Wilderness of Spring Part 18

Nothing like it in New England nor Old England neither. Clean, wondrous blue--Jenks told me once 'tis good as well water above the tides. He took a sloop of mine up to Albany once, years ago. Well, poor Jenks!

He'll be into the second or third tankard by now, scarce giving that slave wench time to lift off his boots. Yes, the troubled men--seekers and dreamers and friends of the moon, a little mad, and minds grown wise before their time like your sweet brother's--I don't pretend to understand 'em, Ben, the way I think you and I understand each other. I suppose they engender a great share of the sorrow in the world. What a place it might be without 'em! In a world without 'em I swear I'd die of boredom before I was hanged."

"She is fair. When we saw her a-building up the river and climbed about on her naked ribs, that was different, Ru. Now she's alive, even at the wharf you feel it. She's only waiting to meet the winds again."

"You'd marry the sea if you could. Come here to the window and look down. Something else is fair. Still light enough if you look sharp. The apple--nay, I mean the little new one, that Rob set out the first year we came here. It's budded, for the first time."

"So it is. Will Rob let 'em ripen this year, I wonder?"

"I dare say not.... So you've met the great Jenks at last."

"Never shake hands with him. Remember the bosun Joe Day? Died at the Indies--smallpox, Mr. Dyckman said. I was fond of Joe Day--made me think of Jesse Plum, the tales he could tell.... What's Kate contriving that smells so good all over the house?"

"Roast goose, O wanderer."

"And what's up with Hibbs? Ha'n't seen him since I got home."

"Sulking. Benjamin, stand forth! You ask me, what of Gideon Hibbs; you ask, oh, where is he? Hibbs Pontifex hath gone to roost, with a book upon his knee."

"Upstairs?"

"Next door."

"All lank and lean?"

"Ay--dreaming of roast goose."

"What planneth he for the morrow's morn, the evil old--uh--papoose?"

"Ovid, my lord."

"Not Ovid still!"

"Ovid, my lord."

"Oh, no!"

"_Multum in parvo, fiat lux, pro bono publico._ b.a.l.l.s, we've done better, but for a Monday evening it'll pa.s.s. Throw me a clean pair of drawers, will you, like a fair angel, Ben? Was Jenks' daughter there?"

"Yes. Both, I mean. The younger's a child. And a stranger introduced himself, a Mr. Daniel Shawn. Excited by _Artemis_ and won Uncle John's heart praising her. A seaman, silver-tongued--honest, I thought."

"What was he after?"

"I don't know that he was after anything, Ru. From his talk he must have been everywhere and seen everything."

"Maybe not everything."

"Oh, Muttonhead!--a manner of speaking."

"A goaty eye for Jenks' fair daughter belike?"

"No. Merely polite to her, like any gentleman."

"An old man then."

"Forty perhaps."

"Ah, Ben, these ancient cods! They're the worst, didn't you know?

Consider our Pontifex, how we sometimes hear him moaning in the night. I tell you, he hath a private succubus. Down the chimney cometh she, most punctually, Wednesdays and Sat.u.r.days, to grind him all night long between hot ivory legs, grind him even unto the very last gerunds and aorists and ablatives and first person plural of the verb _contorquere_."

"Ha?"

"Alas, poor Ben!--no Latin? It means to wriggle."

"Well, shame on you!"

"b.u.t.ton your long lip. You can't say that when I've made you laugh."

"No, blast you, I can't. As for Shawn, I think he only wished to know more about _Artemis_."

"Ay-yah. Still everyone wants for something."

"Granted, O Grandfather! And thou?"

"Trifles. Most of the ocean and the empire of Cathay. The spring moon.

The Northwest Pa.s.sage, the Fountain of Youth, a few acres of Eden.

Trifles, but still you see it's true--everyone wants for something, even I."

_Chapter Two_

"Yet the manifold desires of man," said Mr. Gideon Hibbs, biting a walnut--"and note that within this category I would subsume the concupiscent;"--his long right hand held down a finger of the left--"the natural, wherein I include the need of daily provender and nature's other common demands;"--another finger--"the intellectual, that is the desires of mind operating as it were in _vacuo_; the spiritual, whereby I understand the desire of man unto G.o.d;"--his left thumb waved, not included, and this troubled Mr. Hibbs because he was slightly drunk--"all these desires, I say, are subject to the ineluctable domination of _chance_, gentlemen, pure chance." He sighed at another walnut, a grayish man not old, in fact rather young by arithmetical measure. He could never have been young in spirit; Reuben supposed that Mr. Hibbs would have admitted this himself, with stern pride, holding that flesh is corruption, that truth can be illuminated only by the cold flame of philosophy.

From threadbare sleeves jutted his hands, pale and bony, clumsy with anything but a goose quill, stained by ink and tobacco, the nails always black--a corruption of the flesh that did not trouble him.

Reuben wondered occasionally if anything did. Mr. Hibbs' pedagogic rages were just that, put on for discipline and academic show. Reuben had sensed this, ever since his and Ben's first sweaty encounters with _amo_, _amas_, _amat_. The rages were as artificial as the lancinating stare of Mr. Hibbs' dark eyes, the stare intended to pin a student to the mat confessing all sins, especially those of omission. He knew Ben felt less secure under the _furor academicus_. The eyes of Mr. Hibbs might glare bitterly, the large red lips squirm anguished above the spade-shaped jaw, the hands clench as if itching to claw the answer out of a boy like a loose tooth, but Reuben knew the soul of Mr. Hibbs was away from all that on the other side of the moon, disputing with Democritus, Aristotle, Cicero, the Schoolmen, Comenius, even John Calvin, who might have been a sad sort of freshman in that crowd. Living at John Kenny's house with no duty but teaching, Mr. Hibbs had all the time in the world for the boys but not an undivided spirit. The black stare was further softened by his wig, a mousy thing carelessly powdered. The powder grayed his poor clothes, puffing off in a sneezy cloud if anyone patted his back--no one ever did except John Kenny.

"And yet," said Mr. Kenny, "if I understand you, sir, you believe in G.o.d. Shall G.o.d rule by chance? I am not well grounded in philosophy."

"Oh, the Prime Mover set the wheel a-spinning, and needeth not to observe it, I dare say--heresy of course, for the which I could spend a week or two in the stocks."

"And I with you," John Kenny chuckled, "for at least two thirds of what I say every day within mine own house. G.o.d then is synonymous with first cause?"

Ben was gazing into the purple country of a winegla.s.s, and Reuben saw that he had not drunk much, which was proper--or was that his second gla.s.s? This was the first time the boys had been invited to linger thus after dinner. Perhaps Uncle John wished to give them an initiatory taste of manhood, or else supposed them too full of roast goose to move.