Wilderness of Spring Part 43

Reuben was long silent, drooping, looking into his empty hands. "Ben--'d I ever recount to thee the story of the woodcutter's stupid son who tamed a lion?"

"Woodcutter's son--I don't think so. Is it from Aesop?"

"No. Well, that's nearly the whole tale already. He found it as a cub.

They grew up together, played together, the lion learning not to unsheath his claws, the woodcutter's son trying to roar like a lion, but 'tis said he made only some poor squeaking sounds that carried no great distance. They were yet friends when the lion was full grown, but then the poor brute in some manner sickened, fretted, vanis.h.i.+ng at whiles and returning unwillingly, until at length the woodcutter's stupid son did arrive at one moment of wisdom, and took his friend into the forest and said to him, 'Go thy way.'"

"I am no lion."

"Marry come up, I am a shade more learned than that woodcutter's son.

Ben, I'm only trying to say I don't think anyone should try to possess you, as I suppose Uncle John does, as maybe I've done--but if you wish to sail, if it's your decision and your heart in it, d'you think I'd impede you? Supposing I could?"

"No, I don't think you would."

"And I will not," said Reuben, and jumped off the desk. "I'm for Mr.

Welland's, by the back fields. Best change thy jacket, Ben--that one beareth the slight saffron memory of an egg which hath gone before. I'll saddle Molly for thee, meanwhile."

When Ben rejoined him in the stable, Reuben had nothing more to say, except the light random murmuring that Molly enjoyed. Ben led her out into the yard--not in sight of Mr. Hibbs' window. Reuben said again, unnecessarily: "I'll go by the fields, you by the road."

As Reuben held the bridle, Ben was bewildered at his reluctance to set his foot in the stirrup. "Ru, what ails thee? It's not as if we were saying a good-bye."

"No. Why, man, if you sail, I also--well, I hope it turns out as you wish. I believe Uncle John heeds what you say, more than you suppose.

Why the knife, little Benjamin?"

"Oh, I might be in the city after dark. I rather missed it that other night, coming home."

"Well, tuck it under your britches, can't you?--so to look less like a b.l.o.o.d.y cutthroat and more like my little brother?"

"Very well.... Ru, I don't know how to say this--lately I've been some-way troubled about thee."

"Oh, why, why? Have I two heads?--but don't answer that."

"As if we no longer understood each other--my fault, I think."

"It is not. It is not even true." Reuben still held the bridle, his face stiff and white and smiling. "No cause for trouble about me. I am one of the fortunate, didn't you know?"

"I don't understand."

"I own a s.h.i.+eld. I walk in the woods. I read the _Anatomy_ of Vesalius, and the books you bought for me. And I told you, Ben--they do not fade."

"Ay, there's that. Still, if I live to be a thousand I don't suppose I'll ever understand you."

"Must you, Ben?"

"I try."

"I have never understood another, and yet I think about them as much as you do."

"But--oh, I _don't_ know how to say it--I don't think I meant that kind of understanding. There's more than one kind...."

"Ben, you'd best hurry a little if you're to have any time with Uncle John at the office."

"Yes," said Ben unhappily, and was in the saddle looking down, more than ever reluctant to be going away. "I'll tell you after supper, what he says. Ru, what was that?--you started to say that if I sail, then you also--?"

Ben had spoken softly, in his confusion. He supposed Reuben had not heard, for he did not answer, and that was a discourtesy Ben had never known him to employ. Ben saw him rub his hand along Molly's fat neck.

"Be a good horse," said Reuben, and was gone, walking quickly around the stable, the shortest way to the back fields.

The cottage with the green shutters sat comfortably under the dignity of twin elms--like its owner mild, and quiet, and rather old, carrying age as an elm does with rugged awkwardness, with many scars, without pomp and circ.u.mstance.

Reuben had learned the inside of the cottage--simple, on the same stark plan as the house in Deerfield, with two main downstairs rooms and a garret, but where the Deerfield house had owned a small lean-to off the kitchen, Mr. Welland had a larger annex, more solidly built, which he called the surgery. It was also his reception room for patients, his library, his study, his room of contemplation. The gray striped lady, Goody Snively, who kept the cottage rather constantly supplied with kittens (often yellow), lived here in a box of her own beside the wood-box at the fireplace. Very few patients ever came to Mr. Welland here at the cottage, so few that he did not try to keep precise hours for them, but it was understood that he would ordinarily be at home in the late hours of the afternoon. Most of his work was done in visits that often took him a considerable distance to outlying farms. A small stable stood separate from the cottage, home of the brown mare Meg, who carried Mr. Welland on his labors in all weathers, all times of day or night. He claimed that Meg was a better diagnostician of the purse than himself, being always restless outside the houses of wealthy patients, who were invariably the slowest to pay his charges. That puzzled Reuben.

"You'll learn," said Mr. Welland. "Your great-uncle is one of perhaps five exceptions to the rule that I can remember."

Mr. Welland kept no servant, and no one came in to clean or cook for him. He took most of his meals at the ordinary down the street; messages were left for him there more often than at the cottage. In the cottage he maintained a monastic neatness--no dust, no clutter, very few possessions and those necessary, functional and in good order. "It's not difficult," he had explained on Reuben's first visit, "but a servant or woman-by-the-day would make it so, and by the way, Reuben, my house is never locked, this door from hall to surgery never closed except when I have a patient with me. I like simplicity, seeing it leaves one free to consider complexity--especially that of persons who a'n't so smart as you and me. Don't trouble to knock, I don't like it. I hate knocking. If it's loud I jump out of my skin, if it's soft I blame it on the mice."

