PART TWO

_Chapter One_

Ben Cory searched the bay, his eyes ardent for greater distances. Here at the wharf the ships relinquished wakefulness and power, becoming boxes of cargo for the calculations of landsmen: the harbor is not the sea.

"Watch, Ben--he'll take in sail presently." John Kenny was holding his dwarfish body erect to make the most of it, ancient head slanted so that he might look down his nose even at Boston Bay. He thrust his gold-headed cane against a crack in the wharf--his wharf, and smiled at the boy--his boy. "Luck of the Artemis, this breeze. When she nears the wharf Jenks will haul his tops'l to set her aback. You'll see her reach the piling a-tiptoe, a lady, all whisper and dignity. Didn't I say she'd be the lucky thing, when I took thee and Reuben up the Mystic to watch her a-building on the ways?"

"Yes, Uncle John." The mild westerly breeze fluttered Mr. Kenny's gray coat and the gray owl-tufts above his ears. It woke the dance of whitecaps under April sky, and seventeen is a kind of April. "She's a fair ship, sir."

"Hoy, mind your terms! A ship is all square-rigged, commonly a three-master. Two-masted, a ketch, is _Artemis_--well, a loose name, seeing we use it also to mean small harbor craft. But with her fore-and-aft mizzen you mustn't be calling her a ship. I wish Reuben had come. He's missing a pretty sight, and all to go strolling in the woods." Ben winced inwardly, knowing that the old man, for all his understanding, had been hurt by that. He ought to know by this time, Ben thought, how when the black mood came over Reuben there was nothing to do but let the boy alone, let him go walk in the woods or whatever else he wished. Ben himself did not know whether it was the flame of Deerfield that attacked Reuben at such times; had not been able to learn, in all the three years since they came to Roxbury and Uncle John had opened heart and home to them. "_Artemis_ is near three hundred ton, Ben. That's not big, but she could sail anywhere in the world."

The lonely man, blue-eyed and gaunt, who stood at the outermost end of Kenny's wharf, swung about to gaze at the old merchant. Ben had not until now observed the stranger's face, motionless as a boulder in a patch of grass against the raised collar of a shabby green coat. Grave, Irish maybe, handsome in spite of a signature of smallpox from jutting cheekbones to the edge of an angular jaw. Under a battered tricorne hat Ben saw coal-black hair and a forehead high and pale. The mouth was thin, the upper lip compressed. Hands projected immensely from frayed sleeves, a sailor's hands broadened at the knuckles. Others on the wharf had been watching _Artemis_; discouraged by the chill of the breeze, they had abandoned the airy region to Ben and Mr. Kenny and the blue-eyed man.

Anchored in the near waters or drawn up to the many docks, an orderly jungle stirred to the bay's mild motion--stem masts, steep bowsprits, nervous bodies of the drowsing wind-wanderers. To Ben's eyes, Clarke's Wharf over yonder hardly dwarfed Mr. Kenny's single squat warehouse and three hundred feet of pier. All around Ben spread an apparent confusion of ropes, tackle, mooring-posts, more meaningful than when he had first stumbled through it three years ago, but still a confusion to one whose hand had never yet felt the lurching sting and thrust of a working rope across the palm.

Woolgathering, Ben had missed some remark about _Artemis_' rigging. "She owes much to that fore-and-aft mizzen. Fore-and-aft or square, either'll bring you the service of all the winds, but the way of the fore-and-aft is a woman's way, Ben, seeming to yield, winning by yielding. Your squares'l is male, standing up to wrestle the sky breast to breast--nay, but he can drive almost as near the wind's eye--point or two less, what's a point or two in a long journey? _Artemis_ don't roll too much. I've been aboard her under sail only the once, when we tried her out. She didn't roll much, for all Mr. Jenks tempted her to it so to learn her paces. Fast she is, Ben. You can feel it even now when she's picking her way slow as a dream."

"Sir, if I--supposing I might ship aboard----"

"You?" Mr. Kenny jabbed his cane at the planking, his crinkled face gone blank. "Ben, boy, you must stick to your studies. You'll have sea enough when Mr. Hibbs brings your Greek far enough on to read the Odyssey. Better to drown in poetry than salt water."

"Still, Uncle John, the sea----"

"Now let me tell you a thing: never admit to a sailor that you love the sea, if love is the word. He'd despise you for a landsman. A sailor may love a ship, if she be fair and not vicious. Not the sea, not the old blind murdering bitch-mother."

"No, I think love is not the word, but--nay, I don't know."

"You think I don't feel it? Didn't I take ship as a common seaman when I was twenty? I ran away, Ben. My father's blood was partly cold vinegar--something of that you felt in your day with my good sister. My brother George's and mine was red, and hot. Well, I had but a few years of it, he too. Not for me with my piddling strength. We went into trade, we prospered, and I'm a landsman--but I know her. Sometimes if my bad toe's a-troubling or I go to bed with too much drink in me, I dream I'm fathoms down in the cold, the green dark. I see their faces, I mean those of the dead, men I knew who own no grave except the sea. They float by me orderly, no crowding--hoy, you learn not to crowd a man in the neighborhood of live ropes! They go by me one by one--Amyas Holt maybe, that was first officer of the ship _Marigold_ and would never sing except he was stone cold sober, but I _have_ heard him sing, marry have I. Went down with the _Marigold_ off the Bermudas--all hands.... Isn't the land fair, Ben? Full of good things? Good work, women, children, warmth of an earned fireside? And the time of year that's coming now?--but maybe you suppose an old man don't notice the spring. Is not the land fair?"

"Yes, Uncle John," said Ben, and turned his face away.

"Sometimes I see Danny Roeder too, laughing boy, ready for anything, dead of the scurvy when we stood thirty-four days becalmed south of the Line, a run to Recife in the ship _Providence_--most of his teeth fallen from puffed purple gums, not laughing then.... I've but now remembered, Ben, this is the first time you've seen _Artemis_ afloat. When she left the ways last August you and Reuben were a trifle indisposed."

Ben grinned weakly in acknowledgement. Last August he and Reuben had had the measles. After a day or so of misery they had grown busily critical of each other's spots, the despair of Mr. Kenny's housekeeper Kate Dobson, who tried to make them mind the orders of Mr. Welland the doctor and stay covered up in bed. Plump Kate did not frown on pillow fights in principle. She suppressed a few nobly, knowing her massive rear to be prime target, because she believed the boys were in a rarely tender condition. Kate had heard that measles could become the lapsing fever--whatever that was, and never mind that Mr. Welland rumbled and chuckled and took snuff and said it wa'n't so. Kate had sniffed pointedly and severely about Mr. Welland of Roxbury, asking after his gentle departure how a head under such a Lord-help-a-sinner wig as he wore could hold knowledge of the healing art or in fact anything else.

More than a year in building and the pride of Mr. Kenny's ancient years, _Artemis_ took to the water--tide and wind and season won't wait on the measles--with no help from Ben and his brother. By the time Mr. Welland decreed they could leave the house, she was gone, with half a cargo, mostly hardware and woolens from England. She slipped down to Newport to fill her hungry hull with flour and cheese; on to Virginia for a quick turnover; then with tobacco and what remained of the Yankee hardware--anything you like from frying pans to thimbles--she was for Jamaica in the warm seas. At Kingston she ran into a bit of trouble; Captain Jenks sent word of it by a homeward-bound. Tropic fever and smallpox had played hell with his crew, and he was delayed seeking replacements. He would not put out in late winter even on the Kingston-Boston run with nothing better than a passel of louse-gnawed Jamaican monkeys who'd die like Caribbee butterflies at the first breath of a northerly and anyway couldn't tell the head from the hawse-holes. Jenks ripped out other comments, cramped by the need of setting quill to paper, concerning Jamaican speed in loading his logwood and molasses while the remnants of his good crew were too sick or drunk to lend a hand. "They doe labour a Moment," he wrote, "and falle into a most sweete bloudie Slummber." Snorting over that letter in the company of Ben and Reuben, John Kenny remarked that he couldn't picture man, monkey or butterfly winning much sweet slumber when Mr. Jenks spoke in his natural voice--the which, said Mr. Kenny, was the secret of Mr. Jenks' virtue, for by raising that voice to strong conversational pitch he could lift you the father and mother of a typhoon out of a flat calm.

A clop of hoofs, a grind of halting wheels--Ben heard that above the mutter of small waves fumbling the piles of the wharf, and turned to see the coach drawing up near Mr. Kenny's warehouse. A dark woman stepped out, doll-size with distance, helping two others alight. The breeze snatched at full skirts; an arm flew up restraining a blue bonnet; Ben heard a ripple of remote laughter, and the women consulted, bonnets grouped like the heads of little lively fowl. Plainly not working-women nor dockside sluts, they must have some errand at the warehouse, and would not be coming out here into the raw smell of tar, fish, sewage-corrupted water and salt air. Mr. Kenny, with slightly dulled hearing, was unaware of them. Ben looked again to _Artemis_.

"Watch, Ben! Wouldn't you think he was bearing down smack onto the bow of that three-master? She's a New Yorker, by the way. Hoy!" Mr. Kenny danced a stiff caper. "Like an old woman threading a needle! But if the watchman on that Mannahatta tub pissed his britches, no shame to him at all. Watch!"

The lonely blue-eyed man was watching too, in the curve of his long back something hawk-like.

Mr. Kenny relaxed, chuckling. "Ben, I recall you've never met Mr. Jenks. When he's ashore he never visits around, damn the dear man, not even to Roxbury. There's a reason--never mind. Had he a contrary wind this afternoon he'd likely bring her in anyhow. Once I watched him fetch my wallowing old _Hera_ to this wharf. Filthy little northeast blow, and she about as comfortable to handle as a bull on ice. I thought he'd drop anchor alee of Bird Island and wait. Not Jenks--brought her in like a homing dove. Knows every inch and instant of the tides as they'll never be known by your landside chart-makers, noticed it a thousand times. I don't mean he'll take foolish risks. With _Hera_ that time--to him it was a nothing, did it easy as a milkmaid strips a cow. _Hera_ went down off the Cape--'d I ever tell you?--seven years ago in a fog. Floating hulk stove in her la'board side. Filled in twenty minutes, no fault of Jenks, and didn't he bring off every man alive in one boat and one damned little dory? Not a soul lost."

He had told of it before. Ben never found it difficult to hear Uncle John's repeated tales as if new. In a way they were, since Ben knew he had probably missed something in the earlier telling.

Wharf hands slouched from the warehouse, taking command of the space where soon the figurehead under the low-slung bowsprit of _Artemis_ would gaze inward toward her homeland, if that grave white face, something less than a woman's and something more, knew any homeland now but the one she shared with Mother Carey's chickens. The men busied themselves over ropes and fenders, with raucous horseplay. The blue-eyed man certainly noticed them, but never turned from observing _Artemis_ with the intentness of a schoolmaster or a lover.

The roustabouts brought a stench of cheap taverns, rum, tobacco, sweat. Bulky short-worded men, some tattooed and wonderfully scarred, their noise slightly restrained by the presence of an important merchant and a well-dressed boy. The boy envied their carelessness. To watch them you'd think the homecoming of _Artemis_ from her maiden voyage was a trifle, worth no more than a shot of spit off the jetty. Ben saw a leather-hided giant twiddle free a length of rope and try it on the legs of a companion who yelped and grappled with him harmlessly.

Behind Ben a crystalline voice abruptly asked: "Will she anchor, Mr. Kenny, or come in to moor direct?"

"Direct, my dear." Mr. Kenny was beaming, a hand on the girl's arm. "Did your father ever make me pay lighterage if he could help it?"

"What a pert breeze! I vow I'm brave to be out in it."

"This little air? Why, Faith, it would scarce raise a kite for a running boy. Anyway 'twas no breeze put the brier roses in your cheeks, you was born with those, well I remember."

Mr. Kenny's back was turned to Ben. Ben was standing quite alone, hearing yet the long murmuring of the water, as he fought away the dead weight of shyness and discovered the April grace of her, dressed in shining blue, wind-clasped; looked again, and encountered a wounding sweetness of blue eyes.

* * * * *

John Kenny's woodland had never been surveyed; somewhere it blended into crown-grant timberland or unclaimed wilderness. His house stood beyond the natural limits of Roxbury--he liked that--on a rolling rise of ground south of the road to Cambridge. From his back pasture, Reuben Cory had heard him say, you could keep under forest cover all the way to Providence, and maybe he'd do it some time, the old man said, if ever the Saints came a-snapping too close at his heels. John Kenny might have started saying that twenty or thirty years ago when it wasn't entirely a jest.

From the window of the room upstairs that he shared with Ben, Reuben stared eastward beyond the Dorchester road, across open land and marsh and water, to the low hills of Dorchester Neck two miles away, gray and brown yet alive with a subdued radiance under the afternoon sun of April. Beyond those harmless hills moved the sunrises, and the stern Atlantic that seemed to be tugging at his brother's heart and giving him no rest.

Driven by his own dark unease of spring, by some dread of human voices and the wrong questions they ask, by shame at the ungracious whim that had prompted him to stay home--after all, if he was not going in to watch the return of _Artemis_, sighted yesterday playing games off the Cape with a contrary wind, then he had no proper excuse for this half-holiday from study--driven above all by a need for the April day as it might come to him lonely in a golden calm at the edge of wilderness, Reuben slipped downstairs light as a cat, out past the black wet ground of the kitchen garden and down a long slope into the south pasture, then on toward soft-spoken hemlocks.

Reuben had discovered a bodily sureness in these solitary journeys, a trust in his own senses, and a puzzled, reaching love for the life of the unhuman world. Sometimes he stole out of the house at night, with owl and fox and whippoorwill, if the moon was shining to help him; Ben slept sweetly never knowing that. Ben often came with him into the daytime woodland, but to stroll out here with Ben belonged to another category of experience. The world of I-am-alone cannot share an orbit with other planets, as the world and Reuben-self that existed in Ben's presence could exist nowhere else.

He would never be tall like Ben, nor quite as strong. At fifteen that no longer troubled him. His own hard wiry thinness was sufficient; it would carry him, he supposed, wherever he cared to go.

At the lower end of the pasture he climbed a stile into the spicy-smelling hush. A wood road continued on the other side; Reuben soon abandoned it, following landmarks that brought him to one of his better-loved havens, where Ben had often loafed with him.

Over a huge flat-topped boulder a spruce towered to sixty feet, the droop of branches enclosing the rock; one could imagine the hide of a gray monster lurking in the green. The boughs slanted steeply, creating a room with a granite floor and walls of gold-flecked shadow, a gentle and a secret place--old; the spruce must have been already old in the time of King Philip's War. A midget brook passed here. It had gouged a pool at the outer end of the granite block, not deep even in the time of spring rains, but reflections of the spruce gave it an ocean infinity of green.

Wander a few yards down the brook and you owned another world, where the water widened to larger ponds, supporting patches of feather-topped marsh grass here and there. Maples on firmer ground bordered this damp clearing, which by itself became many worlds in the flow of the seasons--the world of deep summer, for example, when you could watch mating dances of the small green dragonflies that never come near houses.

Reuben climbed silently into the sanctuary under the spruce and lay out on the rock to stare into the pool refreshed by the rains of April. He invited to his ears all least disturbances of the enclosing silence--a weak murmur upstream where the trifling water hurried over pebbles, a breath of motion in the needles of the spruce, a bluejay's complaint softened by distance, a cow lowing more than a mile away; a greater mystery, the beat of his own heart in the rib-cage pressed against rock, not quite pain. He saw the face of himself the stranger in the water below, and shut his eyes. When the flesh is quiet, he thought, the mind is also. Why? I alway knew that. The quiet is brief.

Why?...

Because (I think) everything is part of a journey. I am never, I was never still. Perhaps there is no stillness except in death.

Human sounds reached him, a brushing of last year's grass in that clearing downstream, a vague cough. Reuben sat up, annoyed and puzzled.

It could not be anyone with the privilege of bidding him to cease idling. Uncle John was in Boston with Ben. The tutor was sulking in his room--it hurt Mr. Hibbs that a boy granted a half-holiday should elect to spend it as he pleased, and anyway Mr. Gideon Hibbs was not at home in any forest outside the _Eclogues_ of Virgil. Uncle John's gardener and handy man Rob Grimes was accounted for too--Reuben had heard his axe in the woodshed.

If some poacher or Indian were fooling about the back land, Uncle John would wish to know. Reuben slipped from the rock with no sound, and wormed a gradual way through the brush. Someone sneezed. Poachers try not to sneeze; prowling Indians just don't; still Reuben maintained his caution because of a wild-animal pleasure in it. Having stolen by degrees to the edge of the clearing, he observed the stout bowed back and lightly fringed bald head of a man kneeling by a shallow pond, parting the dead grass to stare down into the water. Surely not a poacher examining a trap; the man was familiar somehow.

Reuben identified him, but doubtfully. Acting on an impulse of gentle wickedness, he slid out from the bushes and sat cross-legged with his chin in his hands, all as quietly as a mouse crossing a heap of flour.

Rising at last from his peculiar inspection of the pond water, the man sneezed again. He turned unknowing, and jumped delightfully. He said "God bless me!" and closed his large mouth two or three times while a slow chuckle shook him from fringed head to dingy shoes--a memorably ugly man pitted with smallpox scars from a button chin to a bulging forehead. His clothes were snuff-stained; respectable once, now a second best suited to the woods. His little dark eyes gleamed mirthful and sad, intent. A ribbony nose ended in a flared tip with a double knob. Reuben marveled that having known this face at his bedside, and that not long ago, he could have been confused in remembering it.

"I'm sorry, sir--didn't go for to startle you, Mr. Welland." "Oh, didn't you!"

"It was the wig."

"The wig, sir? Oh, you mean the absence of my wig. I'm in a manner disguised. I understand your synecdoche, or do I mean hypallage?"

