Wilderness of Spring Part 57

"Whisht, Ben! You'll be telling me your great-uncle gave me no promise hard and fast, but I know men's hearts. But for Jenks, I'd've had my way, and glory in it for Mr. Kenny as well as me, don't you doubt it. It wasn't to be. When he took on that agent Hanson, sure my voice was plain enough, I could see how they'd been planning it all the while. You see now, don't you? Had I not taken _Artemis_ from him, Jenks would have her now the other side of the Horn, and Boston would never see her again.

But I, Ben--why, I shall give her back the name of _Artemis_, and I'll send her home, when she's taken us to the new country...." In the silence Ben caught the glint of something--merely the copper farthing; at length Shawn spoke again, quietly: "True, Ben--nothing before you now but the Line, and the South Atlantic, and the Horn. Nothing below you but the Atlantic. And once on a time wasn't I a boy of your age who believed that G.o.d was over me?" He was moving away. Ben thought he might be weeping, but his voice often sounded so when his eyes were dry. "And over you, over all that breathe. Oh, but in those days I was that young and foolish you wouldn't know the misguided thoughts that would seize hold of me and deceive, for the voices I heard then were not G.o.d's voice, they were far other. Maybe even now I'm not certain of anything, except that I cannot die until I've looked again on the color of the western sea." He returned swift and silent out of the shadow and stood close to the helm, eyes level with Ben's; no taller than Ben. Not even as tall, perhaps. "What now? Why did I say that, Ben? Why did I say, the _color_ of the western sea?"

Ben supposed his right hand could flash away from the tiller to his belt, if it must. "How could I know why you say any of the things you do?"

"Ah? But you must sail with me, all the way. Will you not say it? Will you be forcing me to destroy you? Then I'll be alone, Ben. These men with us--what are they but phantoms, all of 'em? Knife 'em, they'd bleed smoke--not blood, Ben--smoke, and drift away downwind. None aboard but you and me, now that's no lie...."

But Ben, for sheer pity and disgust, terror and bewilderment, self-blame and homesickness and again pity, could not speak at all, and Shawn moved away, himself like smoke, past another black shadow by the mizzen that must have heard all he said; at this Shawn snarled: "If the wind changes, Mr. Marsh, you needn't be calling me--I shall know it."

Under Ben's hand beautiful _Diana_ ran southward, cutting away the miles with a timeless whisper at her bow; but during the night the wind fell off, the air growing dull, silent, and in the morning dead. The sun rose on sails become slack, bemused in idleness on a mirror sea.

"I wondered, in fact, that she had not long ago destroyed herself in one of those seizures."

"They seldom do, Reuben, though often they injure themselves. She is nearly forty, that woman we saw today--I've known her bite her tongue and bruise herself, but nothing worse. As a rule they die somewhat young. It's as well you saw her so--the condition is not too rare and you'll encounter it again."

"And the books?"

"Have nothing to offer but speculation and bad advice. Nothing I've tried ever had the slightest effect.... What's that?--I mean the one that called from back there in the pasture."

"Red-winged blackbird."

"I wish I knew 'em all, the way you do."

"Brought up with 'em in the wilderness, Amadeus. But n.o.body could know them all.... Do the books tell anything of the cause?"

"Nothing worth your notice. Speculation, most of it not based on clinical observation. And (as you suggest) without at least some knowledge of immediate causes, treatment's only a blind groping. We must try it of course, because sometimes a guess is correct. But somehow we must also push back along the chain of causes--widen the area of light--somehow.... As you may or may not know, there are many going about in the world far madder than that poor epileptic, who is not really mad at all but merely drops into her fit from time to time, and usually comes out of it unharmed. A fearful thing to watch, Ru--I dare say you still feel it in your stomach. But some of the forms of madness that don't so loudly announce themselves are much worse."

"The world may be a mad place, Amadeus, but there go the peeper frogs. I told you they might, on such an afternoon."

"So they do. You don't suppose----?"

"If we continue to the pond, they'll stop. However, should we then squat patient in our boots, the thing might be done--imitating boulders, you know. We might, as it were, rock ourselves into the semblance of a natural outgrowth."

"Who now hath plumbed the depths of a contumelious paronomasia?"

"Ha!"

"That log looks more comfortable."

"If the ants on it are black, yes. If red, no."

"They look black, the few I see. Is there a difference?"

"Oh, my friend! How did you survive till I came to you?"

"Don't know."

"Yes, they're black.... By the madder ones, you mean the raving kind?

Those with wild delusions?"

"Those, and others. I was thinking of the quieter sort, who are seldom called mad. Men and women eaten up with suspicion. So that--I think you've never encountered this, but beware of it if you do--so that everything happening within their purview must be bent to the shape of that suspicion; and to hear them talk you'd suppose the whole world was allied in conspiracy against them. I'd guess that such a state of mind is begotten of a most fearful vanity. And what evil is commoner than vanity? Of course that particular sickness of the mind is only one of its fruits. How seldom do you find anyone who hath ever attempted to look on his own life with something like the eye of eternity! But without at least some detachment, vanity is bound to grow."

"As for example the seeming humility of proper Christians?"

"Oh, that, yes--but don't trouble thyself too much about that. It would seem they need it. Well, and there are those madder ones devoured by jealousy, spite, greed, and fears of a hundred kinds, mostly groundless.

It's no-way true that all is vanity, but I think you may say that vanity is the source of nearly all the saddest things in human nature. Nay, I think our poor wench with the fits, by comparison with many respectable souls, is quite sane."

