Wilderness of Spring Part 55

"'Twas only a line of Tibullus that cometh now and then to my mind. _Et teneam moriens deficiente manu...._ I never read Tibullus with the boys.

Not altogether suited, I felt, to their time of life. And yet sometimes, as in those particular lines, my dear, he is quite innocent, indeed expressing sentiments appropriate to a man of honorable feeling. 'May I'--(saith Tibullus, my dear)--'may I look on thee when cometh my last hour, and may I hold thy hand as I sink dying!'"

"I must tell Kate this one is nearly past mending, but if she'll make a pattern for me I believe I could follow it in my blundering fas.h.i.+on. He ought to have a change of them for every day. I know a place on Sudbury Street where they have better material than this, and cheap."

"I recall some other lines from the same poem--_me mea paupertas vita traducat inerti, dum meus adsiduo luceat igne focus...._ 'Let the humble fortune that is proper to me lead me through a quiet way of life, if only my hearth may glow with an unfailing fire!' You'd suppose that the sentiment of an aging man, wouldn't you? And yet they tell that Tibullus, he died young.... Charity...."

"Yes, Mr. Hibbs?"

"Charity, having spent, I must admit, very nearly twenty years--beginning, let us say, with the year I commenced study at Harvard, the which was the thirteenth year of my life--having spent so much time, I say, in what would seem, to some, a most arid employment, namely the cultivation of the abstract, the exploration (tentative, limited by the frailty of mine own poor powers) of the borders of philosophy--having spent thus much time in--shall I call it, perhaps, a sanctuary of loneliness?--not altogether unrewarding, you understand; not without the consolation of the poets; not without an occasional satisfaction, like unto discovery, within the region of the inquiry: nevertheless, out of such loneliness--out of----"

"Sir----"

"Nay, forgive me, Charity, I'm most clumsy with words, and could never speak bold and plain what's in my mind, the which plain speaking I do much admire to discover in others, but let me essay it. Having spent, I say, almost twenty years, yes, almost a full score in the--I must call it the dust of scholars.h.i.+p, save the mark--one may then, suddenly as it were, look out as through the window of a study, let us say, and observe that outside this not altogether despicable refuge there is--oh, spring perhaps, as it is even now, my dear--and one may presume to hope that one hath not remained so long out of the world, nor grown so old, but that--but that----"

"Mr. Hibbs, I pray you----"

"Not so old but that perhaps one who is truly at the very brightest beginning of the springtime might find--might find in one's maturer years--oh, nothing like the call of youth to youth, my G.o.d! but--but....

You have not known how I--how since you began coming here in so much kindness--I think you have not known----"

"Mr. Hibbs, I must speak too, and I pray you say no more till I have done. The sentiments you express, the which--oh _bother_! There goes my thread again and I wasn't even pulling at it, they needn't to make it so miserable weak, do they? The sentiments--look, Mr. Hibbs: when we moved to Dorchester last autumn, I found there a place on the sh.o.r.e, just beyond reach of the high tides, a pretty place, a kind of--what was it you said?--a sanctuary of loneliness, at any rate I made it one. The rocks hide it from the house, from the land; 'tis like a room overlooking the open waters, where all the s.h.i.+ps from the south must pa.s.s when they come in for the harbor, and I go there--oh, whenever I may. My mother thinks I'm looking for seash.e.l.ls or other such employment suited to children, and so I do bring in any pretty ones I find--and then throw them away secret-like, la, to make room for more--why, I'm a deceiving small beast, Mr. Hibbs, learned deception young, marry did I, I often wonder that anyone can put up with me. Well--even last winter, if it wasn't outright storming, I'd bundle up in my coat and go out there. The rocks break the wind. You can look a long way out.... I told Reuben about this. He understood--well, of course he did. One expects understanding from Reuben, I don't quite know why."

"I am not certain that I myself understand you, Charity."

"I must say more then?... But perhaps you will tell me, as my mother would, that at my years I can know nothing of love, and yet I do....

Sometimes I'll see a sail that looks from a distance like the _Artemis_.

But I watch any sail that appears, because--because who can say what manner of s.h.i.+p it will be that brings him home?--and now you are weeping, but Mr. Hibbs, I never intended----"

"Nay, I--am not. The fireplace a'n't drawing properly--I'll push these logs further back."