"Metonymy," said Reuben.

"Brrr!" said Amadeus Welland. "Mm-yas, of course, 'tis the spotted child, the younger one. How's your brother, Mr. Cory?" "Well," said Reuben, and laughed happily for no plain reason.

Sighing and grunting as the elderly do, the little man sat on the ground, not too ungracefully in spite of stooped plumpness and a modest melon of potbelly. His darkened snuff-stained hands were firm, not very wrinkled; he might be less ancient than he seemed. "Ah, the wig! The structure! I employ it, you understand, for medical purposes. Wondrous therapeutic--I dare venture you and your brother were so frightened by it that you were forced to recover in spite of the worst my simples could do. Yet plainly no one in his right mind could dwell in such a thing, let alone go for a walk in the woods."

"I can see that, sir."

"You can, ha? I bought it in Newport," said Mr. Welland dreamily. "Ten years ago. The moths have been at it a little since then; at that time there were more ribbons in it, and I was younger myself. It doth own one other function beside the medical. Not exactly duplicity nor artifice--let us say, concealment. As a scholar, Mr. Cory, you'll discover how a man of learning must often hide in the bushes, not only from the ignorant, sir, but even more from the almost-wise. Now a man of medicine, if he hath also some pretension to scholarship, is much exposed, sir, much exposed to the winds of mischance, and so must even carry his own dem'd shrubbery about with him, and that's what I do. Honestly, Reuben, a'n't it a _hell_ of a wig?"

* * * * *

"Oh, Mr. Kenny!" said Faith Jenks. "Brier roses? I'll rest content with that till you say a prettier." She studied Ben with silent laughter.

Laughing of course at the pimples. For a year Ben's face had been lightly tormented. Huge wrists jutted; his nose was too small, his mouth too big, the devil with all of it. Since she chose to laugh, Ben hated her; thus occupied, he discovered as one caught in the embrace of ocean that he was in love.

Maybe she had not been laughing. Her own small dainty mouth showed no obvious quirk. Not brier roses. Damask roses, remembered--remembered----

In a dooryard garden at Deerfield.

Why, they would be blooming still! The village burned, and many died, but not the secret life under the snow. _She planted them...._ At the first urgency of summer sun they would have waked, spreading over scorched fallen timbers in the desolate ground to spill the sweetness from their clear June faces. For the first time Ben thought: I must go back--some day. I must learn whether that is true.

The blue of Faith's coat and dress conspired with the bay and the blue of heaven to make her eyes deeper than any sky of April. She stood taller than Mr. Kenny, a woman grown, full-breasted, poised, maybe no older than Ben in years but in command of all she said and did. His quick glance told him she was in the habit of biting her right thumbnail, and he rebuked himself for noticing it--merely such a flaw as a goddess needs if she's to wear the semblance of common clay.

"Your mother's well, my dear?"

"Ay, Mr. Kenny, but not well enough to be out in this changeable weather. She wished to come but I prevailed on her. Poor Mother is so readily distracted!"

"I know. Ah, forgive me!--Mistress Faith Jenks, Mr. Benjamin Cory, my grand-nephew, more a son. Hoy, and Charity--how's my lady Charity?" This to a brief, blunt block of child who made some breathy noise. Faith was holding out her hand. Ben knew he could not kiss it (as Ru could have done) nor speak at all without sounding like a crow.

She had pity, letting his fingers know the electric softness and taking her hand away. Ben confronted the glare of my lady Charity. About thirteen, grim with crippling shyness, Charity tilted her square face back in a blue bonnet that reflected her sister's in everything but grace. A freckled paw jerked out and dropped before Ben could grasp it, clenching its tiny companion. "'D do," she said, and examined her shoe-tips in a cold quiet of despair.

A third strange face watched Ben--still, brown, impersonal; a Negro girl, therefore a servant, probably a slave, but with no beaten, cringing air such as Ben had noticed in the slaves of Pastor Williams at Deerfield or in the few he had glimpsed in Boston and Roxbury. Her slenderness was clad Puritan-fashion in white and gray, somehow not subdued by the radiance of Faith. She stood apart, unconcerned as the lady _Artemis_. Charity had taken a few awkward backward steps until the brown girl's long-fingered hand dropped on her shoulder and there remained. Dark eyes moved on to contemplate the open daylight and blue water, disturbing Ben with the sense of a quiet alien and strong.

"Indeed," Faith was saying, "I've heard of you, Mr. Cory, and hoped we might meet sooner. We don't go about much, with my father so much away at sea. You was of Deerfield, I think?"

"Yes." Why, that was no croak! "I feel it to be long ago."

She smiled compassionately; everyone knew the story of Deerfield. "'Deed you and your brother are men of mystery. I fear your noses are buried in big old long books from a day's end to the next."

Mr. Kenny sighed and intervened. "True, Faith, their tutor and I, we make 'em toil like galley slaves. Harvard in the autumn--the both of 'em, I'm proud to say. Might have entered last year, but I wished 'em better prepared, Mr. Leverett of Harvard concurring, seeing they had no classics in childhood." Ben squirmed; it sounded as though having no classics in childhood was rather like being born with one leg.

"Your brother isn't in Boston today to see the _Artemis_?"

"No, Mistress Faith, he--well...."

"Mr. Reuben," said Uncle John too lightly, "was of a mind to go walking in the woods."

"Ah, the _pretty_ thing!" Faith exclaimed, and Ben gave her credit for divine tactfulness. "Mr. Kenny, why is the bowsprit slanted so low to the water? I never saw the like on another vessel, no never."

"A whim of mine, my dear. I meddled with the builders. But your father hath told me the thought's good--larger spread of jib, and a stronger angle against the tension of the stays. Yet when I wanted it so I merely thought 'twould make a handsomer line to the eye. Mph!--so peradventure art is good for something?"

"Sir...." The lonely blue-eyed man had come lightly from the end of the wharf, his hat held to his breast with no attempt to hide its shabbiness. His shoes were cracked and stained. A rip in the green coat was mended with large seaman's stitches, evidence that no woman tended him, that his feline neatness was his own achievement. He bowed, as Mr. Kenny's wizened mask watched courteously down the nose. "I fear I intrude--is it I'm addressing the owner of the ketch?"

"I am her owner, sir."

"I've not seen a fairer craft in my seafaring years, and they some twenty or more in all manner of vessels, all manner of places too betwixt here and the Indies, that'll be the eastern Indies--Molucca, Ceylon...."

His voice was baritone, resonant and sweet, a power stirring in it like a drumbeat felt in the marrow. A plangent overtone rang in every word. A lifting inflection suggested the speaker loved his words, reluctant to put a period to them. Ben had never heard that in New England speech--once, maybe, in that lost time when Uncle Zebina Pownal came out of nowhere to sing for them.

"Ay, she's fair," said Mr. Kenny, admitting the obvious.

"And if it's you that oversaw the designing, as (forgive my rudeness) I thought I overheard you say, then may I be shaking your hand?"

Mr. Kenny held it out impulsively, defenses down. Ben saw in his great-uncle what he thought of as the "_Artemis_ look"--love me, love my ketch. Pushing aside a transient alarm, Ben himself gave way to one of his gusty moments of allegiance. This blue-eyed man must be admirable and wise. His pale quiet, the odd way his face took little share in the ardor of his voice--why, merely the reasonable caution of a man who must have voyaged everywhere and seen everything on the everlasting seas. One would do well to listen when he spoke, and remember.

"I am John Kenny of Roxbury, sir. The ketch is the _Artemis_, Peter Jenks captain, her maiden voyage now ending."

"_Artemis!_ O the fair true name for such a lady! Daniel Shawn, sir, your humble servant." No man's servant, and Ben knew it. Presented to the elder daughter of Peter Jenks, captain, Mr. Shawn kissed her fingers, and Ben writhed, not in jealousy but at his own incompetence: that was how it ought to be done, and Faith was clearly pleased. "_Artemis!_--what other name would be possible?" said Mr. Shawn, and grew intent on brushing his coat lapel, asking casually in the same breath: "Doth she carry letters of marque, Mr. Kenny?"

"That she don't," said John Kenny rather blankly. "Armed she is--you can see the la'board falconet from here--but no letters of marque, sir. I've not a word to say against the privateersmen, in these years of war when the French do beset us so, but for my ships I'll have no part of it, having made mine own small fortune in the hard way, Mr. Shawn--refraining, let us say, from the thought of easy prizes because I know mine own share of human frailty, and proposing so to continue."

"For which I honor you, sir," said Mr. Shawn, and having brushed the lapel to his satisfaction and smiled with wonderful sweetness, he changed the subject. "I've heard of your father, Mistress Jenks, the way I suppose most seaman have in this part of the world, and he noble as any captain under sail, now that's no lie."

Faith blushed, overwhelmed; her right hand wandered to her mouth. Mr. Kenny was visibly wondering whether to steer Charity into another social ordeal. Charity leaned against the brown girl, observing _Artemis_ to the exclusion of all else on earth, particularly Benjamin Cory. Faith turned to Ben, astoundingly, swaying so near that her face under the ribboned calash must tilt up to look at him. She clutched the bonnet, though it was well tied. "Pray allow me to tack into the lee of you, Mr. Cory, to shelter my silly bonnet--your shoulders are broad enough."

Later in white nights Ben thought: _She said that, and to me...._

Later also Ben found it hard to recall anything else said by Faith or himself--small talk, surely--in those moments of nearness while _Artemis_, clear of the harbor shipping, moved down on them tranquilly, a great wind-begotten dream realizing herself in the here-and-now.

A round bulky man held a rope at the bow of _Artemis_. Below him a face cruelly pure and calm, carved from apple-wood a year ago by an old artist of Dorchester who was nearly blind, stared into a world of many homelands. In the momentary enclosing silence, Ben saw a flash of startled recognition between that stout man in the bow and Daniel Shawn; since both looked away immediately, Ben dismissed it as a vagary of his own imagination, or none of his business. The stout man was unknown to Ben, perhaps one of the replacements signed on at Kingston; a greasy, unrevealing face. Ben heard a flurry of shouts from men aboard and men on the dock who knew each other. He also found a face he knew, and waved--the mate, yellow-haired Jan Dyckman, who had visited at Roxbury, brick-solid and big, a shy and gentle soul ashore, moving with a warm confidence in all the ways of his Lutheran God. But Jan did not see Ben's wave or had no time for it, taut at the starboard rail and watching simultaneously every inch of remaining canvas, every ripple between _Artemis_ and the wharf.

"Ahoy, Mistress Faith!" That was a north-wind voice overriding all other commotion, from the bald giant looming aft near the helmsman. _Artemis_ was yet some thirty yards away, gliding, barely disturbing the filthy dockside water. Ben's glance took in the giant--it could only be Peter Jenks--with a wonder that such an iron mountain could have begotten the loveliness of Faith. Even that far away Captain Jenks was more than life-size, and surely knew it. His nose was flattened like a board, set in deep leather creases between small eyes icy blue in the sunlight--courageous arctic eyes without compassion.

Faith jumped at her father's shout, clutching her skirt prettily. "Clarissa! My kerchief--quickly!" Her hand behind her snapped a finger impatiently before the Negro girl gave her a white kerchief; then Faith was running, waving the cloth, expertly careless of ropes and tackle and the roustabouts who lurched out of her path. She knew her way; she was not impeding them, and stepped back properly when it was time for that rope in the bow to leap ashore.

Another snaked from the pier to be caught amidships. The lady _Artemis_ needed no restraining thrust of the fenders. She nudged wet timbers as one arranging a pillow for her head, and fell asleep.

* * * * *

"I would not," said Reuben, "utter any gratuitous multiloquence which could be construed as a detraction, libel or impudicitous derogation of another man's periwig."

"I yield. You know bigger and sillier words than I do."

"Then will you tell me, sir, what on earth you were looking for over there by the pond?"

"Mm-yas," said Mr. Welland, "the pond. Why, I've been longing for years to learn how peeper frogs peep. Don't have much time to ramble--difficult for a doctor to break away, but now and then I do, with the excuse of hunting for herbs. I heard 'em peeping hereabouts, thought at last I might catch 'em at it. No such thing. They hide when I peep at 'em, and devil a peep will they peep. Why's that?"

"Too near them, sir, and not still enough. You should have sat well away from the water, with no motion for at least a quarter-hour."

Deliberately Mr. Welland took snuff from an enameled box, and sneezed, a light explosion with a double after-echo. "Fi-_choo_-shoo!... Mr. Cory, I take it they have peeped in your presence?"

"Oh yes. The little throats swell up enormous and they shake all over." To soften the blow Reuben added: "I'm sure they would for you, Mr. Welland. Merely a matter of making yourself look like a rock."

"At my age I'm to imitate a boulder--boulder and yet more bold."

"Paronomasia," said Reuben. "The ultimate in wit."

"Boo! You imitated a rock rather well yourself. I never heard a sound. When I first saw you I thought I had to do with one of the Little People."

"Ah! The invisible world!" Daringly Reuben made horns of his fingers and waggled them. He was very happy, no longer much concerned to wonder why.

"Might I ask further, why you don't find it strange that I should spend my declining years endeavoring to watch frogs peep?"

Reuben considered. "I think everything is interesting."

"Oh!" That was a startled sound, without laughter. Mr. Welland looked away from him so long that Reuben's pleasure clouded over. He could have gone too far; said something wrong; happiness and friendship could tumble, an air-castle in ruins. Mr. Welland was holding out the snuffbox, closed. "Try if you can discover the catch. If you can I'll tell you who gave it me."

Reuben studied it, aware he was being tested in some way that went far beyond the trifling problem. The box was of ebony, the sides covered with intricate carving of grape leaves. The enameled picture inset in the cover displayed a naked goat-leg fellow plucking a cluster from a vine. Since pressure on the carving brought no result, Reuben methodically tried lifting the leaves With a thumbnail until one yielded and the box was open.

"Mph!--most persons spend half an hour and give it up. Well, it was given me--worthless keepsake, he said--by Sir Thomas Sydenham, when as a young man stuffed with mine own importance I called upon him at London. He was most kind. Corrected my quantities, I recall, when I ventured a Latin tag in what he tolerantly called my vile colonial accent. He died, I believe, in the year of the revolution, 1689--so you see, Reuben, time and change, and we grow old somehow." Reuben thought: But he is not speaking to himself in the far-off way of the old; he is speaking to _me_, and for _my_ sake.... "Perhaps you never heard of Sir Thomas?"

"No, sir, I never did."

"He hath been called the English Hippocrates--an exaggeration, but a great man certainly, I think the greatest in medicine since Harvey."

"Harvey?"

"There are gaps in your learning after all. I'll be happy to tell you about Harvey if you like. About Signor Malpighi too, who as it happens discovered the presence of the capillaries by dissecting the lung of a frog. Not one of your frogs of course. Some Swiss or Italian frog, unknown benefactor of science."

"Did you think, sir, I was all vain because I like to make comical noises with big words?"

"No, sir. On reflection--no; I did not think that."

"I've been called--oh, flippant or the like, because it seems I do now and then laugh at the wrong time."

"Who calls you that?"

"Oh!... My tutor for one, but meaneth no harm by it. Actually he's very kind, and I suppose I try him badly, but then by chance I'll pronounce some Latin quantity correctly or come unscathed through the horrid jungle of some Greek verb, and he forgiveth all."

"M. Cory, I have been sitting here fearing that perhaps _I_ had laughed at the wrong times, and that you might regard me as--mm-yas, flippant or the like."

"I do not."

"In that view of the case, perhaps you and I ought to be friends."

"As a matter of fact," said Reuben, "I thought we already were."

* * * * *

South of Boston Neck the road to Roxbury entered a desolate mile between the waters of Gallows Bay on the east and a waste of salt marsh. Here the smell of the sea was all about you; above, a meager crying of gulls in the windy daytime. Near Roxbury the salt flats and Gallows Bay were partly hidden by woods and rocky knolls. Lights were said to wander this mile of road at night, not fireflies nor lanterns of vessels on Gallows Bay, which had honestly earned its name.

Efforts had been made to pave the road during the last sixty or seventy years. Stones rose up and walked. Hence derived grave democratic discussion and heartburning: if you have all the rocks of New England to draw upon, there's still nothing so pleasing as a paving block to support the sills of a barn, especially if it be cut as God might have left it in a state of nature, so that no town father can lay his hand on his heart and swear it came from the particular hole where his horse broke a leg.

Ben Cory watched a soaring of white wings tipped with black as a gull drifted out of sight over the marshes. Out here the white-headed eagles came at times, lesser life falling quiet. Lordly, Uncle John called them, but said they were cowardly pirates too, and told once how he had watched them circle about till other birds rose with hard-won fish, and then torment them into yielding it. Ben wondered as the gull vanished, why he should think of the man Daniel Shawn. He had missed something Uncle John was saying, and clucked to his mare. "Your pardon, sir?"

"I was saying Mr. Jenks had three daughters, Faith, Hope and Charity. Hope died as an infant. Charity's but a young thing...."

"Faith is--charming, I thought."

"She is," said Uncle John with total dryness. "Ben, I wish your opinion of that fat man, that new bosun Tom Ball."

"My opinion?" Flattered and flustered, Ben drew his wits away from the dream of Faith. "He's short of words certainly, Uncle John. He only showed me about the deck while you was engaged with Mr. Dyckman, and I don't recall he said more than half a dozen words, and that in so thick a talk--Devon, isn't it?--I missed much of it. That's not fat, Uncle John, that's mostly brawn, I believe.... I don't like it, sir, when a man stares at me long without winking. They say it's the candid way, but I feel more as if he was defying me to call him a liar."

"Eh, Benjamin, you're somewhat sharp. I don't like him either, but Mr. Jenks calls him a good sailor. Ay, Devon, where my father was born--within sound of the Channel, he used to say, and could speak of the old country pleasantly when he was not laying about him as the Lord's own interpreter and flail...."