"And so what is madness?"

"Do thou tell me, thou who gavest me once a definition of health that serves me still."

"A--a gross exaggeration of some natural activity of the mind? 'Lilies that fester....'"

"I'm pleased I made thee discover the Sonnets. Yes, that might serve....

But the hunger for verifiable knowledge--now there's an activity of the mind, natural I think, but sluggish or nonexistent in most men, and in a few like thee and me, very intense: are we then mad?"

"If such hunger for knowledge became painful or annoying to others, Amadeus, I am sure we would be called mad."

"Mm-yas--thought I'd caught thee, but (as usual) I'm caught instead. So consider--would you say there are _any_ activities of the mind that would not deserve the name of madness if sorely exaggerated?"

"Maybe none. That hunger for knowledge could become a thing _I'd_ call madness, if the pursuit of it caused a man to neglect too many other matters--such as sunlight and peeper frogs and Charity's pictures and the brightness of a swallow flying."

"I'll agree. I dare say anything out of proportion may become a madness.

Even generosity. Even love."

"But Amadeus, I do ever think that love is not a thing, but more like a region where we travel. Something of that I said once to Ben. I can't remember when it was, and he may not have understood it--I'm sure I said it badly. Like a region, where we travel with--oh, some vision, some of the time. As sleep is like a region, and waking. Do I still say it badly, Amadeus? I mean that no one can give his friend a handful of sunlight, but may walk in it with him, and so love him."

After scant and haunted sleep, Ben woke to stillness where motion should have been. Stumbling up on deck long before the beginning of the forenoon watch, he saw Shawn on the quarterdeck deep in a stillness of his own, ignoring Tom Ball who muttered at him, and Joey Mills who stood by the helm but had nothing to do there, for the _Diana_ had lost all way, the sails were dead rags, and if some profound current still moved her there was nothing to tell of it in this deathlike air under a brazen sun.

Ben remained forward, to avoid Shawn. Matthew Ledyard was lounging near the bow with nothing to do. His stare was not unfriendly; he even wished Ben a laconic good morning. Maybe he wanted to break his custom and share a word or two out of his permanent gloom. Like Ben, in these tropic days Ledyard had discarded shirt and jacket, wearing nothing above his belt but a kerchief around his head to moderate the sun and hold sweat out of his eyes. His gaunt chest was darkly tanned; it had never seemed to Ben that the purple splash on Ledyard's face was particularly ugly--once you grew used to it, it was a nothing, no more than another man's scar or mole. Unnecessarily Ledyard said: "We're in for a calm."

For several days a carrion reek had corrupted the air of the forecastle, and the murky h.e.l.l-hole of the galley where French Jack prepared his strange offerings. Likely more barrels of the salt cod had gone bad and ought to be hunted out. Mr. Ball claimed the whole dirty cargo was spoiled and should be heaved overside, but French Jack explained that cod smelt that way anyhow; in spite of the pride of a Boston man, Ben was inclined to agree. With no breeze to sweep the nastiness away, the stench overhung the deck also, as though the _Diana_ herself were exhaling corruption in a mortal sickness. To come up into this from the fetid forecastle was for Ben like waking to a continuation of nightmare.

He was in a mood to fume and curse at anyone--particularly at Shawn, and that not for the large and just reasons, but simply for a certain standing order that forbade any of the hands to sleep on deck. For Ledyard, however, Ben managed a smile and a grunt of agreement. "Hope I may spend some of my trick aloft."

"Ay--stinks, don't it?" And Ledyard startled Ben exceedingly by adding: "Like a dead man's dream it is. A fair hope gone rotten."

Ben grew alert. Ledyard had never said anything like that to him before.

"Maybe it'll be as bad at the masthead. This morning I believe we could stink out Father Neptune himself. Is no one aloft?"

"I was. Captain called me down. Seems dem'd foolish even to him to keep a lookout now--if we're becalmed so's everything else that might be about." He glanced aft and continued, a murmur in his smallest voice: "Cory, him and Mr. Ball was just now speaking of breaking out the boat and towing her. Understand that? Take at least six men at the oars to move her. Six men in a boat, in this sun, nothing to their bellies but p'ison stew or salt cod.... Step further away from the hatch, will you?"

He lounged away to the bow, and Ben followed him as casually as he might, noticing how, with no way on her at all, the Diana had at some time since the wind died turned completely about, her lifeless bow pointing homeward to the north. Ben stood with the blaze of the morning sun behind him and watched the fire of it on the battlefield of Ledyard's face. "You might say, Cory, if so be he wants to kill all us mis'able scrannel hands, us b.u.g.g.e.rly rascals, that's what he'll do. Just get us out there at the oars in the sun, to tow the old b.i.t.c.h, that's all it needs." His browned st.u.r.dy arms spread out along the rail, Matthew Ledyard looked much like a man crucified, his dark face unflinching in the sun. "And I wonder would you be out there too--Mister Cory? Pulling an oar? With your charmed young life, so even the tropic sun won't strike you down? Or back here on the deck belike, so to sail with Captain Shawn when the rest of us is maybe dried up and burnt too black to stink? Or will you now be trundling aft to tell the Captain what old Ledyard said to you?"

Ben dropped his hand on the man's iron wrist. It did not move away.

Ledyard's intense stare did not seem to be one of wrath, for all his words. "I have never carried tales to Shawn and you know it."