Wilderness of Spring Part 26

"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 marked _reductio 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 p.a.w.n 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 rea.s.suring 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."

_Chapter Four_

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 a.s.sume that appearance of G.o.dly 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 Wh.o.r.e 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 p.r.o.nouns, 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 lady _Artemis_ lay 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 cla.s.sic 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 ship _Providence_ in her pa.s.sage 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 t.i.tles 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 n.o.bly 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 a _man_ maybe, 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 embarra.s.sed 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 s.h.i.t?"