Wilderness of Spring Part 20

Uncle John had laughed too much, and was wiping his eyes. Ben had hooted unrestrained. Behind his own laughter, Reuben was reflecting that what Mr. Shawn said of maritime employment was quite simply not true. As the war dragged on, one heard that Her Majesty's Navy was only too hungry for any man who could remain upright and heave on a rope. "Sir, sir,"

said Mr. Kenny, "was there no reviving Jemima?"

"Oh, there was not, seeing it was the cook himself who stepped on her, the blacker the day.... As you can see, Mr. Kenny, I am not at present in prosperity. Perhaps before now I have aimed too high, rejecting opportunities that I ought to have considered."

"Have you a family, sir?"

"A widower, sir, of modest habit, with never no stomach for riot or extravagance. I married young in the old country (G.o.d comfort her!) and when my wife died in childbirth thanks to a certain d.a.m.ned English midwife who probably--Oh, I can see it now----" Mr. Shawn stopped, and lifted frowning eyes as if startled by some remote vision beyond the walls; he finished his wine at a gulp. "Your pardon, sir--my wits were wandering. When my wife died and the little one with her--it was long ago--I took to the sea at last, and since then the ships have been wife and child," said Mr. Shawn, and let the silence hang.

"It would be best," said Mr. Kenny, "if you approach Mr. Jenks direct.

But since you've put it to me fairly, I'll speak to him also if you wish. I can make no promise at all, Mr. Shawn."

"I understand that, sir, and I thank you." Daniel Shawn's neck was flushed, the old scar throbbing, a lightly breathing snake. "You're the fair man, Mr. Kenny, and if 'tis my good luck to serve in your employ, I'll give a man's best, more I can't say."

Reuben wondered why he should be finding it necessary to compare this man with the doctor Amadeus Welland. They were nothing alike. Why?

"Mr. Shawn, let me fill your gla.s.s. Will you stay the night? I'd be pleased to save you the walking home in the dark."

"Oh, I must be going, but a thousand thanks for the thought, and I'm happy the gla.s.s is full so I may drink your health, Mr. Kenny, and the continuance of all good fortune to you, sir!"

They all drank Mr. Kenny's health, and Mr. Shawn did not go.

Reuben thought: Well, it's because of what they _don't_ share. As Ben's face is surrounded by that golden light, so Mr. Welland carries about him--honesty. That man Welland could never plot and contrive, never; he could never show a false face, no more than Ben could. But I think friend Shawn is doing exactly that, and I have drunk far too much wine....

No doubt of it: the sweet purple sorcery was stealing away all natural alertness. A certain Irish magic was filling the room and swelling, Reuben himself yielding to enjoyment of it, until it possessed not only the mournful mighty sound of a sea wind but all the driving power of a wind crossing the dark places, the lonely places, the foam-drenched wilderness.

Daniel Shawn was explaining--had been for a long time, Reuben realized--that the tales of mermaids were mythical fancies; that certain profounder mysteries had nothing to do with such froth of dreams. Uncle John appeared unwilling to abandon the fishtail wenches, and countered with cla.s.sical texts. Some of these, Reuben knew from a glint in Uncle John's eye and a squirming discomfort in Mr. Hibbs, had been invented on the spot for the occasion--John Kenny could be a rough man with a spontaneous Latin hexameter. But Shawn insisted, and was now launched on the story of a supposed mermaid seen by himself and another of his watch on a voyage among the hot somnolent West Indian isles. "Truly the crayter had the like of a woman's bubbies, and nursed a little one at them, and wasn't it meself was thinking I beheld the mermaid, for all she was that mortal ugly and her mouth ran up and down like a caterpillar's?"

"Now," said Gideon Hibbs--"now, after all!"

"I give you my word, sir, do I not?" Daniel Shawn's flare of wrath was swiftly veiled. "Will a man be inventing such a thing? Wasn't it meself that saw that mouth munching a huge great gob of sea gra.s.s, the kind that groweth in brackish waters, and saw the lips churning from side to side? That other man started for a harpoon. I stayed him. Ochone!--how could a man be looking on the ugly thing, the mother she was, and not have pity?"

"Pity's a rare uneasy thing," said John Kenny.

