house. Holding down the meat with his spoon, Shawn cut it in curiously small pieces, and often used the knife to carry them to his mouth, instead of his fingers. It looked dangerous, for the knife was sharp. Afterward Shawn took pains to clean his fingers on a kerchief from his pocket. Privately consulting his wallet for reassurance, Ben ordered a third round of ale. Mr. Shawn was touched and pleased.
He drank Ben's health. He told two or three bawdy anecdotes, large voice intimately lowered; Ben laughed in delight and forgot them at once, which annoyed him. He discovered he was lifting his mug and drinking to the hope that Mr. Shawn would secure a berth withArtemis.
"O the warm heart of youth!" said Shawn, and looked away. "But Beneen, you must not feel obliged to speak of that to your great-uncle."
"But of course I will!" Softness, Ben thought—he is without it. Even now, when Mr. Shawn was manifestly touched and pleased, the brilliance of his look, his friendship, made Ben think of the spurting of light from the diamond thumb-ring Uncle John occasionally wore, or the stark gleam of sun on snow. Wondering whether the sea took all softness from a man, wondering also as he drank whether such an event ought to be called good or bad, Ben understood that Shawn was saying something more he ought to hear and remember.
"Isn't it the strange thing how from all the ruck, all the thousands, millions of humankind, explorers are so few? Why, you may name all the great ones on the fingers of one hand."
"So few as that?"
"Cabot, Columbus, Magellan, maybe Drake, maybe the both hands. And all the South Pacific lies there unseen, untraveled—nothing but a waste of water? I'll not believe that, when there's room for a continent greater than this one, or a thousand islands larger than mine own motherland."
It was music, and what little music he had heard had always troubled Ben, as a voice whose words could never be wholly translated. For all the pure pleasure, that had been so in those distant hours with Uncle Zebina Pownal. "I suppose, Mr. Shawn, some day every least corner of the world will be explored."
"Ha?... Not in my time nor yours. Now that troubles me, Beneen. It's the clear plain thing what you say, but d'you know I never had the thought myself? No more horizons—O the sad earth!... Man dear, I'm wishing you'd not said that."
"I suppose they who live in that day will be otherwise concerned."
"Most are now, the way explorers are few...."
The dirty trencher had been removed from in front of the one-eyed man, and his mug refilled. He must have drunk from it, for a bit of foam clung near his bleak smile and was drying there, as if someone had spat on a statue. Ben hitched his chair sideways, the better to avoid looking at him, and glanced at the bar, knowing the ale had made him foolishly drowsy.
Two newcomers had arrived. Ben was obliged to stare, then understood he should have recognized them in an instant without need of thought. ("'Tis a matter of being your own man....") That was Jan Dyckman over there, big and blond and mild, drinking rum with the round-headed greasy bosun Tom Ball. Ben leaned across the table in a generous glow. "Do you know Mr. Dyckman?"
Shawn shook his head, deep in revery. "By sight only."
"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 passed 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 isPectoralis 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 passed. "There will be times," said Mr. Welland, removing a gray cat from a cushion 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,allthe 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 passed 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 shifted 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 scraps 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 apprenticeship? 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 damned 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 inmyplace, 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."
"MisterShawn, 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 buttered 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.
"I'll send the servant," said Mistress Gundy, and rose, about to potter away.
"Do you send him," said Shawn to the embers, "but bring in the wenches before he returns, Nanny, else you'll be rambling on from here to hereafter and we biting the curbing of the stall, God damn it, with nothing to mount."
"Mr. Shawn, sir, one day your tongue'll turn and bite you, sir."
"Then I'll have thee kiss the place, old woman." She sidled for the doorway, out of reach of his lazy hand. "But wait till I bleed."
"I marvel the sweet young gentleman ever took up with you, sir, you that come in with a smile and stay with a curse."
"Took up with me to see a bit of the world, Nanny, the way the world's a troublesome thing for a boy to see at all and I'm part of it. Come give us a kiss!"
"You leave me tell you this: you mark one of my poor girls on the face just once, just once, Mr. Shawn——"
"And you'll have law on me belike?"
"Though it be the ruin o' me I'll say it: I think you're a wicked man, Mr. Shawn."
"But not on the face is well enough?"
"Mr. Shawn!"
"Come now, give us a kiss and be friends!"
Ben said involuntarily: "Don't, Mr. Shawn! Leave her alone!"
Shawn locked stares with him a moment, smiling, then spread his hands and folded them again on the chair back and dropped his jaw on them, watching the embers, alone on an island. Behind his back Mistress Gundy was beckoning, and Shawn paid no heed as Ben stepped into the hallway with her. "I don't suppose he means too much by his talk, Mistress Gundy."
"Eh? Known him long?"
"Not long, not very well.... I was astonished he should speak so."