Wilderness of Spring Part 38

Reuben smiled to himself and slipped out of the room, and so did not hear it when Ben inquired whether Mr. Shawn was to be considered in the room of Jan Dyckman. "Why, Ben--as a matter of fact I must give that some further thought," said John Kenny.

Later Ben said: "Uncle John, if _Artemis_ should make a quick run, no further than New York and return, might I not--I mean, sir, I'd be gone only a few weeks, and could learn----"

"Now don't press me about that. I must give it more thought. Did we not go to Cambridge not long ago and discuss your situation with Mr.

Leverett himself? Did he not examine you in beginner's Greek and in Latin, and find that even with the summer's work you may be scarce ready for the first year's studies?"

"But suppose, sir--Ru is ready, as Mr. Leverett said, and certainly he ought to begin in September--but suppose I were to wait another year?

Then I might go with _Artemis_ now--might I not?--and earn something, and continue studies afterward, in the winter, and next summer when Ru could aid me, and so...."

"Ben, you would sail as a s.h.i.+p's boy. If you endured the hards.h.i.+ps, and satisfied Mr. Jenks in matters of heavy labor and obedience, the which is no easy thing to do, you might fairly soon achieve the proud condition of an ordinary seaman. They have a saying: 'Six days shalt thou labor as hard as thou art able; the seventh, holystone the main deck and chip the chain cable.' They say also: 'No law off soundings'--and I'm afraid that's true, though I guess the law according to Peter Jenks is just enough in its own harsh way. They have even another saying--I suppose it was repeated by the men who followed John Quelch a few years ago and were hanged with him at Copp's Hill: 'Better a short gasp on a tricing line than a long hunger, short pay and the b.l.o.o.d.y scurvy.'"

"But at least, Uncle John, there would not be the expense of my keep here, and I would be----"

"What? You're troubled that I should spend my substance on mine own--my--like a son--why, Ben, the old have little enough they can do except give. I pray you allow me to do that much."

"And I pray you, Uncle John, understand me! I did not mean it like that.

I meant--if I sailed, I'd be learning things that might make me of some use to you in the business."

"Oh? So?... Well, you know that's near my heart. A few days ago you was undecided. We spoke of it, coming home from seeing _Artemis_ return--did we not?"

"Yes, Uncle John."

"And I feared I was nursing an old man's vanity. Urging on you something that might be unwelcome.... Mind you, Ben, I am not your master and no one shall be. I will not say to you, go there, do this, as I might to the common sort. Somehow, of late years, I don't much fancy the meaning they give to the word 'gentleman' in England. Joseph Cory was a farmer, and a better gentleman than any milord in London. Yes, in this land the word doth seem to be earning a new definition, or maybe it did alway own it, but t.i.tle-dazed Europe is in no posture to comprehend such a thing.

You are a gentleman's son, Ben. I say there's an aristocracy which hath nothing at all to do with wealth or position, nor with ancestry neither except as a parent's good qualities do often appear in the children. I mean the aristocracy of the good mind with the good heart--you will not find that very often on earth, Benjamin. You are a gentleman, and no one may order you about, only guide a little, so far as love and friends.h.i.+p may do it, while you--while you are yet a boy."

Ben felt the fire in his cheeks, and dreaded stammering. "Well, sir, might it not be that sailing with _Artemis_ would help me decide, or at least understand better, what I wish to do?"

"It--might.... Mind, I've not said yea or nay. Don't press me more on it now. It may be two weeks yet before _Artemis_ is ready to go. Mr.

Banning of Gloucester is delaying me. His dem'd price is too dear, noticed it a thousand times. Uh--don't you think so?"

If Reuben had been in the room he would have known how Ben, in the face of all common sense, was very nearly taking that to mean yes. He would have seen how the inner lamp steadied and brightened in a manner hardly reasonable when the overt topic was nothing more ecstatic than the current value of salt codfish. Why, the old man had not even said that _Artemis_ would put out for New York instead of Barbados....

On Sunday the rain continued. Rob Grimes, an accomplished backslider with sixty-odd years of sin to his credit, marched off to meeting as usual and retained sanct.i.ty like a best suit until Monday morning, when Mr. Kenny's nervous gray gelding acted up at sight of the saddle and caused the first lapse into blasphemy. It was a conspiracy of the Powers against Rob, that everything should always go wrong on Monday morning, so that for the rest of the week his state of grace should be nothing but a G.o.d-d.a.m.ned ruin. Kate Dobson slipped away to the Anglican services that she found a comfort in a barbarous land. John Kenny fretted at home--even he might have been subject to arrest and fine for unnecessary travel on the Sabbath--fretted like one under enchantment who must spend a certain twenty-four hours of every week in the guise of a rabbit, a shrewd one who knows very well that if he should venture abroad where the G.o.dly are baying he'd be a gone bunny.