"You said Mr. Jenks never visits about ashore?"

"Mph!... Ben, when you're a man grown, should you find yourself a little too fond of drink, I suggest you resist it, even sometimes at cost of being named a poor thing, canting killjoy or whatever. 'Tis a matter of being your own man. Should you find--by your own judgment, boy--that drinking interferes with that, don't drink. Did you like Mr. Shawn?"

"Yes, sir, I did like him, very much. Are you telling me indirectly, Uncle John, that Captain Jenks----?"

"I am." Mr. Kenny halted his gray gelding on a rise of ground. "I like to pause here, Ben, where you see only the roofs and little threads of smoke.... Yes, he's something a slave to it, though never aboard ship. At sea he allows his men the ration and not a drop for himself. But ashore he must fall into another sea, of liquor--drifting, helpless, I don't know what stops him from sinking altogether. Blameth it on the moon and tides--his fancy. He told me once how in the dark times of the moon at sea he goes near mad with need of it but won't yield--then I dare say it'll go hard with every man aboard. The moon's his friend in some manner--he's well enough when she's waxing full, sad and bitten by his need when she waneth, noticed it a thousand times. I told him who Artemis was in the legends of the Greeks, virgin huntress and goddess of the moon. He was pleased, and turned on my ketch a newly loving eye. A troubled man, Benjamin. Knoweth well what is right, but no one ever tells him, no preacher or any other. Having shaken hands with him at last, I dare say you can imagine why few would undertake it."

"My hand still aches.... Sir, do you think that if I--I mean when I go to Harvard, I shall know what I wish to do, that is for a life's work?" So it was spoken, the doubt that had been nagging his days.

"I trust so, Ben." And was that all? Ben wondered--was that all the old man would say? A gust of wind full of the sea smell blew across Ben's shoulder and sent a last year's oak leaf scurrying down the road. The wind's embrace was cold, the leaf a reminder of autumn in the flood of spring. "You know I concur in the wish your father expressed in his last moments: you and Reuben must acquire learning. But then the decision must be with you. If you should decide to take up my affairs when I'm done with 'em, why, I'll be pleased, more perhaps I shouldn't say. Trade, commerce--it's not dull, Ben, so long as one keeps the wit alive with a private philosophy. Our holy friends make great show of despising it, the while it keeps them and the rest of us fed and clothed. It might not suit Reuben--well well, let time work a little on it, boy.... If you should come to see it that way, remember ships are the thing, and there our dirty Boston's got 'em all by the nose. Never be a port in the Americas to match her, never."

Daringly Ben murmured: "What about Newport?"

"Pretty little harbor. I hear they never let anybody piss off the docks--afraid of flooding it, you know. Now New York might come to something one day, if they ever find the wit to use what nature gave 'em. Like you to see New York some time, maybe after the war, the way the river comes down wide and grand past miles of cliffs on the west. Nothing like it in New England nor Old England neither. Clean, wondrous blue--Jenks told me once 'tis good as well water above the tides. He took a sloop of mine up to Albany once, years ago. Well, poor Jenks! He'll be into the second or third tankard by now, scarce giving that slave wench time to lift off his boots. Yes, the troubled men--seekers and dreamers and friends of the moon, a little mad, and minds grown wise before their time like your sweet brother's--I don't pretend to understand 'em, Ben, the way I think you and I understand each other. I suppose they engender a great share of the sorrow in the world. What a place it might be without 'em! In a world without 'em I swear I'd die of boredom before I was hanged."

* * * * *

"She is fair. When we saw her a-building up the river and climbed about on her naked ribs, that was different, Ru. Now she's alive, even at the wharf you feel it. She's only waiting to meet the winds again."

"You'd marry the sea if you could. Come here to the window and look down. Something else is fair. Still light enough if you look sharp. The apple--nay, I mean the little new one, that Rob set out the first year we came here. It's budded, for the first time."

"So it is. Will Rob let 'em ripen this year, I wonder?"

"I dare say not.... So you've met the great Jenks at last."

"Never shake hands with him. Remember the bosun Joe Day? Died at the Indies--smallpox, Mr. Dyckman said. I was fond of Joe Day--made me think of Jesse Plum, the tales he could tell.... What's Kate contriving that smells so good all over the house?"

"Roast goose, O wanderer."

"And what's up with Hibbs? Ha'n't seen him since I got home."

"Sulking. Benjamin, stand forth! You ask me, what of Gideon Hibbs; you ask, oh, where is he? Hibbs Pontifex hath gone to roost, with a book upon his knee."

"Upstairs?"

"Next door."

"All lank and lean?"

"Ay--dreaming of roast goose."

"What planneth he for the morrow's morn, the evil old--uh--papoose?"

"Ovid, my lord."

"Not Ovid still!"

"Ovid, my lord."

"Oh, no!"

"_Multum in parvo, fiat lux, pro bono publico._ Balls, we've done better, but for a Monday evening it'll pass. Throw me a clean pair of drawers, will you, like a fair angel, Ben? Was Jenks' daughter there?"

"Yes. Both, I mean. The younger's a child. And a stranger introduced himself, a Mr. Daniel Shawn. Excited by _Artemis_ and won Uncle John's heart praising her. A seaman, silver-tongued--honest, I thought."

"What was he after?"

"I don't know that he was after anything, Ru. From his talk he must have been everywhere and seen everything."

"Maybe not everything."

"Oh, Muttonhead!--a manner of speaking."

"A goaty eye for Jenks' fair daughter belike?"

"No. Merely polite to her, like any gentleman."

"An old man then."

"Forty perhaps."

"Ah, Ben, these ancient cods! They're the worst, didn't you know? Consider our Pontifex, how we sometimes hear him moaning in the night. I tell you, he hath a private succubus. Down the chimney cometh she, most punctually, Wednesdays and Saturdays, to grind him all night long between hot ivory legs, grind him even unto the very last gerunds and aorists and ablatives and first person plural of the verb _contorquere_."

"Ha?"

"Alas, poor Ben!--no Latin? It means to wriggle."

"Well, shame on you!"

"Button your long lip. You can't say that when I've made you laugh."

"No, blast you, I can't. As for Shawn, I think he only wished to know more about _Artemis_."

"Ay-yah. Still everyone wants for something."

"Granted, O Grandfather! And thou?"

"Trifles. Most of the ocean and the empire of Cathay. The spring moon. The Northwest Passage, the Fountain of Youth, a few acres of Eden. Trifles, but still you see it's true--everyone wants for something, even I."

_Chapter Two_

"Yet the manifold desires of man," said Mr. Gideon Hibbs, biting a walnut--"and note that within this category I would subsume the concupiscent;"--his long right hand held down a finger of the left--"the natural, wherein I include the need of daily provender and nature's other common demands;"--another finger--"the intellectual, that is the desires of mind operating as it were in _vacuo_; the spiritual, whereby I understand the desire of man unto God;"--his left thumb waved, not included, and this troubled Mr. Hibbs because he was slightly drunk--"all these desires, I say, are subject to the ineluctable domination of _chance_, gentlemen, pure chance." He sighed at another walnut, a grayish man not old, in fact rather young by arithmetical measure. He could never have been young in spirit; Reuben supposed that Mr. Hibbs would have admitted this himself, with stern pride, holding that flesh is corruption, that truth can be illuminated only by the cold flame of philosophy.

From threadbare sleeves jutted his hands, pale and bony, clumsy with anything but a goose quill, stained by ink and tobacco, the nails always black--a corruption of the flesh that did not trouble him.

Reuben wondered occasionally if anything did. Mr. Hibbs' pedagogic rages were just that, put on for discipline and academic show. Reuben had sensed this, ever since his and Ben's first sweaty encounters with _amo_, _amas_, _amat_. The rages were as artificial as the lancinating stare of Mr. Hibbs' dark eyes, the stare intended to pin a student to the mat confessing all sins, especially those of omission. He knew Ben felt less secure under the _furor academicus_. The eyes of Mr. Hibbs might glare bitterly, the large red lips squirm anguished above the spade-shaped jaw, the hands clench as if itching to claw the answer out of a boy like a loose tooth, but Reuben knew the soul of Mr. Hibbs was away from all that on the other side of the moon, disputing with Democritus, Aristotle, Cicero, the Schoolmen, Comenius, even John Calvin, who might have been a sad sort of freshman in that crowd. Living at John Kenny's house with no duty but teaching, Mr. Hibbs had all the time in the world for the boys but not an undivided spirit. The black stare was further softened by his wig, a mousy thing carelessly powdered. The powder grayed his poor clothes, puffing off in a sneezy cloud if anyone patted his back--no one ever did except John Kenny.

"And yet," said Mr. Kenny, "if I understand you, sir, you believe in God. Shall God rule by chance? I am not well grounded in philosophy."

"Oh, the Prime Mover set the wheel a-spinning, and needeth not to observe it, I dare say--heresy of course, for the which I could spend a week or two in the stocks."

"And I with you," John Kenny chuckled, "for at least two thirds of what I say every day within mine own house. God then is synonymous with first cause?"

Ben was gazing into the purple country of a wineglass, and Reuben saw that he had not drunk much, which was proper--or was that his second glass? This was the first time the boys had been invited to linger thus after dinner. Perhaps Uncle John wished to give them an initiatory taste of manhood, or else supposed them too full of roast goose to move.

"Not synonymous, sir, for that would imply that God is only first cause, no more. We must assume he hath many more attributes."

"We may assume it. We can hardly know it," Mr. Kenny suggested, and reached across the table to refresh the tutor's Madeira and splash a bit more in Reuben's glass. "But what is knowledge?"

A sidelong glance told Reuben that black caterpillars had gone crawling up toward Mr. Hibbs' wig; the big red mouth was pursed; the eyes squinted at the borders of philosophy. "We must recognize divers degrees of knowledge. There is mere factual knowledge: I know I hold this glass in my hand; if I drop it the wine will stain the cloth. Knowledge of the attributes, eternal presence of God is a higher knowledge."

"In what manner higher, Mr. Hibbs? More difficult? More important? More full of earthly significance?--if so, to whom?"

"I mean such knowledge cometh to the mind and soul direct, not by way of mere tangible evidence."

"And yet, Mr. Hibbs--this is simply mine own ignorance finding a voice--I don't understand why knowledge becomes higher because tangible evidence is lacking, nor indeed why tangible evidence should be despised. But may we return to the matter of definition?" John Kenny glanced at Reuben while the tutor's head was bowed for the inspection of another walnut; Reuben decided it was not merely possible, it was a fact: Uncle John's eyelid _had_ flickered down and up. "What _is_ knowledge?"

"Knowledge is the perception of truth."

Reuben drank a little, remembering the afternoon. He had spent at least two hours by the pond with Mr. Welland--listening mostly, for once launched the doctor spoke well, like one whose talk had been dammed up a long time: Harvey, Sydenham, a surgeon named Paré, Signor Malpighi again and his little frog, something of a book named _Micrographia_ by a Robert Hooke of England. The time had gone quickly; Mr. Welland was still talking as they crossed the south pasture and climbed the slope, and from the top of it Reuben could see the tiny figures of Ben and Uncle John returning, but the doctor at first was not able to make them out. "My eyes are not what they were," he said, "though maybe I can peer a little way through a stone wall." With that remark Mr. Welland had become somewhat remote, like a man interrupted in conversation by a distant call, though all he did was stand there, his ugly, kindly face turned away from the path of the late lowering sun.

John Kenny asked: "And what is truth?"

"We must recognize divers degrees of truth," said Gideon Hibbs. "There is the empirical, observational truth I mentioned. There is logical truth, demonstrated by proceeding correctly from the premise. There is ethical truth, not demonstrable by observation or logic, deriving from an ideal harmony between the human will and the will of God."

"There I begin to lose you," said John Kenny.

"Ideal, sir, attainable in perfection only by the mind, not in common life because man is the plaything of chance, a conclusion to which I am forced, in defiance of prevailing theology, by contemplation of human frailty and the vicissitudes of life." Mr. Hibbs drank and looked a trifle happier. "Above all there is metaphysical truth, even further beyond the reach of observation and logic. Here indeed the philosopher may find consolation--by submission, if you like, to the incomprehensible."

"But in what manner is mind not a part of common life?"

"Oh? Sir, do you doubt the separateness of soul and body?"

"I confess that sometimes I do." Uncle John looked tired, Reuben saw, as though he might have lost interest in Socratic method, might even prefer to be playing chess. He enjoyed it most with Ben, Reuben knew; when Reuben himself entered the dry brilliant world of the chessboard he found it nearly impossible to temper his own sharp skill, and victory came with too much ease. He wondered if the doctor could be a chess-player. Strange, the remoteness like a sadness that had come over Mr. Welland there at the top of the rise. "If you run, Reuben, you can meet them in front of the house." That had been like a mind reading. "I don't run nowadays, Reuben." He recalled the doctor's brief mirthless smile as they shook hands. "I think I'd admire to see you run. I'll take the path through this other field--it'll bring me out back of my own house.... Run, boy, run!"

He had missed a part of something Uncle John was saying concerning the influence on the human spirit of every change suffered by the flesh. The old man was speaking of youth and age. It was all reasonable and wise, Reuben thought. Uncle John was seldom anything but reasonable and wise. "I think truth may be both a humbler and a sterner thing. I think, Mr. Hibbs, there can never be any truth but a partial truth, subject to change by every new observation."

"But that is...."

"Terrifying? For my part I don't find it so. This may be a matter of one's disposition, I suppose."

And so I ran from Mr. Welland, and because I knew my own speed and was loving the wind around me, I did not look back....

"Beyond such partial truth," said John Kenny, "you enter the region of faith; and by faith, Mr. Hibbs, I think men have moved no mountains. I think in mine old age that men have moved mountains by art and by the sweat of discontent, while faith never stirred one grain of sand."

And Ben had spurred the mare, running up the road to meet him, leaving Uncle John far behind, sweeping off his hat to let the wind at his hair. Reuben recalled his gray eyes wide and curious and sweet, his flushed face somehow surprised, as though Ben had never dreamed the world could be as good to him as it was....

John Kenny was saying something more, about the arrogance of certainty; it was not completed, for someone was knocking.

The man in the green coat stood ghostlike in the dining-room doorway behind the bulk of a bothered Kate Dobson. He should have waited for Kate to announce him. To Reuben he was a shadow of something not quite acceptable, even dimly alarming, tall with his ancient hat held to his breast, sweeping them all in a blue stare. But Uncle John was pleased. "Only a poor matter of business, Mr. Kenny, and had I known you was entertaining guests----"

"But happy to have another, and if business, let it be pleasure too! Off with your coat, man, and take a chair, and drink up!" As Daniel Shawn was protesting but sitting down anyway, Mr. Kenny sent Kate flying for a fresh decanter. "If a man hath an eye for my _Artemis_, shall I let him go without drinking her health? Mr. Gideon Hibbs, Mr. Daniel Shawn. Ben you've met, sir. And this is Mr. Reuben Cory, my other grand-nephew--nay, my other son."

Standing to reach across the table for a handshake, Reuben thought: God damn it, I don't like him. "I am honored, sir."

If Mr. Shawn was astonished that a pup of fifteen should have the impudence to speak first and with high formality, he hid it well; his hand was firm and kind, his murmured response neutral without amusement. Very likely, Reuben thought, he supposes I know no better; and so I have made a fool of myself once again. But he continued to feel that the coming of Daniel Shawn on this evening of winy philosophy was the approach of a wolf to a pack of harmless dogs.

Ben was pleased too, though Reuben had noticed shyness settling over him like a mist. Kate Dobson was not pleased. As she brought in the wine, her prominent mild eyes openly assessed Mr. Shawn's clothes, and her soft-footed rush from the room was virtually a flounce. Uncle John was asking: "Did you come afoot, sir, all the way to Roxbury, and at night?"

"Oh, I did that, Mr. Kenny, an easy walk."

"I'm pleased you had moonlight." In the windows, reflections of candelabra were steady golden fires. "The dem'd road's a caution, noticed it a thousand times and said so in high places too, but it does no good. I trust you met no inconvenience?"

"None, sir." Good white teeth flashed in a light dangerous smile. "No man troubles me," said Mr. Shawn, and patted his left hip, where he carried a short knife something like Ben's. "And I easy found your house, sir, the way everyone knows of Mr. John Kenny." The flattery was gross. Shawn clearly meant it to be recognized as such, using it to intimate a deeper flattery, a suggestion that he and John Kenny knew how to value the coinage of light conversation and enjoy it as a comic work of art.

"To _Artemis_!" said Mr. Kenny. "May she venture far!"

"Amen!" Shawn jumped up to drink that toast standing, in one draft, and Ben, Reuben saw, could do no less. He took one swallow himself for courtesy, and sat down, shifting his chair until the delicate flame of a silver wall lamp was behind Ben's head and created around him a golden nimbus that no one but Reuben would see, or seeing, remember.

"I'm happy we spoke at once of the bright lady, Mr. Kenny, for that allows me to state my business and so have done, and not be outstaying a welcome that's more than kind." But once settled in the chair at Ben's right, Mr. Shawn appeared to be in no haste at all. Reuben observed an old scar running in a gray-white thread from the black hair behind Mr. Shawn's left ear, winding through the smallpox scars and losing itself under his collar. Mr. Shawn wore no stock, no wig; simple, clean and neat in a brown jacket and gray shirt and patched breeches, he made Reuben feel foppishly overdressed in his fine silk stock, dabs of lace and other impedimenta of a gentleman that Uncle John liked to see him wear. Mr. Shawn's green coat, tossed on a chair, nakedly displayed its own patches. His large-knuckled hands were clean, his face slick-shaven and scrubbed, a moderate tan combining with natural pallor to give him a look of pitted old ivory, the only grooves two deep ones framing his proud nose and three faint permanent frown-tracks between his heavy black brows. Uncle John was replenishing his glass. "I thank you, sir, but I pray you don't press me to drink overmuch, it's I have a poor head for it, now that's no lie."