"A bald black head round like a cannon ball, devil a bit of nose but only a pair of slits like a common seal." Shawn laughed abruptly. "And now I must ruin my tale, Mr. Kenny, for when I went below one of the crew who'd often sailed those parts told me the thing was called a manatee or sea cow, and had been well known for many years, the way the folk at Campeachy and elsewhere do fancy the meat highly and use the hide of the gentle beast for making whips. Thus I was spared the folly of telling abroad the marvel I had seen. But you understand me, sir?--in this manner, from such particulars glimpsed in a poor light, come many inventions." Reuben could smell Shawn, a muskiness not quite unpleasant; a wild smell. "In all waste places are wonders--in swamps, jungles, mountains, deserts. The greatest of all lies very far west of here, or say east if you like, for it's the other side of the world. Beside that these fancies of storytellers are pap for children. I have never beheld the sea serpent, though I've heard of him times enough, and spoke with those who'd seen him, honest men owning no more imagination than a block of holystone. The Kraken too, perhaps. Yet those mysteries, and all others, are nothing beside the sea's own self, the sea of the west, the Pacific."

Ben turned to Shawn, rapt and flushed, and Reuben knew he was asking for the sake of hearing Shawn speak again: "The Kraken?"

"A t.i.tan of many arms, Mr. Cory, mightier than a right whale they say, who will drag down entire ships, or overturn them belike to feed on all aboard the way a cat will take her a nestful of little birds. It may be so. The sea is boundless. Anything might live therein."

"Even mermaids," said John Kenny, but Mr. Shawn was not listening.

"No man knoweth the sea until he hath ventured the western sea, the Pacific. The fat Spanish ships travel it, but I tell you the route they follow is a single thread stretched over a Sahara. I have sailed it too, a very little of it, above and below the Line, in a whaler, once, and I young with no wisdom in me but with open eyes--and I was, say, like an insect crossing the continent of Europe, but I'm a wise insect, sir--Mother of G.o.d, I know the meaning of horizons! Pacific nights--deep as any night of the soul, and will you be telling me of a deeper dark than that? Out there only the sea is truth, only the sea, and this is a part of the truth: there be many islands."

"Continents perhaps," said John Kenny, agreeing but somehow without enthusiasm, and Shawn sat back to study him, the blue eyes clouded windows closing away some of the lightning of inner storm.

"What's the Atlantic?--a gray mad stormy puddle. Sea of the Caribbees?--a small hot lagoon, green lumps of land like a lady's emerald necklace on a blue gown--oh, steady as she goes! I'll grant you her breast can heave and toss. If the wind's coming dark and fast down there in the Caribbees I'll strip canvas quick as any man and remember I was brought up religious, for men and ships are small things. But out there on the far side of the world, have I not seen an empty island open to the west, where the high rollers came down and down forever with all the blind leagues of the sea behind them, down and down as heavy and slow and sure as the years beating on a man's youth? Have I not seen Pacific moonrise where no land is, and the gray and silver piled higher than the North Star Polaris?"

Ben woke on Thursday before dawn, disoriented in time, noticing how the days and nights of being in love run together like those disquieted by simpler fevers. He recalled it was a Monday afternoon when he watched _Artemis_ sail home, therefore a Monday evening when he went to bed undeniably drunk, therefore a gray Tuesday morning when Mr. Hibbs, red-eyed and taciturn, gave him and Reuben an a.s.signment of one hundred and twenty lines of the _Tristia_ of Ovid, to be absorbed by Wednesday afternoon, plus (as atonement for Tuesday morning's inattention and general sinfulness) a demand for five copies per boy, in a fair firm hand with no nonsense, no margin of error, of the entire conjugation of the verb [Greek: kephalalgeo], which means _to have a headache_. So Tuesday and Wednesday coalesced to one inky-dark billow of time, and now before dawn the young apple tree out there that Reuben had spoken of was stirring in a new pale softness. As Ben watched, the sky awoke beyond Dorchester Neck, and the truth of full bloom was confirmed. He thought: I'll see her today.

She was lying touched by the pallor of the morning as he knelt at the window, a breeze on his shoulders mild as a woman's fingers. She was sleeping--in a garden maybe, or under that same apple tree's white foam, her gold-brown hair tumbled over the gra.s.s, a curl of it on her forehead above the flush of damask rose. The blue vague garment betrayed her in sleep--no, rather his own daring hand drew it down, leaving bare one breast and the red flower of it. From that, the fantasy moved with reluctance, sluggishly, oppressed by the sense of a thing contrived: sweet yet false. Nevertheless for a moment she shone quite naked, turning in her sleep away from him, a swell of flesh pliant under his hand and hiding the dark desired triangle, the other flower of red. But then she was no longer Faith; she was any woman, with a face unknown.