In their first year at Roxbury, Ben and Reuben had been similarly housebound on the Lord's day. But on a morning of urgent springtime in the year 1705, Reuben had advanced the doctrine that one could easily pa.s.s from the back door through the orchard and to the woods with no danger of detection, and look: anyone who did observe the sin would be far from any route to the meeting-house and therefore a sinner himself; wouldn't he? "Besides, sir," said Reuben Cory, "we've a'ready done it a couple-three times." "Oh," said John Kenny. "I find your reasoning faultless but incomplete. You omit, Mr. Cory, reference to the necessity of wearing your brown suits that don't show at a distance, and of promising to avoid the sky line and open places. Some say reason doth advance, even in these times. I a'n't sure. Wear your brown suits...."

On the Sunday after the death of Jan Dyckman, the rain was heavy enough to discourage even Reuben's need to wander. He felt it unsafe to go to Mr. Welland's cottage, for part of the approach out of the back fields was visible from the main street of Roxbury; and anyway Ben shamefacedly declared he needed help with the next half-acre of Cicero.

Drearily it rained on the Monday when Jan Dyckman was buried.

More time lost to lessons: Gideon Hibbs nourished that thought so obviously that there was no occasion for him to utter it aloud. He was not attending the funeral, having been only distantly acquainted with the Dyckman family. Acidly, with a kind of humor occasionally encountered at the borders of philosophy, he remarked to John Kenny that he was the fourth son in a family of twelve; all his brothers and sisters had married and begotten young, of whom the expected percentage had died, and thus he found himself already in possession of a ma.s.sive collection of pallbearer's gloves, for the which he could discover no practical application whatsoever (although familiar with the rumor that some persons of a weightier worth than himself had turned a fair penny in disposing of such); he would therefore, with Mr. Kenny's permission, remain at home and take advantage of the peace and quiet to do a trifle more on a work which had engaged him now for ten years, namely an employment of the sternest logic--(it could not be published in the colonies)--in a demonstration of the immortality of the soul. Mr. Kenny sighed and patted his dusty back.

The few who were present with Mr. Kenny and the boys bulked like a mult.i.tude in the spotless parlor of the Dyckman house. More un.o.btrusive than the Jenks' slave Clarissa, Constable Derry was there--so far as was known, the corpse had not bled in anyone's presence. There were Jan's two small girls red-nosed in doll-like silence, his stricken wife, a handful of dour strangers, Captain Jenks thoroughly sober and looking like the vast man he was instead of a ruin, Faith and Charity stiff and amazingly pale in black, Clarissa self-effacing, and Madam Prudence Jenks with a black enameled comb instead of a red one.

The Lutheran dominie did not exhort, nor shout, nor whine, but spoke all manner of pleasant things concerning the nature of the dead man, and then entered on the main stream of his discourse--this a poetic enumeration and description of the mercies of G.o.d, announced with mild certainty as though he had been directly instructed in the matter and had been astonished at the kindness of the Lord in a.s.senting to some of his own small suggestions. Unhesitatingly he implied that if any soul could rest sure of heaven it was the soul of Jan Dyckman. A gentle spirit, this minister: incapable of learning how to be content with discontent, he had luckily never needed to learn it, since not every son of Adam is obliged to go to school.

At some time during this pa.s.sage of consolation a kerchief tumbled from Faith's restless hand. Ben was able to find and return it to her, not prevented, not even much scared by the polar stare of Captain Jenks. He won a pressure of her fingers and a sudden blue-eyed look of such depth and sweetness that she might have been saying aloud: "I am with you."

Reuben sat motionless, all gold and ivory.

The minister's tender music did not touch on the fact of murder, yet somehow conveyed that this was an aspect of the infinite wisdom of G.o.d which at the present time it was not polite to mention.

The mellow voice was larger but otherwise not changed, when in the cemetery under a slanting curtain of rain it recited the last words of commitment to the earth. Here Ben and Reuben stood together and glanced often at each other--communication, as any observer would have known, but under this quiet rain perhaps only one message pa.s.sed, the simplest and the most essential: I am with you.

It rained all night.