"In _vino veritas_," said Gideon Hibbs, and giggled. Reuben squirmed inwardly as usual at that degeneration of Mr. Hibbs' conversation into Latin snippets, the eroded currency of scholarship. With the sometimes dispassionate malevolence of youth, Reuben had spoken of it to Ben as the _harrumphitas hemanhorum Hibbsiana_.

Daniel Shawn threw a light, tight smile to the room at large. "Legend says truth is a naked lady dwelling in the bottom of a well, and so up we must drag her and cast a rag upon her lest her beauty be a-dazzling us, or will it be that she's a Gorgon and no beauty?--I can't say. Turn our heads, and faith, don't she go down again to the bottom of the well, the way we've had our labor for nothing? I've heard of no man ever lay with her and lived to tell of it, let alone having any get of her at all."

To the stained crystal of his suddenly empty glass, Reuben said: "Unless it was Socrates, and 'tis very true he died."

Small silence ruled. Reuben heard Mr. Hibbs draw a deep stormy breath, but before anyone could set about demolishing green youth for its impudence (if anyone was a-mind to) Daniel Shawn was tranquilly continuing: "To my business, Mr. Kenny, and I'll have done. I'm here, sir, to inquire if there be an opportunity for me to ship aboard your _Artemis_ on her next outward passage." Caution settled on Mr. Kenny's face like cold. "I must tell you, sir, the way I've fallen enamored of the little sea-witch, I'd count it better than a berth on any full-rigged ship I know. Call it a seaman's fancy. I have mate's papers--captain's for that matter, but no man could replace Mr. Jenks, there'd be never no such thought in me mind. Indeed, Mr. Kenny, were I offered a command at present I think I'd refuse, now that's no lie. I think I'm not of a mind for it, though I have captained a vessel twice in the past and done well enough as the world judges. But if any lesser berth be available with _Artemis_, I'm ready, sir--ready to offer twenty years' experience of the sea and the best devotion a man can give at all."

John Kenny said with care: "But if you have captain's papers, I can't suppose you'd wish to sign on for small pay and scant authority."

Shawn sighed, smiling again with tight upper lip and steady eyes. "I think, sir, if the vessel were the _Artemis_, the position of mate would find me content as any man on salt water, now that's no lie. Truth is I love ships, Mr. Kenny; I know a fair one when I see her. Mother of God, in the old days, the ships I'd see standing out from Sligo Bay, and I too young to follow! I'm a Sligo man, Mr. Kenny, born in Dromore forty-one years ago and can't bear the life on the bloody beach. Steady as she goes!--it's I need a deck under me feet or I'm not living."

Mr. Kenny shook his head unhappily. "Jan Dyckman hath sailed as mate with Mr. Jenks a long time now. I can't imagine Mr. Jenks considering any other in the room of him."

"Still," said Shawn, his head on one side, his smile perhaps no more than a flicker of the candles--"still, sir, you are the owner."

"I am the owner," said Mr. Kenny stiffly, "and merely that. With such a captain as Mr. Jenks, I say nothing about the manning of my craft."

"And very just, sir. I was but thinking this Mr. Dyckman might be ready for a command himself, in one of your other vessels--thus an advancement for him, an opportunity for me."

"I see.... At present I own but two others, Mr. Shawn, one a mere sloop. The other is a ship that should now be at Virginia, a fair sturdy vessel, but she won't be homeward-bound for some months--Captain Foster is intending a triangle course, Barbados and then home. Further, I fear Jan Dyckman himself hath no wish for a captain's place. Splendid fellow, but by his own estimation a natural second in command, who tells me his ambition flies no higher. 'Tis true"--John Kenny's head slanted back and he was looking down his nose--"'tis true _Artemis_ will carry a second mate with her usual complement."

"What is that complement, sir, may I ask?"

"She put out last August with fourteen hands. Came home with ten--smallpox and tropic fever. Three of the ten were new men Mr. Jenks signed on at Kingston. Worked her on the homeward passage with three men and a boy to a watch. I dare say the cook was obliged to turn a hand in dirty weather--he's a renegade Frenchman, by the way, and utterly mad."

"Sir, if a cook aboard ship be not mad he must become so, a law of nature. Why, I recall one we had when I captained the sloop _Viceroy_, King William's time--she was for Naples out of Bristol and a pleasant passage, the most of it. Rot my liver if this cook didn't go overboard off Malta--in a moderate gale, mind you--crying that a pack of Sirens was corrupting the ship's boys and he'd have 'em flayed for it, and all the time wasn't it only the wind in the stays? A Yorkshireman, and broad in the beam with a list to la'board from a broken leg that'd healed somewhat crook. No Sirens that day, and didn't I put about to fish him out of the drink?--the more fool me, for he was na' but a bundle of disaster ever after. His fancy, d'you see, took another turn--O the child he was, the great smiling angry child!--and he'd have it he must train the weevils in our biscuit to be the like of some educated fleas he'd seen, I think it was at the Cambridge Fair, and he all in a frenzy when they wouldn't answer to the names he gave 'em but continued weevils, nothing more. Mother of God, had he wished he could've had fleas a-plenty, Bristol fleas, the best in the world. Well, there was Jemima, Hannibal, Simon, Jasper--many more I forget. His time passed in shaking more of 'em out of the biscuit and bidding 'em increase and multiply in the bottom of a stewpot, the way he saw his fortune made the day we'd raise Land's End once more, but it did so happen, Mr. Kenny, on a brisk golden afternoon, that a cross-wind caught us for a moment, and no blame to vessel or man, over went the stewpot, and someone stepped on Jemima, and here was fourteen stone of redheaded Yorkshireman coming at me with a knife, for he declared the fault was mine. We were obliged to tie him below. For the rest of the voyage the cooking was done by a highland Scot from Inverness, 'tis a mystery of God we didn't all die--no Scottishmen present, I hope?... Well, I think I would not despise the place of second mate if the vessel was your _Artemis_, now that's no lie. Nowadays a berth is hard to find."

Uncle John had laughed too much, and was wiping his eyes. Ben had hooted unrestrained. Behind his own laughter, Reuben was reflecting that what Mr. Shawn said of maritime employment was quite simply not true. As the war dragged on, one heard that Her Majesty's Navy was only too hungry for any man who could remain upright and heave on a rope. "Sir, sir," said Mr. Kenny, "was there no reviving Jemima?"

"Oh, there was not, seeing it was the cook himself who stepped on her, the blacker the day.... As you can see, Mr. Kenny, I am not at present in prosperity. Perhaps before now I have aimed too high, rejecting opportunities that I ought to have considered."

"Have you a family, sir?"

"A widower, sir, of modest habit, with never no stomach for riot or extravagance. I married young in the old country (God comfort her!) and when my wife died in childbirth thanks to a certain damned English midwife who probably--Oh, I can see it now----" Mr. Shawn stopped, and lifted frowning eyes as if startled by some remote vision beyond the walls; he finished his wine at a gulp. "Your pardon, sir--my wits were wandering. When my wife died and the little one with her--it was long ago--I took to the sea at last, and since then the ships have been wife and child," said Mr. Shawn, and let the silence hang.

"It would be best," said Mr. Kenny, "if you approach Mr. Jenks direct. But since you've put it to me fairly, I'll speak to him also if you wish. I can make no promise at all, Mr. Shawn."

"I understand that, sir, and I thank you." Daniel Shawn's neck was flushed, the old scar throbbing, a lightly breathing snake. "You're the fair man, Mr. Kenny, and if 'tis my good luck to serve in your employ, I'll give a man's best, more I can't say."

Reuben wondered why he should be finding it necessary to compare this man with the doctor Amadeus Welland. They were nothing alike. Why?

"Mr. Shawn, let me fill your glass. Will you stay the night? I'd be pleased to save you the walking home in the dark."

"Oh, I must be going, but a thousand thanks for the thought, and I'm happy the glass is full so I may drink your health, Mr. Kenny, and the continuance of all good fortune to you, sir!"

They all drank Mr. Kenny's health, and Mr. Shawn did not go.

Reuben thought: Well, it's because of what they _don't_ share. As Ben's face is surrounded by that golden light, so Mr. Welland carries about him--honesty. That man Welland could never plot and contrive, never; he could never show a false face, no more than Ben could. But I think friend Shawn is doing exactly that, and I have drunk far too much wine....

No doubt of it: the sweet purple sorcery was stealing away all natural alertness. A certain Irish magic was filling the room and swelling, Reuben himself yielding to enjoyment of it, until it possessed not only the mournful mighty sound of a sea wind but all the driving power of a wind crossing the dark places, the lonely places, the foam-drenched wilderness.

Daniel Shawn was explaining--had been for a long time, Reuben realized--that the tales of mermaids were mythical fancies; that certain profounder mysteries had nothing to do with such froth of dreams. Uncle John appeared unwilling to abandon the fishtail wenches, and countered with classical texts. Some of these, Reuben knew from a glint in Uncle John's eye and a squirming discomfort in Mr. Hibbs, had been invented on the spot for the occasion--John Kenny could be a rough man with a spontaneous Latin hexameter. But Shawn insisted, and was now launched on the story of a supposed mermaid seen by himself and another of his watch on a voyage among the hot somnolent West Indian isles. "Truly the crayter had the like of a woman's bubbies, and nursed a little one at them, and wasn't it meself was thinking I beheld the mermaid, for all she was that mortal ugly and her mouth ran up and down like a caterpillar's?"

"Now," said Gideon Hibbs--"now, after all!"

"I give you my word, sir, do I not?" Daniel Shawn's flare of wrath was swiftly veiled. "Will a man be inventing such a thing? Wasn't it meself that saw that mouth munching a huge great gob of sea grass, the kind that groweth in brackish waters, and saw the lips churning from side to side? That other man started for a harpoon. I stayed him. Ochone!--how could a man be looking on the ugly thing, the mother she was, and not have pity?"

"Pity's a rare uneasy thing," said John Kenny.

"A bald black head round like a cannon ball, devil a bit of nose but only a pair of slits like a common seal." Shawn laughed abruptly. "And now I must ruin my tale, Mr. Kenny, for when I went below one of the crew who'd often sailed those parts told me the thing was called a manatee or sea cow, and had been well known for many years, the way the folk at Campeachy and elsewhere do fancy the meat highly and use the hide of the gentle beast for making whips. Thus I was spared the folly of telling abroad the marvel I had seen. But you understand me, sir?--in this manner, from such particulars glimpsed in a poor light, come many inventions." Reuben could smell Shawn, a muskiness not quite unpleasant; a wild smell. "In all waste places are wonders--in swamps, jungles, mountains, deserts. The greatest of all lies very far west of here, or say east if you like, for it's the other side of the world. Beside that these fancies of storytellers are pap for children. I have never beheld the sea serpent, though I've heard of him times enough, and spoke with those who'd seen him, honest men owning no more imagination than a block of holystone. The Kraken too, perhaps. Yet those mysteries, and all others, are nothing beside the sea's own self, the sea of the west, the Pacific."

Ben turned to Shawn, rapt and flushed, and Reuben knew he was asking for the sake of hearing Shawn speak again: "The Kraken?"

"A titan of many arms, Mr. Cory, mightier than a right whale they say, who will drag down entire ships, or overturn them belike to feed on all aboard the way a cat will take her a nestful of little birds. It may be so. The sea is boundless. Anything might live therein."

"Even mermaids," said John Kenny, but Mr. Shawn was not listening.

"No man knoweth the sea until he hath ventured the western sea, the Pacific. The fat Spanish ships travel it, but I tell you the route they follow is a single thread stretched over a Sahara. I have sailed it too, a very little of it, above and below the Line, in a whaler, once, and I young with no wisdom in me but with open eyes--and I was, say, like an insect crossing the continent of Europe, but I'm a wise insect, sir--Mother of God, I know the meaning of horizons! Pacific nights--deep as any night of the soul, and will you be telling me of a deeper dark than that? Out there only the sea is truth, only the sea, and this is a part of the truth: there be many islands."

"Continents perhaps," said John Kenny, agreeing but somehow without enthusiasm, and Shawn sat back to study him, the blue eyes clouded windows closing away some of the lightning of inner storm.

"What's the Atlantic?--a gray mad stormy puddle. Sea of the Caribbees?--a small hot lagoon, green lumps of land like a lady's emerald necklace on a blue gown--oh, steady as she goes! I'll grant you her breast can heave and toss. If the wind's coming dark and fast down there in the Caribbees I'll strip canvas quick as any man and remember I was brought up religious, for men and ships are small things. But out there on the far side of the world, have I not seen an empty island open to the west, where the high rollers came down and down forever with all the blind leagues of the sea behind them, down and down as heavy and slow and sure as the years beating on a man's youth? Have I not seen Pacific moonrise where no land is, and the gray and silver piled higher than the North Star Polaris?"

* * * * *

Ben woke on Thursday before dawn, disoriented in time, noticing how the days and nights of being in love run together like those disquieted by simpler fevers. He recalled it was a Monday afternoon when he watched _Artemis_ sail home, therefore a Monday evening when he went to bed undeniably drunk, therefore a gray Tuesday morning when Mr. Hibbs, red-eyed and taciturn, gave him and Reuben an assignment of one hundred and twenty lines of the _Tristia_ of Ovid, to be absorbed by Wednesday afternoon, plus (as atonement for Tuesday morning's inattention and general sinfulness) a demand for five copies per boy, in a fair firm hand with no nonsense, no margin of error, of the entire conjugation of the verb [Greek: kephalalgeô], which means _to have a headache_. So Tuesday and Wednesday coalesced to one inky-dark billow of time, and now before dawn the young apple tree out there that Reuben had spoken of was stirring in a new pale softness. As Ben watched, the sky awoke beyond Dorchester Neck, and the truth of full bloom was confirmed. He thought: I'll see her today.

She was lying touched by the pallor of the morning as he knelt at the window, a breeze on his shoulders mild as a woman's fingers. She was sleeping--in a garden maybe, or under that same apple tree's white foam, her gold-brown hair tumbled over the grass, a curl of it on her forehead above the flush of damask rose. The blue vague garment betrayed her in sleep--no, rather his own daring hand drew it down, leaving bare one breast and the red flower of it. From that, the fantasy moved with reluctance, sluggishly, oppressed by the sense of a thing contrived: sweet yet false. Nevertheless for a moment she shone quite naked, turning in her sleep away from him, a swell of flesh pliant under his hand and hiding the dark desired triangle, the other flower of red. But then she was no longer Faith; she was any woman, with a face unknown.

Reuben stirred and yawned. "Behold the nympholept! Benjamin, what of the night?"

"It a'n't night, Muttonhead."

"Do you attempt to assert that the difference between night and dawn can be detected by the dull besotted perception of the peasantry?"

"I love you too," said Ben.

"Ah! In lieu of morning prayers let us contemplate Pontifex."

"Law, why that, on a spring morning?"

"He hath been subjected to experiment and found wanting."

"How's that?"

"The verb, boy. Consider, it was the doom of Pontifex to _read_ all those twice five copies. Well, sir, in one of 'em, taking not even you into my confidence, I inserted one error, a miserable crawling misplaced accent--a wee louse, do you see, nibbling the fair white integument of a Greek verb. Did he discover, percontate and make manifest this crapulent, this obscene and overweening impudicity? Damn, I forgot concupiscent. Did he find this adventitious louse to be a concupiscent intrusion upon the fulgurant purity of grammatical impeccancy, and crack the hereinbeforementioned louse upon that sable thumbnail? Nah. By the way, where'd the bloody pot get to this time?"

"Under _your_ bed," said Ben, exasperated, for the Cyprian fantasy had not completely dissolved, and it did seem too bad that the last of it must be dismissed by the unequivocal din of urination.

"There!" Reuben sighed. "I have subsumed the concupiscent." He stooped to pat the floor a few times with the flat of his hands, and sprawled back on his bed. "With reference, sir, to that Cicero whose lank shadow falleth across our afternoon: _Sunt autem qui dicant foedus esse quoddam sapientius ut ne minos amicos quam se ipsos diligant._ Do you understumble me, sir?"

"Please, sir, no, sir."

"I freely render: Some say there's a kind of compact of the wise, to love their friends no less than themselves. You may construe."

"Please, sir, no, sir, I won't, sir."

"You what or that which, sir?"

Ben snatched for his brother's sleep-tangled hair. Reuben caught his hand palm to palm and braced his elbow, stretching out wiry and tense. "Wrastle then," he said, not smiling.

Ben knew that with his feet firm on the floor he could hardly fail to force Reuben's hand back, though the boy did possess uncommon strength in his thin arms. Ben recalled he had won last time; not wishing to win twice running, he allowed his hand to sink slowly, as their eyes locked too, Reuben's grave and dilated. Ben drove the smaller hand up once or twice, catching then a glimpse of panic in Reuben, but Reuben clamped his mouth tight and heaved, the power of his knotting arm increased unreasonably, and Ben was startled to find his own arm wavering down. No need after all to simulate defeat; it was fairly done. Ben slumped on the floor laughing and rubbing his shoulder. He thought of telling Reuben that he meant to go into Boston today, Hibbs or no Hibbs. "Ru, you could strangle a bull."

"Not yet." Reuben lay flat, lifting yesterday's shirt from a chair with his toes, to frown at it horribly. "But seeing you're about to throw me a clean shirt like a good Christian, be careful how you come within reach, for I'd be happy to try my powers on a small calf." Ben threw a pillow at him and then the shirt. "Snuff the air, little Benjamin! What hath Kate wrought, do you know? _I_ know."

"Sausage!"