"Mice, with that cat?" "Mice is a general term, boy. Mice includes everything that bothers by day or goes thump in the night. If a door squeaks I blame it on the mice for a week before I oil it. Everyone needs a devil, Reuben, and mice have served me bravely in that capacity for lo, these many years. Pull up a chair and be at ease."

On this Tuesday afternoon Reuben entered without knocking, an action that still caused him some shy discomfort, and spoke Mr. Welland's name unanswered. The door to the surgery stood open; also the stable door, as Reuben noticed through the window; the doctor was away, and this new loneliness an unexpected blow. "I am most unreasonable," said Reuben to Goody Snively, who rubbed his leg, and purred, and exercised a cat's privilege of trotting ahead and sitting down in front of his feet as he was about to go into the surgery. Reuben hooked her on his shoulder; she sang casually and damply in his ear as he went to the doctor's bookshelves and took down the Vesalius.

"_This is a man----_" well, certainly, but also not a man. A man is motion and thought; a man is foolishness, courage, love, pain. Reuben turned the pages at the desk, rather blindly trying to force them into some clearness, and he wondered if there had been any truth at all in what he had said to Ben less than half an hour ago. Vesalius had not faded--that much was true. The mist is in the observer.

Not only now, he thought, but always, in every observation, whether made at a favorable time or not. If I were happy, that also could deceive, a rosy mist no easier to penetrate than a gray one. If I were calm, neither sad nor happy--still a mist, of accepted thoughts that may be false as fog over quicksand. "But don't you see, Goody Snively?--we know one thing: we know the fog is there. And that, by the way, is my tender thigh and not a tree trunk. If you regard me as a tree, I may bark."

Goody Snively retired--shocked, maybe.

The drawing before his face was lost to him a while, the room also, in a trance not of thought but of stillness avoiding thought. Then, as the body itself will usually shatter such a refuge with its own cantankerous insistence, Reuben's nose itched, his hands upholding his cheekbones grew sweaty and cramped. He gave it up and wandered about disconsolately. He knelt by the box to which Goody Snively had returned.

Her latest kittens were quite new, their open eyes not focusing, their legs uncertain. He lifted the black-and-brindle one of the four and held it against his cheek, liking the harmlessly wild kitten smell; it mewed in small wrath, and Goody Snively began to look stern, so he replaced it at the consolation of the nipple and strolled away. He leaned in the open doorway of the front room, the room where Mr. Welland slept.

Curious, but somehow not inappropriate, that this room like the rest of the house should be bare of ornament. Monastic was the word, but it held a sense of comfort too. A plain narrow bed, made up with sharp precision. One armchair, much worn in the seat; beside that an unpainted table, bearing a Betty lamp, a pitcher and a basin, nothing else. Two pairs of shoes--so the doctor owned three altogether--lined up at the side of the bed like little soldiers. Reuben thought of his own five expensive pairs, of the days in Deerfield when he had not always owned two pairs, of time and change and human virtue, of the froth of bright embroidery Kate had st.i.tched at the b.u.t.tonholes of the fine maroon waistcoat he now wore, and shut his eyes, wondering if that enameled snuffbox was the doctor's only luxury.

Opening them--but still holding away thought, or letting his eyes alone think for him--Reuben observed that one pair of Mr. Welland's shoes bore the marks of dried mud. The man must have changed in haste with no time to take care of them, or had forgotten. Reuben recalled noticing on a kitchen shelf a few cleaning rags and a jar of neatsfoot oil. He carried the yellowed shoes out there, refreshed the fading hearth-fire and sat by it to polish them. The crackle of new wood and the noise of his cleaning covered the light sounds of Mr. Welland returning and putting up Meg in the stable. Reuben was aware of it as the doctor opened the door, but the task was not quite done; he did not want to abandon it, or even to rise respectfully: work started ought to be finished, and as for the trivia of politeness, Amadeus Welland wouldn't care.

"What's this, Reuben?"

"It was something to do, sir. I couldn't bring my mind properly to the study, some-way. Besides, if this mud stays here too long it'll spoil the leather."

"Ay, but--thou, scrubbing _my_ shoes? It's kind, Reuben, but I don't find it fitting."

"Sir, _I_ do."

"Eh?" Reuben could not answer, nor look up when after a silence the doctor drew a chair to the hearth and sat there spreading his hands to the warmth. Yet he was not disturbed, nor worried--if Mr. Welland was annoyed, that would pa.s.s. It occurred to Reuben as his fingers (remembering Deerfield) worked the oil into the leather, that he had in fact never felt less troubled about his own behavior and how it might appear to another. It was simple, satisfying and natural that you should scrub mud from the shoes of someone you loved, taking it for granted that if the occasion ever happened to suggest it he would do the same for you. "Each time you have come here," said Mr. Welland at last, "you have been in some degree different, and also the same. Each time I must become acquainted with you again, and each time, I suppose, a little better, since I change too if only by learning."

"You remarked that living is a journey."

"Oh," said Welland, and sighed, "I fear that was little better than a simile after all, for what is the thing that travels and cannot itself remain wholly constant? All is change; all things flow; and what's more, I'd no idea those dem'd shoes had so much virtue left in 'em." Reuben could look up then and smile. "Well, Reuben, being in Boston yesterday, I called at thy great-uncle's office and spoke to him concerning thine apprentices.h.i.+p. He is not averse to it, not at all, but would have thee continue for Harvard, and perhaps not be formally bound immediate, but later, if it is still thy wish in a year or so.... Pleased, my dear?"

"I--am. I would--I would...."

"What, Reuben?"

"I would study, and--serve, if I may, whether formally bound or not. I think that is what I was trying to say. It won't fade, Mr. Welland. I was never so certain of any other thing.... I ought to have spoken of it to Uncle John, but rather feared to because he hath had so much to distress him lately, the death of Mr. Dyckman, the loss of the _Iris_."