Reuben stirred and yawned. "Behold the nympholept! Benjamin, what of the night?"

"It a'n't night, Muttonhead."

"Do you attempt to a.s.sert that the difference between night and dawn can be detected by the dull besotted perception of the peasantry?"

"I love you too," said Ben.

"Ah! In lieu of morning prayers let us contemplate Pontifex."

"Law, why that, on a spring morning?"

"He hath been subjected to experiment and found wanting."

"How's that?"

"The verb, boy. Consider, it was the doom of Pontifex to _read_ all those twice five copies. Well, sir, in one of 'em, taking not even you into my confidence, I inserted one error, a miserable crawling misplaced accent--a wee louse, do you see, nibbling the fair white integument of a Greek verb. Did he discover, percontate and make manifest this c.r.a.pulent, this obscene and overweening impudicity? d.a.m.n, I forgot concupiscent. Did he find this advent.i.tious louse to be a concupiscent intrusion upon the fulgurant purity of grammatical impeccancy, and crack the hereinbeforementioned louse upon that sable thumbnail? Nah. By the way, where'd the b.l.o.o.d.y pot get to this time?"

"Under _your_ bed," said Ben, exasperated, for the Cyprian fantasy had not completely dissolved, and it did seem too bad that the last of it must be dismissed by the unequivocal din of urination.

"There!" Reuben sighed. "I have subsumed the concupiscent." He stooped to pat the floor a few times with the flat of his hands, and sprawled back on his bed. "With reference, sir, to that Cicero whose lank shadow falleth across our afternoon: _Sunt autem qui dicant foedus esse quoddam sapientius ut ne minos amicos quam se ipsos diligant._ Do you understumble me, sir?"

"Please, sir, no, sir."

"I freely render: Some say there's a kind of compact of the wise, to love their friends no less than themselves. You may construe."

"Please, sir, no, sir, I won't, sir."

"You what or that which, sir?"

Ben s.n.a.t.c.hed for his brother's sleep-tangled hair. Reuben caught his hand palm to palm and braced his elbow, stretching out wiry and tense.

"Wrastle then," he said, not smiling.

Ben knew that with his feet firm on the floor he could hardly fail to force Reuben's hand back, though the boy did possess uncommon strength in his thin arms. Ben recalled he had won last time; not wishing to win twice running, he allowed his hand to sink slowly, as their eyes locked too, Reuben's grave and dilated. Ben drove the smaller hand up once or twice, catching then a glimpse of panic in Reuben, but Reuben clamped his mouth tight and heaved, the power of his knotting arm increased unreasonably, and Ben was startled to find his own arm wavering down. No need after all to simulate defeat; it was fairly done. Ben slumped on the floor laughing and rubbing his shoulder. He thought of telling Reuben that he meant to go into Boston today, Hibbs or no Hibbs. "Ru, you could strangle a bull."

"Not yet." Reuben lay flat, lifting yesterday's shirt from a chair with his toes, to frown at it horribly. "But seeing you're about to throw me a clean shirt like a good Christian, be careful how you come within reach, for I'd be happy to try my powers on a small calf." Ben threw a pillow at him and then the shirt. "Snuff the air, little Benjamin! What hath Kate wrought, do you know? _I_ know."

"Sausage!"

"True," said Reuben, rising in a whirl of activity, "and though you may seem more dressed than I"--he slipped behind Ben, s.n.a.t.c.hed off his neckcloth and darted away knotting it around his own neck--"I shall be in the land of the sausage before you."

They were late. Mr. Kenny had already breakfasted and gone to Boston.

Mr. Hibbs lurked impatiently in the schoolroom, nursing one of the head colds that tormented him with the onset of spring, and Kate Dobson was moving about in a large dreamy morning mood, soft-footed scamperings carrying her billowing body from one to another of a dozen errands--the rising of bread, the simmering of a kettle on the hearth, a speck of dirt to be scrubbed, the demolition of a fly. She bounced everywhere, a huge gray-headed silkworm ever hurrying at her generous spinning, and began talking as the boys entered, with some sentence begun obscurely in the depths of her mind: "... so to myself I said, minute I see 'em I'll ask, is it p-i-e-s or p-e-i-s or _what_ is it, with a pox?--I could declare it had an a in it the way you showed it me, Master Reuben, oh dearie me, the letters all shaped out fair and plain."

"Ah, that," said Reuben. "P-e-a-c-e, Kate."