"True," said Reuben, rising in a whirl of activity, "and though you may seem more dressed than I"--he slipped behind Ben, snatched off his neckcloth and darted away knotting it around his own neck--"I shall be in the land of the sausage before you."

They were late. Mr. Kenny had already breakfasted and gone to Boston. Mr. Hibbs lurked impatiently in the schoolroom, nursing one of the head colds that tormented him with the onset of spring, and Kate Dobson was moving about in a large dreamy morning mood, soft-footed scamperings carrying her billowing body from one to another of a dozen errands--the rising of bread, the simmering of a kettle on the hearth, a speck of dirt to be scrubbed, the demolition of a fly. She bounced everywhere, a huge gray-headed silkworm ever hurrying at her generous spinning, and began talking as the boys entered, with some sentence begun obscurely in the depths of her mind: "... so to myself I said, minute I see 'em I'll ask, is it p-i-e-s or p-e-i-s or _what_ is it, with a pox?--I could declare it had an a in it the way you showed it me, Master Reuben, oh dearie me, the letters all shaped out fair and plain."

"Ah, that," said Reuben. "P-e-a-c-e, Kate."

"Didn't I _say_ it had an _a_ into it? Think of that! Ah, well...."

Ben saw she was close to tears. Kate wept easily at many things trifling and great; this was no trifle. What she referred to was a labor of years, a sampler intended (some day) for the wall of Mr. Kenny's study. For all Ben knew it might have been started before he was born. Kate herself couldn't say when she began it, as she couldn't say for sure how old she was, or what year it was she came as a redemptioner from England. To Kate all the past telescoped in a half-reality, and memories overflowing in her talk could seldom be closely tied to conventional mileposts of time. Ben had seen the incomplete sampler, shyly unfolded from a workbasket at times when Mr. Kenny was away in the city. The border was almost done, she said. From the bottom on either side rose branches, ivy idealized, stitched in springtime greens with immense pains and skill; at the top the branches met, interlocking as leaves in nature do, contending but sharing sunlight. That part, she claimed, was easy--why, you just stitched it: so, and so. But the motto caused her endless grief, since she had never been taught to write or read. She knew the alphabet; with desperate trouble she could fit together elements of it indicating words. Ben wondered how she had found courage for such a project before he and Reuben were present to aid her. But she was still troubled even with their aid. No motto was ever quite good enough on second thought. Occasionally she changed the lovely border too. Once Ben had found her rocking in her sewing chair and weeping because, she said, a brown thread among the leaves was the _wrong_ brown and must be picked out, every stitch, and that by candlelight. Her eyes hurt--weren't as good as they used to be.

"Woman dear," said Reuben, "you've gone and lost the paper."

She blinked in sorrow at the hominy and sausage she set before him. "That I have, and I don't understand how a body _can_ be so heedless. I did, I had it in my basket, and then I vow I must've wrapped something in it, maybe a skein, and put it away somewhere, _I_ don't know where--why, my mind's light, light as a whore's promise, I just don't _think_ good."

Ben reached out to pat her fat floury hand, as Reuben said: "Then we'll draw you a fresh one. A nothing for such scholars as me and my little brother--only, bruit it not abroad that ever I said such a thing. You know, Kate, the sin of vanity in us--sad, sad."

She chuckled, dashing a comfortable tear from a bulging cheek, and bounced away to deal with a fresh emergency. Fragments of yesterday's chicken sat on a side table waiting a destiny in soup, and the lean yellow tomcat, Mr. Eccles, had wandered in nursing a sordid plot, one easily detected and swiftly refuted by a whisk of Kate's apron. He came over to rub Ben's leg rather grimly, knowing well enough that breakfast sausage is not cat-food. "Which motto was it, Kate?--believe I've lost track."

"Oh--le' me think, Master Benjamin--'Let peace in this house be everlasting as the sea'--it was real pretty." She wiped an eye and sighed. "Boys, I was thinking--maybe it's foolish, maybe it a'n't even right I should try such a thing, but I was thinking, what if I was to make that motto something in the _Latin_? He'd favor it so--wouldn't he?"

"The very thing!" Reuben exclaimed. "Hark 'ee: _Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori._ That's Virgil, Kate."

"Think of that! That's real Latin, Master Reuben? But--but a'n't it terrible short?"

"Oh, Kate!--greatest things said with fewest words."

"It do sound pretty. What's it mean?"

"Love conquereth all things, let us yield to love."

"You wouldn't play no jape on me, would you?"

"Save us!" Ben knew his brother was genuinely shocked. "Not about the sampler, Kate!"

"I know, dear."

"Only ask Mr. Hibbs whether my translation be right, if you doubt me."

"Nay nay, Reuben, love, I don't at all.... Love conquereth--"

Ben said: "Love conquereth all things."

"Ah me!" She came near, a soft hand on Ben's shoulder, her small sweet mouth like pink petals fallen in bread dough. "Ben, boy, you be a little changed. Something happen, Master Benjamin?--maybe Monday?"

"Monday? Why, Uncle John's _Artemis_ came home from her maiden voyage that day, and a prettier vessel you never--"

"Oh, bother old _Artemis_! And ha' done with talk of the sea too--ask Mr. John, what's it ever done but make widows, and empty graves in the God's acre?"

Reuben said to his empty plate: "The tale goes, it may have been filled by the tears of Chronos who was before all the gods."

* * * * *

"Ha?--oh, your talk, Master Reuben. But only look at Ben boy there a-blushing! Bound to happen--I knowed it, I knowed it, I know all the signs of what makes the world go 'round, and who should know 'em better? O Ben, oh dearie me, soon you'll be a-moping about with a long face, there'll be a wringin' of hands, you'll go sighing with the springtime in your loins and no living with you at all. Ben dear! Tell Kate. Is she fair, Ben? Is she kind?"

"Now, Kate, truly!"

_He will go where I cannot go. Three years past he told me something of his dreams, but I dream never that way, never._

"Why, Ben, not a word! Mumchance. But I know, for a'n't I _alway_ said it was love 't makes the world go 'round? Oh dearie me, they do grow to be men before there's time a spider should build her web over the cradle where they was rocked."

"Can't help it, Kate, the way you stuff Reuben and me with sausage and kindness, we're bound to get big and bad and greasy."

_Where he goeth I cannot go, and he will be much loved, as he ought to be, but I ... I think that I...._

"Phoo, didn't I marry for love me own self, the more fool me for not listening to wiser heads, however and moreover I don't regret it nor won't to my dying day, though it was a whoreson hard thing to learn the cull was na' but a file, dearie."

"A file, Kate?"

_He said: A man of learning must often hide ... even more from the almost-wise. He said: You and I ought to be friends._

"Nay, Ben, it's right you shouldn't know the word, it's only London-town cant and means a common cutpurse, that's all he was, him and his fair talk to me about an inheritance, washed down you might say with the kissing and the sweet looks and the tumbling--marry, could I say no to the likes of him, and meself as hot and limber as a March hare, could I? Well, rest him quiet, he danced for it at Tyburn."

"Oh, I remember. You've spoke of it before, but I'd forgotten the word. Kate, you shouldn't let those old memories rise up and trouble you--not here, and the old country so far away."

_It's back from the Cambridge road (he said nothing about coming to visit him), the cottage with green-painted shutters. Something discourteous the way I ran, but he did say...._

"Ay, it's far. Repent?--phoo! nor they wouldn't've got him, never, only he drunk hisself blind in a tavern and talked, so you see, dearie, it was the rum that ruint him, and never took a strap to me neither except he was in the drink, and that only once or twice. Repent?--why, didn't he spit on the foot of the gallows tree and cock his head at the sky to see a shower coming, and didn't he say to the ordinary: 'Ha' done canting and go to hanging, man, can't you see it's coming on to rain and must I catch a quinsy for King Charles' sake, God bless him?'"

"Maybe he repented later, Kate--I mean in the last moment when there was no way to say the words."

_How much he must know! Why not medicine? Nay, think of it, Ru Cory, why not? WHY NOT?_

"Not him. Why, didn't he wave a purse that he'd h'isted from the ordinary's own pocket, that he had--waved it and throwed it to the crowd and cried: 'Here, culls, drink me a remembrancer!' That he did, anyway so a friend told me that was there and seen it all, the which I couldn't be meself, being in childbed on his account--died, the little thing, and best maybe seeing it'd've had no father, and then me for the colonies, I suppose it was a long time ago."

"Well...."

_But if I am--if there be some evil, some mark of evil to make others recoil as from a leper--but it can't be so, it can't. Would that man know (could I ask him?) why so often I--why--why----_

"But do you know, dearie, I had another friend in the crowd that day to see him die, and she told me the tale different, I can't understand how it could be so different, how that my Jem was leaden-faced, and fought the rope, nor spoke nothing at all but some mumbling about former times, and how his life should be an example--example, with a pox! That wasn't never his way of talk, but--but maybe he did and all. No purse for the crowd, she said, nothing like that."

"I don't think it happened that way, Kate."

_Could I kill a wolf again if there was need? I think I could._

"'Deed she said there was but few present to watch it, and the officers in haste to be done with it because the rain was already falling--I don't know, I don't know."

"Kate, from what you say of him, I'm certain it was the way the other friend told you, that he met it bravely, and threw the purse too, not for impudence but only so to hold himself a man to the end."

_How long it is now since I was child enough to cry out: God help me!_

_Chapter Three_

The builder had intended a storeroom off the kitchen, with no heat and one narrow window, where Gideon Hibbs in these days wrestled with Ben and Reuben across the rackety battlefield of the classics. When the boys came to Roxbury John Kenny, in a genial phase of turning things upside down, had hired a mason to build a fireplace in this austere chamber, and had purchased a magisterial new desk and high-backed chair for Mr. Hibbs. Then with his own hands he fetched from the attic two small old desks, trusting only Ben to help him worry them downstairs, and grew dreamy at the marred and squeaky things, chuckling over jokes superseded forty-odd years before.

In the house of the Reverend Mr. Elias Kenny of Boston, these desks had sustained the squirmings of John Kenny and his brother George, whose young hands left a network of schoolboy carvings now black with age. The satiny pine held room for Reuben and Ben to add a number of their own: arrows, circles, cabalistic squiggles; on Ben's a rising sun with a questioning eyebrow, on Reuben's a portrait of Mr. Eccles that did scant justice to his second-best ear.

One other chair stood at the rear of the schoolroom, sacred to occasions when Uncle John strolled in to listen, owl-tufts cocked like secondary ears alert for a false quantity. At such times Mr. Hibbs became grave and slow-spoken. Hibbs was not an obsequious man: he merely found it important to satisfy Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury. It was at one of those times that Reuben witnessed Uncle John's discovery of the new carvings, a pale crinkled hand descending to the desk, groping at B--R newly incised. Reuben saw only the hand, fearing to look up lest he find Uncle John sad or annoyed. After all the desk was a chip of history; having served John Kenny when he was a boy of twelve, it must have been made at least as early as 1649, and from a pine tree that would have sprung up in the wilderness before the planting of Plymouth Colony. The blue-veined hand lingered feather-light, restless like that of a blind man encountering something formidably new in the pattern of the known. Then it rose and passed gently through Reuben's hair, and the door of the schoolroom closed.

This Thursday morning spring was assailing the house with lazy reminders, a ripple of breeze at the window Mr. Hibbs had sternly closed, a muted hammering from the shed where Rob Grimes was mending a chicken coop at great leisure; earlier Reuben had heard the lonesome Sundayish clamor of the meeting-house bell nearly a mile away, warning that Thursday was Lecture Day, when decent citizens take thought for their souls.

"Very well, Reuben." Mr. Hibbs sniffed. "Lines twenty-one and twenty-two, and pray note that you are not to stress the caesura in line twenty-two, seeing there is no break in the thought."

"quid fuit, ut tutas agitaret Daedalus alas, Icarus immensas...."

"What's the matter? Are you considering, Mr. Cory, whether the caesura be intended by the poet to indicate a pause for daydreaming?"

"Icarus immensas nomine signet aquas."

"You have the quantities correct, and may now construe."

"'Why should Daedalus have----'"

"'Should'? 'Should'? I see no subjunctive, Mr. Cory."

"I was construing freely, sir."

"Why?"

"I thought it sounded smoother so, in English."

"Fiddle! _Fuit_, not being subjunctive, cannot be so translated."

"'Why was it that Daedalus safely moved his wings----'"

"Mr. Cory, one light fugitive moment if you please. Concerning the word _tutas_: is this an adverb?"

"No, sir."

"If Ovid had wished an adverb he would have written----?"

"_Tuto_, sir."

"Yet he used this strange word _tutas_, which is----?"

"An adjective, sir. _Tutas_, _-a_, _-um_, meaning 'safe.'"

"Light breaks." Mr. Hibbs filled his clay pipe, deliberately maddening his tortured nose. "The source, incidentally, of a dreadful English word, 'tutor'--I suppose from some woeful misguided conceit to the effect that a tutor can hold his charges in safety, Master Reuben, from the perils of error--_wharrmphsh!_--within and without. An adjective, then, and plural, I presume. The case, Mr. Cory?"

"Objective, Mr. Hibbs."

"Could it by any remote chance agree with--hm----"

"It agrees with _alas_, sir."

"Oh! How we do see eye to eye at times! _Tutas alas._ I could even imagine it meant 'safe wings,' 'uninjured wings,' something like that, if an adverb had not gone flying past my aging benighted head. Now concerning this word _agitaret_. Did I hear you translate it as 'moved'?"

"I did, sir."

"Had you considered the word 'agitate'?--excellent, _I_ should have thought, and taken direct from the mother Latin."

"I did, sir, but the present-day meaning seemed unsatisfactory."

"Why?"

Reuben discovered he had pulled down his underlip. Mr. Hibbs had striven for three years to break him of the habit, but Reuben, as now, was often unaware he had done it until it was too late. He let it back gently without the usual comforting pop. "To me," Reuben said, "the word 'agitate' suggested fluttering. I might translate: 'Why was it that Daedalus fluttered safe wings?'" He glanced up, honestly feeling as apologetic as a puppy caught _in flagrante_ with a ravished shoe. "To me, sir, Daedalus was no butterfly."

Ben knocked his Ovid on the floor and scrambled after it. Reuben guessed he was trying to divert the lightning, but Mr. Hibbs paid the uproar no heed at all, staring at Reuben with a twitching nose. You could never quite predict Gideon Hibbs: the next moment might be hell, or sudden sunshine, or merely another sneeze.

It was sunshine. Mr. Hibbs relaxed, a wrestler overcome, and laughed, a large generous bray. "You have a point, Reuben. Oh yes!" He fumbled for a kerchief and blew the inflamed organ mightily. "Well, but I'm not content with so flat a word as 'moved.' Benjamin? Considering the wriggles you perform at your desk (and I declare only a young backside could endure it) you ought to be able to offer some word conveying the sense of a sustained and powerful motion."

Shining with relief, Ben said: "'Plied'?"

"Why, excellent!" Mr. Hibbs tensed in astonishment. "'Why was it Daedalus plied uninjured wings?'--mph, comes out in English as iambic pentameter, bless me if it doesn't. Satisfactory, Reuben?"

"Yes, sir, I like that. 'Why was it Daedalus plied uninjured wings, but Icarus marks with his name the enormous waves?'"

Out of a suspended hush, Mr. Hibbs sighed. "Benjamin, proceed. If possible, without butterflies. Let us leave the butterflies to Reuben."

Reuben thought with care: _He means no harm by that, none at all...._ His eyes idly compelled the carved B--R to grow immense and blurred, and he listened to Ben's voice:

"nempe quod hic alte, demissius ille volabat; nam pennas ambo non habuere suas."

"Quantities correct, Benjamin. Construe."

"'Surely it was because Icarus flew high, and Daedalus lower; for both wore wings that were not their own.'"

"Eh, Benjamin, doing uncommon well today. High time of course--I am not prepared to consider this the millennium." Mr. Hibbs could seldom bear to leave a compliment undiluted. "Well, gentlemen, I suggest to you, these particular lines are something more than an exercise in grammar and prosody. I think, no more of the _Tristia_ today. Your grammars if you please--this afternoon it shall be Cicero of course."

"Sir"--startled, Reuben saw his brother rising, not quite knocking over his little desk--"sir, may I ask a favor?"

Mr. Hibbs' lank features froze, but not completely. "Yes, my boy?"

"Last night, sir, I wrote out a translation of the lines in _De Finibus_ that you assigned us for this afternoon. I--wished to know if I could do so without aid. I mean, sir--Ru hath helped me often at other times, being swifter at these things, so I--so I didn't tell him of it. And if it be satisfactory, Mr. Hibbs, may I go to Boston this afternoon?"

Mr. Hibbs stared at the paper Ben handed him, like a man hit by a chunk of firewood. "Done without aid, ha?"

"It was, sir. I even waited till Ru was asleep, for fear I'd give up and ask him for help after all."

Reuben gazed deeply into the swirling black midgets that had been the text of Ovid; he instructed himself: _It doesn't matter. It does not matter. Seeing that he will go--_

"No objection," Mr. Hibbs was saying vacantly--"no objection to the two of you helping each other: I expect it and you profit by it, but I can see, I understand, Benjamin, I--uh--commend your industry and the sentiment that must have prompted it." His voice trailed away under the threat of another sneeze, and Reuben knew that he must speak.

"It's quite true, Mr. Hibbs. I knew nothing of it till just now." _Was that good enough? Did I snarl, or squeak?..._

"Of course. This translation is--not bad, Benjamin. Some errors, but nothing that cannot be caught up--uh--tomorrow. I'm assuming your great-uncle hath nothing against it, or you would mention it, being"--the sneeze arrived and passed on--"being an honorable boy. Yes, you may have the afternoon. No precedent, of course."

"I understand that, sir, and thank you."