In the morning at Roxbury pools of standing water translated the image of a warmer sky, for it was now well past the time of the return of the robins, and of the bluebirds whose color of morning is a music made visible. Once in such a pool at the base of a rock near Uncle John's private road--but that was another April, the April of last year--a distant self of Ben Cory had been revived, so that the older boy could momentarily breathe with the breath of that child and rejoice in the sunlight wantoning over the child's bare chest and legs and muddy feet.

He had been five then or younger, master of a vessel on a sea of s.h.i.+ning calm--a chip with an oak-leaf sail, a pond in a world no longer living: well, in the immediate world you must write down a Latin subjunctive a hundred times, whipping an intractable brain into retaining it, and by the way, what the devil did Ovid himself care about subjunctives when it was spring in Italy? Nothing, Ru would say--subjunctive's one small step in a stairway to a place up yonder where you might get a glimpse of Ovid; and Ru would take the book from him, and tumble across the bed in his thin-legged sprawl or sit on the floor with his almost beardless chin hooked on his knees, and listen while Ben groped and stumbled through the lesson--correcting Ben casually, guiding, sometimes ripping out lewd or startling comment to make the Latin stick in Ben's mind by a.s.sociation, and never once needing to open the blasted volume and make sure he was right....

By the same pool in the April of 1707, this present year of change, Reuben Cory had stared as through a window on the inverted blue of heaven; had knelt by the rock to find white violets, the first to come, miniature, early-waking, with a midget purple eye. Hurried bees had discovered them before him, since it is not enough for these restless innocent to store up summer in the honeycomb, but with the earliest warmth they must be out and seeking in hunger. He heard then the incessant whispering, the waters of the earth returning to the broader streams, to the sea, the sky, the earth again, the waters of spring.

Drifting away to the south pasture and the woods, Reuben heard also a catbird in a budding thicket, chuckling and mewling and singing in a dozen voices, attempting alone the merriment of a full choir, sounding the bravura of summer before its time, fantastic, strong and sweet as the reed of the horned G.o.d. Furry silver softness of p.u.s.s.y willows shone at the edge of the woods; further in, he found the never-distant symbols of struggle and pain, for the tips of the wild grape were becoming fingers, later to grow aggressive, cruel in silent pressure, though all they seek is an island of s.p.a.ce in the sunlight. He heard the peeper frogs, the delicate violence in their amorous throats, and now and then the ponderous grumble of a big frog, not yet sustained in the organpoint of summer but large as the owl-voices that had been disturbing the night woods all winter long. He watched a robin carrying mud with a purpose, and other small architects concerned with the foundations of secret houses, and sat long silent in his watching; silent and thinking now and again of something said by Mr. Welland which seemed not unrelated to springtime and the nesting of birds: "I do believe in G.o.d, Reuben, but I must tell you my faith is rather like that of a man on a cloudy day who hath some notion the sun may come out before evening. Should the sky remain overcast he will not be too sadly dismayed and may fall asleep with ease. And I suggest, it is no belittling of mine own faith, that I reject the arrogance of certainty."

Silent--so long that a box turtle placed a blundering claw on his shoe before it understood that Reuben was no rock. Reuben moved his hand idly to make it withdraw hissing into the sanctuary; he held his foot motionless, until by degrees the little bothered head emerged, vague and sad like Jesse Plum's, and the creature lurched away to safety. Reuben forgot it, listening to the wind and the voices of a thousand hungers within him, almost but not quite seeing the airy rising in mist of castles in Spain, almost but not quite hearing the reed of the horned G.o.d that makes a mockery of everything but blind desire and the need to embrace the fleeing sun-dappled body in the country of Arcadia.

Then from near bushes another music streamed, three notes of purity, the last one twice repeated; notes at intervals true to the human scale but sung as no one sings them except a white-throated sparrow who has come home to April in New England. But even under the glow of this music Reuben's human brain must at once observe how bounteous nature includes the porcupine's quill festering in helpless flesh, the needle teeth of a weasel in a rabbit's neck, the scar on Ben Cory's lip, the drop of a hawk, smallpox, the death of Deerfield, a pencil sketch of unredeemable sorrow in Mr. Welland's surgery, the husband-eating habits of spiders, the right eye of the boy Wilks gouged out by a cutla.s.s; and so it would seem there's no help for it, but the brain must continue, trying in some confusion to kill wolves and learn how to be content with discontent. It will not say: _What is man, that thou art mindful of him?_ Such mock humility, Reuben thought, is iniquitous rubbish, in the presence of the whitethroat's music and the drawings of Vesalius, for if the human creature and the sparrow are not beings of wonder and infinite depth then nothing is wonderful under the North Star.