"I am a beast."

"Hus.h.!.+... I think he will come home, Charity--older, as you are, but what you saw in him will not be greatly changed.... But I may be your gray-headed counselor, and--friend?"

"Of course. You aren't gray."

"Soon enough."

"What is it, Mr. Hibbs--what _is_ it that doth compel one to--eh, as they say, to give away the whole heart to another? I would be better, I would be happier, I suppose, if I...."

"I could wish for mine own sake that I knew the answer to that. Why, Charity, it seems we love where we must and no help for it."

"I remember I was not happy, very far from it, a year and more ago, when I was a silly child, had not even met him, indeed had none to love but--oh, poor Sultan. Clarissa of course, but it seems to me I never knew I loved her until I lost her, only took her for granted like sunlight until the day she was no longer there."

"Sultan?"

"Don't you remember Sultan, Mr. Hibbs? Why, the child I was would never forgive your forgetting Sultan. He died, very fat and ancient, soon after we moved to Dorchester. It was the sea air, my mother said. I wept like a fountain. But I think it was some while before then that I had ceased to feel like a child."

_Chapter Three_

The island fell away in the west. All day long, and for three days more, the ketch _Diana_ held the northeast trade off her larboard bow, close-hauled. Ben supposed that presently Shawn would turn south and prepare for another chicken-thief raid somewhere in the Leeward Islands.

On the fifth day he did s.h.i.+ft course, but not much, the unchanging wind now on the larboard beam, the _Diana's_ direction southeast.

A withdrawn, taciturn mood had come over Captain Shawn. The members of his ragam.u.f.fin crew, including Ben, felt it as schoolboys feel a teacher's cold in the head. For Ben there was the growing urgency of that secret whisper: _Something I can do...._

Ben was forced to admit that, whatever else might have happened to the year, he had learned a little seamans.h.i.+p. He had acquired sea-legs even before the capture of _Artemis_. He was never seasick--Shawn himself knew green moments from time to time. Ben had learned the ropes--no mystery after all but quite simple once you agreed to use your head and accept the buckle end of Marsh's belt as a parallel to the sarcasm of Gideon Hibbs. Marsh was acidly fair about that: as soon as Ben's hand had learned to jump for the right rope at the right instant, the belt was no longer used.

Shawn's instruction had followed a different idiom--articulate explanation, with continuing patience (not displayed toward anyone but Ben). Somehow the Irishman conveyed: Let's forget that we seem to be enemies; let's consider this logic of navigation, the s.e.xtant, the tiller, the handling of sail, powers of wind and current and the pattern of the clear stars; let's do this as though we were not afraid to turn our backs to each other, you with the knife I let you keep, and I with mine. Ben could respond to this; could not help responding.

The secret whisper continued in the dark.

Ben's body was learning too, his hands calloused and enlarged, his shoulders thickened. Already wiry and tough, he was aware of a burgeoning strength that never reached exhaustion even in the occasional days of bad weather when the mainsail could stiffen and fight back like a living beast. When Ben stripped for swimming, as he had done back there at the island to the amused horror of all aboard, he had noticed a whiplash hardness in leg and thigh, surely much greater than he had possessed a year ago. Ben had been startled to learn--last July, when the _Diana_ put in for careening at another lonely island--that not one other man aboard could swim. So Ben, who had learned it fishlike in the waters of the Poc.u.mtuck River with Reuben darting around him, a little demon of gold and ivory, frolicked alone in the surf and beyond it, amazed and delighted at the buoyancy of salt water and the untiring almightiness of the waves. Even to Shawn it was a mystery. Manuel giggled helplessly. Tom Ball appeared to regard it as a black art.

Once in November, during a lesson on the s.e.xtant, Shawn had happened to stretch and flex his shoulders, and Ben discovered that he was fully as tall as Captain Shawn. Another time, Ben spoke with careless sharpness to Joey Mills--the old man's garrulity could be a nuisance--and Joey had drawn back in manifest physical fright, astonis.h.i.+ng to Ben until he understood: Well, I could break him in two, couldn't I?