There was grammar, there was logic, there were Greek verbs, there was in the air a warm premonition of luncheon. Mr. Hibbs tucked his books under his arm and marched upstairs, where he would allow himself a five-minute meditation before the meal. He was willing to explain this exercise without embarrassment. It was not the same as prayer, but a contemplation of nothing, a device for clearing his mind of trivia in the hope of perceiving a moment of truth.... "Ru, why don't you come too? You could easy catch up the work if he gives you the afternoon, and he would--for all his barking you know you can twist him any way you please."

"No, bub," said Reuben lightly--but he was afraid to look up from his desk at the puzzled kindness he knew he would see. "There'll be a tag end of the afternoon when Pontifex hath done his worst, and I--wish to do something else."

"Something else?"

"Oh, I--nothing too important."

Ben looked hurt. "About the Cicero--haven't I leaned on thee too much, Ru? I never did think to wound thee, doing that."

"I'm not wounded! I"--_careful, Ru Cory!_--"I commend your industry."

"Ru!"

"I'm sorry. About this afternoon--you remember Mr. Welland?"

"Welland? Oh, the doctor?"

"Yes, I--he knows so much--I met him by chance the other day, when you was in Boston----"

It was no use. What had seemed clear a little while ago, a lamp in a parting of the mist, was now once more submerged in fog, and Reuben lost his way in a tangle of half-exasperated words, trying to reassure Ben that a wish to see Mr. Welland had nothing whatever to do with being ill.

* * * * *

Older and neater than neighboring houses, the Jenks house was shielded from them by a coach house, and on the other side by a small fenced-in garden. Such aloofness would not save it if flames like those of 1679 or '91 ever raged into this western quarter of the city, where many still owned the forbidden wood-framed chimneys and hoped for the best. Fires in the past had usually started near the docks. That might be the reason why Captain Jenks wished to keep the breadth of the town between him and the ships that were his daily bread.

Approaching the house, Ben had been sharply aware of second-floor windows, feeling eyes in a way remarkably like fright if only it weren't absurd to be frightened at calling on a girl. Now he held back his hand from the knocker, studying the garden with unstable dignity, suppressing a hope that nobody was at home. He admired the grape arbor, enlivened already by a white and brown of buds, and noted here and there the brave glow of daffodils. Flagstone walks suggested a trust in permanence.

He remembered other doorways, how they had stood between him and the unknown. Three years ago one had opened, himself and Reuben standing in rags on the threshold and unable to speak at all to the face with owl-tufts, for John Kenny had answered the door himself, looking down his nose. "To what have I the honor--oh, my soul! Your mother's look, the both of you--come in out of the cold!" Not until hours later, when they were washed and fed and settled in the room where they now lived, did John Kenny speak of his sister's letter announcing their tragic death in the jaws of the beast, a passing hard example of the infinite wisdom of God. He had answered the letter, he said, with the proper sentiments. Very much later, weeks later, Mr. Kenny's own conscience moved him to write another letter even more stately, explaining that the boys appeared to be abundantly alive and would remain with him until of man's years. This letter was never answered by Rachel Cory; after three years, it seemed unlikely that it ever would be. That doorway had opened on years of change, as all years are, but Ben held a private notion that the century really turned then, in March of 1704: for himself and Reuben an end to flame and trouble except for whatever stirred within--and this only natural, since any boy or man is a volcano with a thin crust and knows it.

Ben sounded the knocker. Now he must remember to take off his hat after the door opened, not before--supposing it ever did.

It opened. In Puritan gray and white, she of the brown face was regarding him with amiable recognition. Ben had started to claw his hat at the first rattle of the latch; he checked that, and was now able to remove it, not gracefully but at least without dropping it on her shoes. All this the slave girl observed with calm, secure in cool gravity, a well-trained servant waiting for him to speak, but there could be no doubt about that flash of welcome. "Mistress Faith Jenks--is she at home?" He spoke so softly he could hardly hear the noise himself.

"I think so, sir." Again a sparkle shared, as if she had said aloud: "Of course she is, Ben Cory of Deerfield, but I must make a show of going to find out." In her actually spoken words Ben heard a puzzling foreign quality: the _th_ was almost a _t_. "Will you come in, Mr. Cory, the while I inquire?" The foreign stress altered his name to something like Cor_ee_. But she did remember him, name and all.

Clarissa showed him through the entry--he knocked over no furniture--into a parlor dim with heavy drapes at the windows such as Ben had never seen. Mr. Kenny liked his windows casually plain to the world. Clarissa moved to the drapes with the grace of a wild being incapable of clumsiness. She said: "Let's have more light."

"Thank you," Ben said. She glanced at him quickly, startled maybe by the thanks, then flung the cloth open and lingered briefly, a golden hand raised to the drapery, the round of her cheek lovable in the sun.

Ben realized he was rudely staring, in a sudden loss of blindness. He automatically damned himself for shameful thoughts--he came here to call respectfully on _Faith Jenks_!--not to yearn and lust after a slave wench who doubtless owned not even a last name. In his confusion he could no longer look at Clarissa. He heard her murmur some pleasant word about sitting down and making himself at ease. She was gone, and the room cold.

Clarissa's hand--now Ben could not even scold himself. He could not escape the sweetness of a golden hand, pink-palmed, shining in sunlight as a part of sunlight.

Seated and short of breath he tried furtively to clean an over-looked fingernail with a thumbnail, an operation tinged with futility. On the wall a sampler confronted him, not very well made--Kate would have sniffed--asserting: _And thine ears shall hear a voice behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. Isaiah, xxx; 21._ Ben Cory ventured a modest alteration in the angle of his chair.

He remembered he did not know the religion of the Jenks family; had stupidly failed to inquire about it of Uncle John. What if Faith were strongly devout?--it was likely. What if she discovered with shock that he had not seen the inside of a meeting-house since coming to Roxbury?... He fretted at the fingernail, borrowing trouble. Could a man dissemble, hiding essential doubts from a woman if he loved her? Shabby bargain: for my pretense, your love. He gave up the fingernail as a lost cause, and begged the moral dilemma to go away a while.

Slowly, as it may dawn on a wanderer in the forest that he is under examination from a thicket by the feral unconciliating eyes of a Something--bear, catamount, Indian, he doesn't know, doesn't exactly wish to know--so it dawned on Ben that he was being studied from the hallway, in perfect silence, by a square lump of girl and a smaller lump of yellowish dog.

Following her inclinations, the mother of Charity's dog might have conceived and born a spaniel, but she must have been tempted by the Devil in the shape of a terrier. The snuff-colored result had been amended by years of overeating into a hairy sausage too close to the floor. His silky ears were tolerable spaniel, his eyes all spaniel in foolish sadness, blurred in the iris like some old human eyes. When Ben smiled, a wag disturbed the squirrely tail; he shambled up to analyze the smell of Ben's feet and pronounce it fair. Charity nodded. "He worships you. I foresaw it plain. Most uncommon for Sultan to worship anyone."

Ben studied Sultan in some alarm. He was lying on Ben's shoes, true, but it looked more like sleep than worship. "Often he growls with menace"--Charity approached, awkward in a shapeless brown frock that did her no good--"the which he was prepared to do when we ambushed you."

"I'd've gone straight up in the air. A perfect ambush."

Charity planted her feet far apart and hid her hands behind her back. "Did you play Inj'an when you was young?"

"Oh, I did, Mistress Charity, my brother and I. Used to sneak off to the woods where we were forbidden to go, which was wrong of us."

"Why?"

"The woods were dangerous--real Inj'ans."

"I've seen real ones--not wild, though." She came nearer, not by walking but by a side-to-side evolution of spread feet, carrying her like a statue on small wheels. "Christian Indians, talked English all piggedy-gulp."

"I remember an old Indian at Deerfield, supposed to be a Christian. A Pocumtuck. Wore a cast-off bodice for a breechclout, and was alway----" Ben remembered the failing of Captain Jenks--"was alway a little foolish."

"Faith is dressing her hair different, the which you're obliged to notice or she'll be in a taking, the which I think is poo."

"I'll be sure to notice it, Mistress Charity."

"Be you"--Charity jerked her head; upstairs Ben could hear a muted ripple of women's voices--"in love with _her_?"

Ben evaded. "Charity, I've met her but the once."

No good. "I thought a person alway knew."

"Oh--maybe they do and I'm just foolish."

"I guess you are, but very wonderful."

Maneuvered thus against a lee shore with the broadside raking him from bow to stern, Ben mumbled: "'Deed I'm not."

"Not poo," said Charity, sinking him....

"Do you go often to church, Mistress Charity?"

"We're Church of England."

"Oh, so was my mother."

"Then a'n't you too?"

"Well--my father was not a member of the congregation at Deerfield, and my Uncle John is not a churchgoer, nor--nor am I."

"Um. Thought everyone was obliged to go."

"My Uncle John says it was so, years past. Now, if everyone went there wouldn't be meeting-houses to hold 'em.... Do you like going?"

"Mr. Binyon was very wonderful."

"He is--no longer with you?"

Charity shook her head and sighed. "I do treasure his memory. He thundered, as with the voice of many waters."

"He--uh--died?"

"Nay, he went back to England. Later they said his steps went down unto the--that is, he joined--well, somebody. I don't just know. Mr. Mitching is not wonderful. He whuffles. In fact he is...."

"Poo?"

Charity came quite close, and seemed perilously near to smiling. "_You_ said that--but I'll never tell. Nay, I do hold in my heart many things that Mr. Binyon--thundered--but mustn't speak of him, and yet I do sometimes, because everyone says I own the nature of a heedless brat."

"I don't say so."

"You are different. Mr. Binyon spoke as with the voice of angels. Somebody said he was forty--he didn't look so terrible old.... Were all your people killed at Deerfield, Mr. Cory?"

"My father and mother. My brother escaped, with me. He's fifteen now, and I'm seventeen. And you?"

"Thirteen in May. A sad time--nobody will ever listen."

"You don't mean you're going to be thirteen forever?"

"Do not be poo...."

"He's a much better student than I, Reuben is."

"I can read, by the way.... Was your mother very beautiful?"

"Why--yes, Charity, she was. Everyone should be able to read."

"I thought so because you are beautiful."

"Now, Charity! You ought not----"

"I know. Alway, everything wrong."

"Not that, but--oh, never mind.... What do you like to read?"

"Not romances. Faith reads those, by the way."

"I've read but a few." In Mr. Kenny's helter-skelter library, Ben had had a glimpse of Aphra Behn and her long-winded imitators; he had rather enjoyed the swashbuckling of _Oroonoko_. "Our tutor keeps us so hard pressed with the classics we can't read much else."

"Um ... Mr. Cory, is it true that swallows spend the winter at the bottom of frozen ponds and streams all naked of any feathers?"

"Nay, I've heard that but don't believe it. They must go south like so many others and return in the spring."

"Um. All the same I drew a picture of some of them under the water all naked of any feathers, and another on the brink--he hath just risen and put his feathers on again." She gulped and stuck out a blunt jaw. "I draw many pictures, when I ought to be sewing. I like cooking if I can cook what I like."

"But sewing is poo?"

"You too would think so, had you been obliged to do it. Would you wish to behold the picture I made of swallows under the water all naked of any feathers and one on the brink?"

"Yes, I would, Charity."

She whirled like a doll on a revolving pole and marched away. Sultan moaned and followed, a slave to duty with a backward glance of apology.

Ben heard other footsteps and rose, too soon, and bowed--too soon, so that he was bent in the middle when Faith entered, grave and shining and young, preceded by the bulk of Madam Prudence Jenks, who clearly did not expect a hand to be kissed or shaken but held both pale things curled below the twin billows of her bosom and entered the room thus, rather like an angel looking for breakfast, and allowed Faith to help her into a chair, and loomed in it, rather like an angel disappointed but willing to wait. "'Tis most agreeable of you, Mr. Carey, to call upon us in our simple afflicted seclusion."

Uncle John hadn't mentioned that the Jenks family was secluded, afflicted, or simple. The drowned gaze of Madam Jenks suggested she had risen from a rest of ages under water, for the purpose (imposed on her by others) of viewing Benjamin Cory; if he proved not too detestably in need of correction, she might submerge. Ben mumbled how happy he was to meet her. For all their damp opacity, her prominent eyes were not at all blind.

Faith's gold-brown hair lay in soft spirals above her ears; on the coils rested a cap, no such cap as Puritan custom approved but a trifle of frivolous lace--the Mathers would have hated it as one of the stigmata of popery. Her dress today was dead-leaf brown. To Ben it looked uncomplicated and demure, its very plainness encouraging the eye to rejoice in what it held. Surely _she_ could never become gross and overblown, the damask fading to an underwater bleach, dugs swollen to down pillows!

"How charmingly you've done your hair, Mistress Faith!"

"Oh, la, thank you, sir--I merely toss it together so to have it out of the way." (And thank _you_, Charity!) Hands chastely folded, Faith watched him with unmistakable radiance; as Ben dared to meet her eyes she blinked both of them. Ben's heart floated over shining fields. He must have said the right thing. In fact, as matters looked now he could perfectly well sit down; it might even be expected of him.

With larger sternness Madam Jenks repeated: "Most kind of you to call, Mr. Carey, seeing we have not been much about since our loss, the which one must suffer with fortitude required of us by the Lord in his infinite mercy, very kind of you." A parchment contraption appeared magically in her hand; she fanned the pallid orb of her face in a motion grave and hypnotic.

Faith patted her mother's arm where folds of baby-creases narrowed to a tiny wrist. "Mama, I think Mr. Cory never met Uncle James." Faith's charming double wink instructed Ben not to be even slightly dismayed by sudden Uncle James: she would see him through.

A red enameled comb projected from Madam Jenks' tight-bound hair like the comb of a hen, bobbing so unstably that Ben's anxiety climbed notch after notch. "He did not know James?" Madam Jenks shook her head, but nothing happened. "A pity, seeing he was ever a worthy influence to young and old and would have profited much by knowing him, but God disposes." Pronouns, Ben noted, counted for no more than ripples, to be brushed aside by the lady under full sail. Solidly abeam of him, cutting his wind and threatening to broach him just when he was trying to claw off to windward, she seemed to be conveying a message: that Benjamin Cory or Carey must have found it extraordinary difficult to maintain the Christian virtues with no assistance from Uncle James.

"My father's brother-in-law," Faith interpreted. "He died last year, Mr. Cory. Mamma thought you might have met him."

"Hadn't the honor, ma'am. I'm sorry to learn of your affliction."

"He resteth in the Lord," said the fat woman, and beamed. "Lived in Cambridge. I trust your grandfather is well?"

"Yes, ma'am, very well these days." (What was the use?)

"I join you, Mr. Carey, in praising, for that mercy, the Dispenser of All Things." Madam Jenks went on to pronounce the weather changeable; Ben agreed; Faith expressed intelligent neutrality. Small silence spread like a blot of ink.... "I understand you intend going to the college this year, Mr. Carey?"

"Yes, ma'am, my brother and I."

"Preparing for the ministry, I presume?"

"Neither of us would appear to have the call, Madam Jenks."

"Indeed.... Do you enjoy the Boston air?"

"I don't think I've ever heard it, ma'am."

"Your pardon, sir?"

"Nay, I--beg _your_ pardon--I must have misunderstood."

"My inquiry was in reference to the Boston air. Do you enjoy it?"

"Oh, very much...."

By some transition which Ben heard but didn't understand--the instant of kaleidoscopic shift was blurred for him by a gleam of merriment in Faith--Madam Jenks was comparing cats and dogs. "'Tis true a cat is a tidy beast and of value if she be a good mouser, but one can feel no affection for them."

"Why," said Ben, "our big yellow cat----"

"They are treacherous," said Madam Jenks. The comb was rising. "Now a dog is a faithful animal instant ever to his master's needs, for it would appear the Lord hath prepared him for the service of man, and I am trying, Faith, to recall the name of a small dog Mr. Jenks owned, you must remember: I mean the one that was two before Sultan, or was it three?--with a white ear."

"You must be thinking of Prince, Mama."

"No, my dear, seeing that Prince was the one that fell down the well, and Goodman Jennison spent the better part of a forenoon attempting to rescue the poor brute and had no white ear to be sure."

"Rags?"

"Faith, Rags was black, and was given to us by Mr. Riggs when his good wife was taken to the Lord, and was obliged for business reasons to go to Newport for some weeks, and certainly had no white ear, and was indeed rather ill-natured, in fact we were obliged to give him away, since he did not return from Newport until some damage had already been done to Goody Jennison's herb garden, the which I regret."

Ben wondered how long Charity had been standing in the hallway, a paper clasped to her square breast and Sultan lying on her shoes. She might have been waiting for Ben to smile, since when he did she dislodged the dog with a backward step and brought him the paper, ignoring her elders.

"My word, Charity!" Faith spoke kindly. "Mr. Cory doesn't wish to look at pictures."

"He told me he did," said Charity flatly, and laid the paper on Ben's knee, leaning close. "This be the one with feathers restored."

"Oh, I see." Confusedly, Ben saw more than that. It had never occurred to him that lines of ink on paper could move and sing. A stream glittered with fragmented ice. Ben could feel the vulnerable pride of the swallow twitching a pert forked tail, tilting a round head toward distant cloud. And how should Charity have made him actually hear the slow yielding of a brook to the coming of spring? Those naked things huddled under the water--swallows maybe, or squirming babies, ambiguous, blind. The eye clung to them, not in laughter.

"Charity," said Madam Jenks, "I believe Mr. Carey would prefer to look at pictures another time."

Charity tried to ignore that. In nearness she was all little-girl softness and warmth, electric. Little?--thirteen.

"Charity," said Madam Jenks, "go and aid Clarissa with the refreshments. You should have remembered it before."

Ben blurted: "Charity, this is beautiful."

"Charity," said Madam Jenks.