On cool mornings after fog, Ben Cory liked to search out the green of poplar bark still damp, a green softer and stranger than any other on earth, seeming translucent, leading the mind to green oceans.

Ben Cory knew as well as anyone that the country beyond the magic of poplar bark is not to be entered, and may be declared what you will.

There as here, like the reed of the horned G.o.d demanding and perilous, the west winds move beyond the green land and over blue-green waves remote from land.

The days crawled with inky toil into another Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and Ben Cory was once more free to invade Boston. This time he could ride his mare to the Jenks house--ride like a gentleman, with a solid determination not to fall from grace, no, not in the lightest particular.

In the morning, Uncle John also had gone to Boston, as he seldom did on a Sat.u.r.day. Since that evening a week ago when Ben had presumed to speak out, Uncle John had appeared withdrawn in a puzzling way--even more since the gray hours of the funeral--almost as though he regretted having allowed young Benjamin to talk up like a man. It created a background trouble for Ben's thought: maybe he had made a fool of himself after all; maybe on second thought Uncle John had found it downright insulting, the idea that his _Artemis_ should abandon the rich journey to the Indies and operate like a cheap ferry tub in the coastal trade. Only background: even the fear he had managed to discuss with Reuben, that John Kenny's fortune might tumble suddenly at the a.s.sault of creditors, could not dominate such an afternoon as this, when the warmth of June had arrived to blend with the crystal freshness of the end of April, and the girl Faith was in the garden by the house, alone, kneeling to lift with a pink finger tip the golden face of a jonquil.

Ben jumped down, not able to look again and pretend to discover her until he had made a careful business of hitching his mare to the post in the street, rubbing the hairy foolish nose and murmuring the words old Molly usually required before she would stand quiet and go to dreaming in the sun. He could turn then, but (such is the bewildering skill of women) Faith was still engaged with the daffodil. Only at that moment did she rise, glance toward the house, lift a hand in the light to push back a strand of hair under her little cap, brush away a clinging leaf from the softness of her brown skirt, and then at long last step away from the bed of flowers to find Ben Cory at the gate, with a wondrous flush of surprise. "Oh, Benjamin, you startled me!" Her right hand jumped to her mouth, blue eyes laughing over it in mirthful self-reproach at having used his first name when of course she ought to have spoken with proper reserve in spite of the violets swaying at her feet, and called him Mr. Cory.

"I didn't mean to. I'm not dangerous, now that's no lie."

"That, sir, remains to be seen. You did cause me to forget myself." She was still silently laughing--from natural good spirits, or from kindness, or because Ben Cory was the most comical savage under the sun.

"Surprising me so, Mr. Cory!" That in drawling mimic reproach, as her hands held down the latch of the picket gate, in mimic warfare declining to open it.

"May I come in then?"

"Oh-h--mmm," she said, her tone a singing. "I'll consider it, I suppose.

I suppose it would be cold and unkind if I obliged you to stand out there in the street. Though perhaps you ought to, as a punishment for surpri-ising me so."

"I'm most sorry for that."

"Are you now? Why, Mr. Cory, if I thought so I might decide you were a poor thing of no enterprise, and so away into the house closing the door, and you might sit out here lorn and lonely enough until the lamplighter cometh in the evening." She blinked both eyes. "Or I could send Charity to you, sir? With another picture maybe, so to keep you company?" She glanced down at her hands.

Out of breath in an April gust of wisdom, Ben lifted their unresisting warmth from the latch, opened it, found himself inside the garden and closing the gate without commotion. She had drawn away from him, laughter fallen from her like a ravished s.h.i.+eld. Not too far away, grave, with veiled downward-looking eyes, the hands he had briefly touched holding each other as if for safety between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Ben could neither move nor speak unless she did so. "Would you like to come look at the daffodils? They were timid, Mr. Cory. They would not bloom in March, but now I think the sun's a little kinder."

The daffodils, yes, but not yet. Ben stooped to the purple glow and wind-stirred motion at his feet, plucked a single violet perfect in fragility and held it near her eyes, so that she must lift them presently to look at him, frightened with discovery, as young in all ways as himself and unsure. He recaptured the memory of a breath of music from the dingy library of John Kenny, and found a glory of pride that he could bring these words to himself out of some dusty hour that must have pa.s.sed without love, and speak them for her pleasure, and not sound in the least like a fool.