Manuel? One fist, and Manuel would cringe and run.

Ledyard? Maybe, just maybe. That would be a near thing.

Ball? French Jack? Well, hardly. And still, either of them might think twice before starting anything unarmed, or alone.

Dummy? Never, if he got a grip.

Judah Marsh? Why, knives put aside, by G.o.d, I could flatten him like a bug, and wash my hands.

Shawn?...

The whisper continued in the dark.

Since leaving the island under the northeast trade, Captain Shawn had spent most of his time in the locked cabin, or on deck in a black and scowling silence. He ordered the log cast unreasonably often; it was plain the _Diana_ was maintaining an even speed, better than nine knots.

Ben was present whenever Shawn checked his bearings, and could make his own calculations. When his trick at the helm began at midnight on the seventh night out from the island, the _Diana_ had crossed the 18th parallel and was surely far east of the Leewards, too far if Shawn intended any business with them, and was still running blandly southeast. Why?...

In these wartime years, with no pressure of maritime unemployment to drive hungry men into piracy, some furtive harbors throughout the Caribbean still nourished the old trade, and at some outwardly respectable ports a vessel of dubious virtue could still put in to dispose of this and that with few questions asked. So much had been common talk at Boston; Ben heard it again from the half-timid chatter of Joey Mills. Captain Shawn might have found men in those ports to make up his complement; he never went near one of them, all year long. Joey Mills dared to ask why, and shook his head and spat over the rail. "Tell you why," said Joey Mills, watching Ben with squirrely courage and making sure no one else could hear. "He'll get more men, _he_ says, from the fine prize we a'n't seen yet--or if we seen it we been evermore tacking somewheres else, G.o.d almighty d.a.m.n. But this here ketch, Ben Cory, let alone it seems she a'n't bound for nowhere, she a'n't got nothing. Salt cod, G.o.d almighty d.a.m.n. Put in at one of them places, nothing to trade, he'd be laughed at. _They'd_ give him salt cod, yah. I allow _he_ can't bear no laughing at--now don't betray me, don't never let it out I said no such of a thing--you wouldn't, boy?" Before Ben could even promise, he chuckled in apology and fled, and avoided Ben for days....

Far away ahead this midnight, over the curve of the world, stood the shoulder of Africa. Somewhere in the south--Ben gazed off idly to his right in the murmurous dark--down there beyond the Line, the Spanish and Portuguese settlements of the southern continent. Down there too--so far that one's thought hardly dared trouble with it--the wild cold legendary region of the Horn, Magellan's gateway, the path to the western sea.

Here in the undemanding night Ben found it possible to command the earth to be not vast but small. Merely to point with the right arm toward the Horn--did not that reduce the world to a modest map that might be held in fancy, handled, contemplated?--never mind the thousands of leagues of open sea where that right arm was no greater than one splash of foam.

The paradox was familiar. Mr. Gideon Hibbs had touched on it at the borders of philosophy: how, if the container be greater than the thing contained, that organ in the skull must be somehow wider than a galaxy....

The shadow coming slowly aft might be Manuel, ready to relieve Ben at the tiller. No--too soon, and Manuel was aloft. Moonrise had begun some while ago at Ben's left shoulder, magnificent and calm. The shadow was not Manuel but Daniel Shawn, prowling the dark as he often did when, as Ben supposed, he could not sleep. Ben suppressed a word of greeting. His arm over the tiller held firm with elastic readiness for all of the _Diana's_ whims, as Shawn himself had patiently taught him it must do.

Captain Shawn stood a long time at the after rail gazing northwestward.

It could happen some night, Ben knew, out of a silence like this. The unknowable driven brain could abruptly decide that Ben Cory must no longer live. What is madness?... After the decision, execution--but not immediate, perhaps. It did not seem to be Shawn's way to kill with his own hand.

He was capable of it. Joey Mills had told Ben how, in the battle with the _Schouven_, Shawn had boarded the sloop with the rest, two pistols in his belt. Disdaining a cutla.s.s after the pistols were empty, Shawn went in howling with his short knife, and that on a tall Dutchman with long arms--as if, Mills muttered, death was a nothing to Captain Shawn, or welcome. But Shawn wasn't for dying that day.