Charity inhaled carefully. "Very well, Mama, I will leave the room."

The red comb popped. Ben had been half-prepared for that, and for the deferential scramble he now performed. Under cover of the commotion Charity vanished with the picture, Sultan gloomily following.

"Thankful heart!" The comb restored, Madam Jenks fanned herself. "Ah well, a difficult time of life I suppose. You have no idea, Mr. Carey, the hours of grief and dismay, I have sought guidance on my knees, the which she'll be the death of me yet considering the palpitations of my heart, nevertheless when the Lord calls me to my long home I shall certainly go."

"Mama!" Faith murmured. "I'm sure in a few years she'll learn poise and manners. 'Tis only a passing thing. Why, when I was her age I'm sure I was difficult too."

"Nay, my darling, never intractable, never strange, alway a consolation to me. Faith is my great comfort, Mr. Carey, you've no idea."

"I'm sorry she plagued you, Mr. Cory."

"But--truly she didn't. Anyway, that picture--"

"Art," said Madam Jenks sadly. "When I think how Mr. Jenks and I have striven to teach her womanly ways, and all to no purpose, and then such dreadful passion if she be crossed in the lightest particular, even in these trivial childish notions of art, the which she could not have got it from Mr. Jenks or myself, good heavens!"

Charity said from the doorway: "I heard that." Sultan had given up trying to sleep; he leaned against her leg and whined.

"Oh, Charity, Charity--I suppose you never even went near the kitchen to help Clarissa."

Charity's square face had gone dull red to the eyelids. "She said she had no need of me. Mama, I brought that picture to Mr. Cory because he did ask to see it."

The red comb popped. Ben gathered it up again, but could not immediately return it, for Madam Jenks needed all her powers for speech. "I should have supposed, Charity, that at your years you might have acquired some trace of manners if not of gratitude, the which I do not ask although a child of thirteen is certainly capable, and never no unjust correction nor harsh words if not wholly yielded up to depravity, the which----"

"Mama, I am becoming exceedingly wrathful."

"Charity," said Madam Jenks, "we will _not_ have one of your Times. I forbid it. Go to your room, after all the effort your father and I have made, and that continually."

"Don't you bring Papa into it and him lying up there dead to the world!"

"_Charity!_" That was Faith, rising, then kneeling quickly by her mother, whose round face had gone gray as ash.

"I will go away forever," said Charity in a sudden loud rage of tears. "Even as Mr. Binyon. I tell you my steps will go down unto the Whore of Babylon!"

* * * * *

"Reuben, I've thought occasionally that the game hath something in common with the course of living. The opening--that's a preparation like youth, and I alway thought, if a chess player might truly understand the opening no other player could defeat him--a'n't that so? Still, it is too complex, the possibilities too near to infinite, for any mind to hold 'em all, and so the best of players will inevitably fumble the opening, at least a little, missing some bright opportunities, the result a compromise with what might have been. Then the middle game--action, struggle, changes of fortune, more opportunities lost, and a few fairly grasped at the just moment."

"I believe I like that, Mr. Welland. And the end game?"

"The end game, if one may arrive at it--some die young, you know, some from a Fool's Mate, or blind chance may overset the board--but if one may arrive--oh dear! Oh dear me! That knight, through my poor wall of pawns--dare say it's all up with me. I will try this. What next?"

"This, sir. You left a hole for my Bishop too."

"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 Pawn 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 reassuring 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 assume that appearance of godly 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 Whore 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 pronouns, 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 classic 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 passage 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 titles 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 nobly 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 embarrassed 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 shit?"

"Thrive on it," said Ben, and snapped a finger at his hatbrim affectionately, and walked away with his parcel, curiously happy.

On King Street the water-front smells thickened. Ben turned into Fish Street where they became a miasma, but dominant always was the salt cleanness of the sea. Here a few sodden faces appraised Ben's good clothes and youthful slimness, as if debating how much the garments might fetch, supposing he were dragged down an alley, coshed, and stripped. Ben missed his knife, which he seldom wore nowadays, admitting that it would never have done to wear it for his call at the Jenks house. No one offered him any trouble; that might have been different at a later hour, when the widely separated lamps would do no more than emphasize the blackness.

_Artemis_ rested high in the water, unloading done, her new cargo not yet aboard, her empty rigging lonely against the late sky. Debating whether to go up the plank, oppressed by a shyness of inexperience, Ben heard some stir of leisured voices below the forward hatch. "... opportunity, for a man like yourself...." The words received some grumbled answer. Ben wandered away disconsolate to perch on a mooring-post and argue that there was no reason at all why he shouldn't go aboard. The last of the sunlight dissolved in a thickening of cloud-wrack on the horizon; a small southerly breeze was shifting to the eastern quarter when an ancient tricorne hat appeared over the side--Mr. Shawn about to step ashore, frowning a moment at sight of Ben, but relaxing at once and smiling, coming to sink in an easy squat by the mooring-post, careless of the old green coat that settled around his feet. "I'm after passing the time with the watchman, wishing I could make the man talk of something but fish. O to listen to the long Gloucester face of him, and he with scarce a sight of Gloucester the twenty years past by his own telling!" Shawn's knife gouged a splinter from the planking and went to whittling under big knowing hands. "Will it be a truce to studies, Mr. Cory?"

"A short one, sir. Mr. Hibbs gave me the afternoon."

One end of the sliver grew to a delicate fishtail. "Boy--look at that bowsprit line. Mother of God, will your mind's eye see her under a fair wind?--a following wind, say, to belly that fores'l, to make her lean toward the faraway like the goddess she is, man? Do you see it?"

"I think I do. I've never been under sail, Mr. Shawn."

"You will, one day."

"It seems not to be my great-uncle's wish."

"Then maybe not till it's you with the full years of a man, but you'll be going." Shawn frowned at the shape growing under his fingers as if he faced a strong light but would not turn away. "Maybe it'll destroy you, maybe not, but whatever time you'll be going, and you that young, why, Beneen--may I call you so?--you'll see places I'll never live to see at all, now that's no lie."

"May I ask, have you spoken to Mr. Jenks, about that matter you mentioned to my great-uncle?"

"Faith, I've not had opportunity." Shawn smiled at his sliver, where now grew a rounded head and the suggestion of a face, and his knife defined deep curves of female waist and hips. "Indisposed he hath been, and not receiving visitors." Shawn drooped an eyelid. "From the little black wench I understood the condition might continue to prevail."

To Ben that seemed not funny but unkind. "Uncle John told me the Captain never drinks at sea."

Ben knew he was being studied from under lowered brows. "I meant no disparagement. May I ask what years you have itself?"

"I am seventeen, sir--last February."

"And I thinking you nearer twenty." Shawn whittled with tiny careful strokes. "Parents not living?"

"They were both killed in the French attack on Deerfield."

"Forgive my blundering! I remember hearing about Deerfield, in London. 1704 surely, and I navigator of a Dutch brig in the spring of that year, homeward bound out of the Moluccas for Amsterdam, where I left her and so to London, and was the long time cooling my heels waiting a passage for these colonies, with a thought of settling here--a'n't it the laughable way of a man never to know himself at all? I'll never settle, nowhere. In less than a month I was hunting another berth, and do be still hunting. I'll never settle anywhere till I die, and won't that be under the salt water where nothing marks the place a man's vanity ended?... Killed by the savages?"

"My mother was. It was a French officer shot my father."

"And such is war," said Shawn; the mermaid sagged in his hand. "Wars, wars, and all the time the world scarce explored! War was never no profit to a living soul, Beneen, unless it might be a king or a priest." Mr. Shawn spat off the wharf. Ben was confused, that in the moment when Shawn spoke out against the cruelties of mankind his face should be showing the color of some kind of hatred.

"Well, sir, we can hardly permit the French Louis to become master of all Europe, so to harry us and drive us out of this land too, as his forces in Canada have attempted continually."

The Irishman shrugged, watching the bay. "Canada, the way I hear, is a handful of frightened papists in a wilderness. As for the Sun King Louis, I saw him once. Six years past, before the war was renewed--the Treaty of Ryswick accomplished nothing, you'll understand, a patching-up, a pause for the licking of wounds, and so you may say 'tis all one war, and I happening to be in Paris when his solar bloody Majesty made a gracious appearance unto the multitude, I beheld a trembling dried-up monkey in velvet. That minikin shivering old man, that homunculus, that thing, master of Europe and the West? Don't they tell he's not even master of his own bowels? Faith, when he dies his empire will be crumbling like a child's mud castle in the rain as others have done before, and England would do better to wait for it, but not so, the armies and navies must be employed and good men die to no purpose, anyway that's the opinion of one mad Irishman," said Shawn, and smiled with sudden brilliance. A twist of the knife gave the mermaid a pretty navel; he held her away for admiration. "O the anatomical enigmas of the mermaid!--hey? I wonder could there be word of her in Physiologus?... Will you be in haste to return home?"

"No great haste." But with the words, Ben realized he ought to be. The sun was behind the rooftops, the wind sharp easterly.

"Would you dine with me, Ben?--that is," he asked again, "may I call you so and no offense?"

"Of course, Mr. Shawn."

"That's kind. I dread a lonely evening, now that's no lie."

Ben was startled, having meant only to agree to the use of his first name, for which Mr. Shawn hardly needed permission. Well--might not Uncle John suppose he had been invited to dine at the Jenks house, and so not be troubled? It would mean walking that ugly mile of the Roxbury road after dark, but there would be a moon later, if the deepening clouds did not interfere. Mr. Shawn was already speaking of a tavern on Ship Street. "The Lion they call it, nothing so fine, but I fear, Beneen, I am not dressed for a finer place. Hi!--that wind's pure easterly, and will that be meaning rain by morning in this part of the world?"

"Sometimes," Ben said, and discovered he was cold.

"Let us go...."

The Lion tavern consisted of one long narrow room, filled with the reek of malt, sweat, clay pipes, rummy breath, wood smoke. A line of small tables on one side was divided by a poorly drawing fireplace; on the other side of the room a bar ran from the kitchen door to a grimy window, and the smeary glass denied all memory of daylight. Pine knots sputtered above the fireplace; a lantern on the bar added more smoke but no light worth the name. Shawn chose a table within spitting distance of the hearth, ignoring two shabby customers who were exchanging an aimless rambling conversation at the bar.

At the table farthest to the rear, dark as the smoke and like a part of it, a thin man with a black patch on one eye sat by himself, smiling. Before him stood a dirty trencher with the remains of supper, and a pewter mug. He sprawled with elbows hooked on the back of his chair, arms dangling, so quiet he might have been asleep, but the one good eye was open wide and one does not sleep with a frozen smile. When the eye moved to examine Ben and Shawn with no sign of interest, the rest of his face took no part in the act.

An ancient waiter who knew Shawn by name was mumbling a good evening, flicking a rag at the table, his warty face darkened like a ham hung a long time on a rafter. Shawn seemed quite at home; after some unease, Ben found his own lungs could adjust to the haze.

Shawn approached the roast beef, which was not bad, like a man with a week's hunger. Ben finished his first mug of ale quickly, for it helped him avoid coughing; the influence of it softened the sordidness of this place; as the mug was refilled, Ben wondered why anything here should have troubled him--honest working-man's tavern, and Daniel Shawn the prince of good fellows. As for the one-eyed half-corpse, one needn't look....

Shawn's manners, he noticed, were not quite those of Mr. Kenny's house. Holding down the meat with his spoon, Shawn cut it in curiously small pieces, and often used the knife to carry them to his mouth, instead of his fingers. It looked dangerous, for the knife was sharp. Afterward Shawn took pains to clean his fingers on a kerchief from his pocket. Privately consulting his wallet for reassurance, Ben ordered a third round of ale. Mr. Shawn was touched and pleased.

He drank Ben's health. He told two or three bawdy anecdotes, large voice intimately lowered; Ben laughed in delight and forgot them at once, which annoyed him. He discovered he was lifting his mug and drinking to the hope that Mr. Shawn would secure a berth with _Artemis_.

"O the warm heart of youth!" said Shawn, and looked away. "But Beneen, you must not feel obliged to speak of that to your great-uncle."

"But of course I will!" Softness, Ben thought--he is without it. Even now, when Mr. Shawn was manifestly touched and pleased, the brilliance of his look, his friendship, made Ben think of the spurting of light from the diamond thumb-ring Uncle John occasionally wore, or the stark gleam of sun on snow. Wondering whether the sea took all softness from a man, wondering also as he drank whether such an event ought to be called good or bad, Ben understood that Shawn was saying something more he ought to hear and remember.

"Isn't it the strange thing how from all the ruck, all the thousands, millions of humankind, explorers are so few? Why, you may name all the great ones on the fingers of one hand."

"So few as that?"

"Cabot, Columbus, Magellan, maybe Drake, maybe the both hands. And all the South Pacific lies there unseen, untraveled--nothing but a waste of water? I'll not believe that, when there's room for a continent greater than this one, or a thousand islands larger than mine own motherland."

It was music, and what little music he had heard had always troubled Ben, as a voice whose words could never be wholly translated. For all the pure pleasure, that had been so in those distant hours with Uncle Zebina Pownal. "I suppose, Mr. Shawn, some day every least corner of the world will be explored."

"Ha?... Not in my time nor yours. Now that troubles me, Beneen. It's the clear plain thing what you say, but d'you know I never had the thought myself? No more horizons--O the sad earth!... Man dear, I'm wishing you'd not said that."

"I suppose they who live in that day will be otherwise concerned."

"Most are now, the way explorers are few...."

The dirty trencher had been removed from in front of the one-eyed man, and his mug refilled. He must have drunk from it, for a bit of foam clung near his bleak smile and was drying there, as if someone had spat on a statue. Ben hitched his chair sideways, the better to avoid looking at him, and glanced at the bar, knowing the ale had made him foolishly drowsy.

Two newcomers had arrived. Ben was obliged to stare, then understood he should have recognized them in an instant without need of thought. ("_'Tis a matter of being your own man...._") That was Jan Dyckman over there, big and blond and mild, drinking rum with the round-headed greasy bosun Tom Ball. Ben leaned across the table in a generous glow. "Do you know Mr. Dyckman?"

Shawn shook his head, deep in revery. "By sight only."

"I could present you. Maybe a word from him would be of use?"

Shawn shook his head again and murmured: "The thought is kind, but look again, the way the time's inauspicious. Mr. Dyckman is the worse for drink, Beneen. Some other time."

Ben looked again, astonished, to find Jan Dyckman gazing directly at him without recognition, eyes rigid and damp. The eyes moved jerkily away and with dignity viewed a coin that Mr. Dyckman would have liked to raise from a wet spot on the bar. He must have been drinking elsewhere, to be so far gone. Abruptly Shawn was asking: "Have you ever had a woman?"

"Why, no, I--no, Mr. Shawn."

"And don't I remember that time of life, the ache of it? Ah, steady as she goes!--the fear too, boy, but devil any need of that. I'll take you to a house, and you agreeing."

"I--don't know. I suppose I ought to start soon for home."

Shawn seemed not to hear. "It's orderly is the place I'm thinking of, above a cordwainer's on Fish Street and next door to a grog shop, the which is convenient. Four girls and the madam--O the fine flow of conversation in her cups! She's that rambling you wouldn't know the thing she'd say. I'd have you hear how she was betrayed by an earl in London town, the way I'm thinking she was never no closer to England than a comfortable pile of sacking, maybe forninst a warehouse on one of the wharfs out yonder, but it's the fair fine tale." Ben fidgeted. "As for the rest, Beneen, a stallion will need but a moment to cover a willing mare, and in such a house they are willing. I recall a half-ugly wench who would be doing anything you like at all." Shawn laid a finger along his old-ivory pockmarked nose and smiled diamond-like. "I had her once--wasn't it like sinking into a warm dumpling fresh from the oven? One of the others is handsome but cowlike--I'm a-mind to try her, though I fear she'll be watching a spot on the ceiling and do no more for a man's entertainment than if he was a wind at the door."

Ben pressed damp hands on the table to check a shaking in them, knowing with exasperation that Shawn must have seen it. Vague sounds at the bar gave him an excuse to turn away. Tom Ball and Jan Dyckman were leaving, Dyckman moving like a giant wooden doll, every step a separate achievement. When at length Ben turned back it seemed to him--but everything now was confused, the ale in him mumbling I-will-I-will-not--it seemed to him that Daniel Shawn was settling in his chair as if he too had just swung about, or risen perhaps, resuming his former position in the same moment when the one-eyed scarecrow stood up (not drunk at all) and stalked in the wake of Ball and Dyckman out of the tavern.

As he passed Ben's table the thin man shot one downward glance. To Ben in the cold-hot worry of I-will-I-will-not it was like being jabbed by an icicle, and he could not even summon his wits to think about it, for Shawn was saying kindly: "It's the fresh air you need, Beneen, and I'm thinking of the old saying, a man's not quite a man till he's tried that bit of a doorway. So shall we go?"

* * * * *

Reuben left the cottage with the green shutters before the sun had entered the smudge of horizon clouds. He took the path across the back fields, his muscles lazy with the spring, his mind blazing.

Mr. Welland had not appeared surprised that Reuben should wish to study his art. He had not probed for motives; had not even inquired whether such ambition harmonized with Mr. Kenny's plans; had offered no large generalities of grave counsel. Alertness was the word: as though the doctor had caught something more than Reuben's words, and must listen sharply within his own universe to interpret the message.

Reuben had lived through a heavy time while Mr. Welland gazed at the completed chess game, his monkey face a stillness. Then--"Yes," said Mr. Welland, "you and I must be friends. Yet I have never taught...."

The doctor spent much time laying the chessmen away in their plain box, the stillness remaining, his lips pursed, a dim frown coming and going. He carried the box to a drawer of a battered cabinet, then stood before the single bookcase in his surgery, stoop-shouldered, elderly, pinching his small chin with thumb and forefinger. "Mm-yas--Vesalius. Not the most recent but still the best." He spread the tall book open on his desk. With the appearance of impatience he nodded for Reuben to come to him.

"This is a man," said Amadeus Welland. "You've glimpsed him, clad in garments, and in a skin--itself an organ of first importance, but forget it for the moment and look on him here, flayed. You can imagine, I suppose, what these are--these flowing, overlapping bands?"

"Muscles, surely?"

"Yes. Place your left hand by your right armpit, here, now draw your right arm leftward; what bunches under your fingers is this, here in the drawing, and the name of it is _Pectoralis major_, and you may find some little trouble in remembering it."

"I will try to remember it."

"I am glad you said 'try.' I have spent fifty-three years striving to overcome that vanity wherewith all men are born. You'll also try, and succeed, in remembering the names of all the other muscles in this drawing, and in this one where the fella turns you his flayed back, and in all these other drawings further on. You will reflect that muscles, while of major importance, are not more important than all the organs that live below them in their manifold occasions--since these also you must remember, all of them, their names, their functions so far as we know them, the many changes that will affect them in youth and age, sickness and health. Here, for example, is the diagram of the bony frame that bears us. When my own studies began I had first to learn these bones--all of them, naturally, their names, position, function whether in action or repose--mm-yas, as you will. I do recall my teacher once struck me across the face with a dry bone called the radius--this one--because I called it the ulna, for the which I later praised him--with reservations."

"Reservations, sir?"

"It was possible for him," said Mr. Welland lightly, and took snuff. "It would not be possible for me to strike--a student. Fi-_choo_-shoo! And here, sir, is a representation of the human heart...."

When Reuben next glanced at the clock in Mr. Welland's surgery, another hour had passed. "There will be times," said Mr. Welland, removing a gray cat from a cushion on a three-legged stool by the western window, where she had slept through the lesson, so that he might sit on the stool himself with the late sun behind his shoulder--"times, I guess, when your eyes grow tired in candlelight; other times when you'd much prefer to go outside and play--as you must do fairly often, but not of course at times when you're unable to remember, for example, _all_ the occasions when laudanum may be given and those when it may not. And so on, Reuben, and so on and so on--I've merely mentioned a few things that come first to mind," said Mr. Welland, and rubbed his eyes. Reuben could not see his face very clearly against the light....

Crossing the back fields, Reuben passed through a clump of trees, and from the other side could look across a better-known field to the roof of Mr. Kenny's house. He leaned against a beech, discovering that he was hungry, that it would be enjoyable to pester Kate for something unauthorized in advance of supper. The wind had shifted behind him, now easterly; the broad hard body of the beech was a friend.

There was too much: Reuben knew he could not immediately bring order to any such welter of new impressions and discoveries. Hungry, yes, but let that wait; and the questions about himself that he had timorously half-intended to ask Mr. Welland--let them wait too. Too much for now--like a runner exhausted, he must rest, and was even reluctant to go on to the house. Better for the moment only to stand here in the failing daylight, friendly with the beech and needing (for the moment!) no other friend.

Rising from that stool, disturbing the cat again and taking pencil and paper at his desk, Mr. Welland had made a few light loving strokes.

"You draw with great skill, sir."

"Thank you--practice. And this woman's breast I have drawn--beautiful, you would say?"

"Yes, it is."

"Yes, I should think so, to anyone, although I fear my poor sketch claims only accuracy and not art. But 'tis beautiful, as you say, the thing itself--maketh one to think of the lover's kiss, or of a child's mouth here drinking life." He began another drawing. "This is what I have seen not once but too many times, when this organ is afflicted with certain kinds of destroying tumor." Reuben watched, shaken and sickened but refusing to turn away until the doctor sat back from his desk, murmuring: "You understand, Mr. Cory, I am merely trying to frighten and demoralize you with selected scraps of truth."

"I killed a wolf once," said Reuben Cory, refusing to look away.

"Tell me of that."

Reuben told of it, reluctant to meet the doctor's look because of what the man had said a while ago about vanity, but finding no great difficulty in the telling. After all it was not brag. It had happened.

"I shall speak to Mr. Kenny," said Amadeus Welland. "Perhaps an apprenticeship? Or better a year or so of preparation, to determine for yourself if this be really what you wish, in such time as may be allowed from your other studies--which are not to be neglected, Reuben, not ever, you understand? Show me a man of medicine who hath found himself too busy for other fields of learning, and you will have shown me an educated damned fool."

"I can't----"

"Reuben, if thanks be appropriate, let them wait. I may have done thee no service. I have only pointed out one or two signposts on a most heartbreaking journey. But if that is the way you will go--I am fifty-three, Reuben, not very successful and not at all loved here in Roxbury--if that is the way you will go, I'll go with you as far as I may."

* * * * *

Ben Cory ducked his head to clear the doorframe, unused even yet to being rather tall, following Daniel Shawn with the precarious poise of a man of the world. The room in many ways resembled a cavern, its air stale-scented and much used, with bat-rustlings from other chambers. The shriveled woman squeezed his damp hands, twittering, her pink cheeks like summer apples as they look after a winter in the cellar, powdery and dull within but retaining a characteristic cloying sweetness. "Any friend of yours, Mr. Shawn--ooh, look at the great gray eyes of him!" Mistress Gundy patted the pleat of her lips every moment or two, maybe enjoying a silent burp. "What do I call you, dearie?" She trotted away with small bobbing steps, to plump into an armchair and smile and sigh. "Cat's got his tongue, la. So he loseth nothing else, no harm done, ha, Mr. Shawn? What do I call the pretty young gentleman that's lost his pretty tongue, Mr. Shawn? Won't have anything lost in _my_ place, and me trying so hard to keep everything agreeable, ha, Mr. Shawn?"

"Just Benjamin," said Shawn, and straddled a chair, watching the old woman with somber upturned eyes, a darkness in him. Ben thought, with alcoholic irrelevance, that if Shawn were to reach out and squash poor Mistress Gundy with a twist of a sailor's thumb, she would pop like any defenseless bug, but none of them need be astonished, Mistress Gundy least of all. But at one time she had been a child, a growing maid.... "Just Benjamin will do," said Shawn, and spat in the fireplace.

"Oh, marry will he, I'm sure." Mistress Gundy giggled and remained genteel.

"Anything new here, Nanny?"

"A'n't it alway new, Mr. Shawn?"

"That it is not, and never was unless maybe for Adam, the poor sod, and for a boy the first time but not the second. Nanny, I'm wanting Laura for the boy. For meself I don't care--anything that'll bear me weight a moment."

"_Mister_ Shawn, such a manner of conversation! Will you not mend, sir?" He only looked at her. "Well, Master Just Benjamin, dearie, Laura it shall be, and she so fresh and lovely, I'm sure, you'll be most content, I'm sure."

Ben cleared his throat, mindful of Shawn's rambling advice in the evening street. "Would you wish something to drink, Mistress Gundy, that we might have sent up from next door?"

"Nay, I knew he'd find it, and with pleasant speech!" She cut her eyes at Shawn to make that a reproach, but he was remote, observing only the embers, or the South Pacific. "Well, dearie, 'tis early on in the evening for it, but since you speak of it and so pleasantly, a trifle to wet the whistle would not go amiss." She patted her lips. "For my part, sir, ever since I resided in London I have been partial to a bit of hot buttered rum of a chilly evening, to settle the rifting-up and keep out the cold. It's the Boston air, sir. Never do I grow accustomed to it, that I never."

"Yes," said Ben.

"I'll send the servant," said Mistress Gundy, and rose, about to potter away.

"Do you send him," said Shawn to the embers, "but bring in the wenches before he returns, Nanny, else you'll be rambling on from here to hereafter and we biting the curbing of the stall, God damn it, with nothing to mount."

"Mr. Shawn, sir, one day your tongue'll turn and bite you, sir."

"Then I'll have thee kiss the place, old woman." She sidled for the doorway, out of reach of his lazy hand. "But wait till I bleed."

"I marvel the sweet young gentleman ever took up with you, sir, you that come in with a smile and stay with a curse."

"Took up with me to see a bit of the world, Nanny, the way the world's a troublesome thing for a boy to see at all and I'm part of it. Come give us a kiss!"

"You leave me tell you this: you mark one of my poor girls on the face just once, just once, Mr. Shawn----"

"And you'll have law on me belike?"

"Though it be the ruin o' me I'll say it: I think you're a wicked man, Mr. Shawn."

"But not on the face is well enough?"

"Mr. Shawn!"

"Come now, give us a kiss and be friends!"

Ben said involuntarily: "Don't, Mr. Shawn! Leave her alone!"

Shawn locked stares with him a moment, smiling, then spread his hands and folded them again on the chair back and dropped his jaw on them, watching the embers, alone on an island. Behind his back Mistress Gundy was beckoning, and Shawn paid no heed as Ben stepped into the hallway with her. "I don't suppose he means too much by his talk, Mistress Gundy."

"Eh? Known him long?"

"Not long, not very well.... I was astonished he should speak so."

She was sniffling, patting her lips. "Let it go." In spite of the small gust of tears she was alert and brisk. "Be you paying or him?"

"I am. How--how much?"

"Ho, and if he's not, how comes he to lay about him so?" She broke off, laughing indulgently. "Never thee mind, Master Just Benjamin. Two such lovely girls! Well now, if you're a-mind to buy us a wee trifle of rum--so pleasant with a dab of butter, don't you think?--and the girls...."

Ben re-entered the parlor with enlarged wisdom and a shrunken wallet. The books for Reuben, lying in a chair, comforted him: at least some of his money had been well spent.

"Don't allow her to rob you, a devil's name," said Shawn drowsily. "No highwayman liveth but could learn jolly tricks of a bawd."

Glancing down at the alien profile, wondering in passing whether he even liked Daniel Shawn, Ben felt disinclined to mention that the robbery, if that was the name for it, had already taken place. He jingled the few pence and farthings remaining, and waited, himself alone on an island within a cavern.

She entered abruptly with good-natured bounce and giggle, plump and moon-faced, smelling of rose-water and sweat. As she paused in the doorway her transparent smock offered Ben a silhouette of cushiony thighs, by her intent maybe, and then she was coming to him directly with nothing for Shawn but a glance that might or might not have held recognition. "There's the sweet cod," she said, and cupped Ben's chin in her hands, and was on his lap, heavy and squirming, elastic, moist and warm.

In Deerfield, "whore" was only a word, seldom used except in back-of-the-barn profanity or Bible readings. It had never occurred to Ben, but did now as Laura twitched his shirt open and rubbed a knowing silky hand over his nipples, that a whore might be a human being, and friendly.

Another girl, stately and yellow-haired, sat in dignity across the room from Shawn--surely not cowlike as he had said but quite beautiful in her stillness, conveying an impression that she was not really present. A woman on an island. Shawn had remained in his idle sprawl, studying the queenly repose of her like a man who might yawn any moment. "Be you pleased with me?" Laura whispered, and nibbled Ben's ear.

"Of course." With some enterprise he found a smooth kneecap and sent his hand exploring, since she seemed to expect it; and then he thought: Too much of that damned ale--or maybe I'm ill--and now we must even have buttered rum!

All the same, it was unmistakable relief when Mistress Gundy pottered back, ahead of a gangling servant with the drinks. "Well, I'm sure," said the little madam--"to the Queen, God bless her!"

Laura bounced off Ben's lap at the call of patriotism. The tall quiet girl was on her feet, and Shawn too. But as Ben staggered, finding his leg half asleep, and drank dutifully, he was aware of a sudden annoyance in Daniel Shawn, and saw how with the mug at his lips the man was hardly tilting it at all. To Ben it was obscure, a thing he might tell himself he had not seen. This stifling moment, with fat Laura's arm hugging his loins, held no fair opportunity to think about it. But surely for all his strange, sometimes cruel speech and wild ways, Mr. Shawn was not disloyal--surely nobody ever refused to drink the health of Queen Anne!

Ben coughed as the cheap rum bored down his gullet. He saw Shawn grab the wrist of the tall girl and stride out of the room with her, not a word for courtesy. She had not even finished her drink.

"A hard man," said Mistress Gundy, comfortably stirring her mug. "Well, I told him. Just let him mark one of my girls, just once...."

"He won't, Mother," said Laura. "Why, that time----" A sharp glance from the old woman checked her. It held more than sharpness; they were exchanging some wry understanding, and Ben was oppressed at feeling himself a patronized, tiresome child. Laura tugged amiably at his arm. "Come to my room, love?" He followed her jiggling rear down a whispering hallway to a smaller cavern of stale roses. She had brought along the remains of his buttered rum. "Old bawd'd finish it, did you leave it there. A'n't she a caution, love?"

"Mm." Ben gulped a little more of it, finding it not so bad. Here the bed was virtually everything, but Laura was fond of dolls; a dozen of them sat about in comical attitudes, and Ben would have liked to say something about them. "Help me drink it, won't you? I had enough."

"Nay, I had too, and too much." She patted her stomach and yawned. With the casualness of habit, she pulled her smock up to her middle and dropped on the bed, fat thighs comfortably wide.

Ben shoved his drink aside. In daydream, yes--he had pictured such mindless complaisance in a woman who never quite owned a face. The reality was no more voluptuous than a belch or a kick under the ribs. Yet Laura was neither gross nor unclean--indeed, pretty in her overblown way, and certainly friendly. Repelled and hypnotized, he stumbled toward her, meeting, across the bulk of her pink flesh, a drowsy smile that suppressed another yawn. "What's the matter, love? Be you afeared of me?"

"Of course not."

"Ah--sweet cod--my little goat--whatever's the matter, love?" Her voice was thick and slow, the noise of a wave, her giggle the idle foam on a reaching wave. "Don't you know nothing, little goat?"

Ben fought with his clothes. For an instant in the candlelight the hair was golden, not dark, the pallid skin a damask rose. Then it was fat Laura again, nobody else--writhing, arching her heaviness, moaning, big arms reaching for him in practised simulation of hunger as Ben groped, struggled, and spent at the instant of contact with no pleasure, no excitement but that of fear and no relief but that of exhaustion.

Laura cursed casually under her breath, but as she sat up she was not noticeably angry--more amused, maybe a little concerned. "First time, dearie?" Ben nodded in misery. "Ho, never mind! You're very young."

"God damn, I'm seventeen."

"Hey! No cursing and swearing, boy!--I can't abide it.... Did something happen maybe? You know--spill salt at supper? Something?" She was serious, lightly worried. Ben shook his head. "Why, there!" She pointed at his jacket tossed on a chair, a bit of his kerchief dangling from a pocket. "Swoonds, that's bad luck as ever was," she said, and rolled off the bed to push the kerchief out of sight. "No bloody wonder!"

Ben knew she would take great offense if he laughed. Anyway the darkness of a new fear was killing laughter. She sat by a little square of wall-mirror to put her hair to rights. Ben ordered his clothes, finding his legs too large, blurred, disobedient. Maybe the last of that buttered rum would steady him. He gulped it down. "I'm sorry," said Ben.

"Hoo, it's a nothing, boy, happens all the time. Come again some day," she said, and could not resist a small parting cruelty: "When you're old enough."

The darkness of the new fear followed him out of the room, and the name of it was Pox.

Mistress Gundy sat as before with her rum, or somebody's rum, and nodded to Ben, waving her puckered hand in some cryptic courtesy. Her eyes were swimming--sad or hilarious or both. Somewhere down the hallway a woman was whimpering rhythmically. "Top of the evening, young man. I'm bloody mellow." Mistress Gundy patted her lips. "Going so soon? Parcel's yonder, needn't make out I'm keeping a den of thieves."

"Thank you. Had no such thought."

"No dallying with Venus? Up and off like a little bull? I'm bloody mellow or I wouldn't speak so free, but I say a bit of broad speech never hurt no one, la, besides, I lived on a farm when I was a little maid. Lord, the Surrey countryside, and I'll never see it again!" She wept comfortably, and burped. "A'n't you waiting for your friend?"

"I must be going. Tell him I couldn't wait."

"Tsha!" She drank, her little finger thrust out for gentility. "Come again, do. I feel sorry for you. My weakness." She held up her free hand earnestly to detain him. "Understand? I feel like a mother to you, but you--you--you----"

"I must be going."

"That's right, boy, turn away from an old whore. You--you--have--not--got the least notion wha's like to be old and lorn and forsaken, every man's bloo' hand raised against you. Have you? Colonial. _You_ never saw no earl, not in this Godforsaken land, marry you never. Why, one of the particular maids to 'is lady I was, and he got it in a linen-closet, now that's no lie as your nasty-spoken Irish friend would say. Understand?--the very self-same sheets 'er ladyship slep' on, the mere smell of lavender can still set me a-thinking of it, and her playing cards only two rooms away, if I'd so much as whimpered he might've been caught what they call flagrant delicious, and you think I'd do any such of a thing, loyal as I was? It shows your God-damned bloody ignorance, all the same there was a time you wouldn't've turned away."

Ben fled downstairs. The smells in the blackness of Fish Street were fresher. He thought, as in prayer: No harm done. None at all, unless he had caught the pox. Probably you couldn't, just from that much.

He dropped Reuben's books, his clumsiness a warning that he was drunk, his head grown to a foggy region of rising and roaring waves. He searched patiently for the parcel, since nothing could be done or considered till he found it. Stooping caused a rush of blood to his head, a tenor of collapse. He squatted, groping with clawed fingers, found the blessed hardness of the books and gathered them up. He knew a shrewd way to deal with this problem: he unfastened his belt, slid the end of it under the string of the parcel, and buckled it fast. Now the books bit his hipbone, but all was well--he would not lose them, and the not unwelcome discomfort would keep him sober on the long journey. The moon had not risen, or was covered by cloud. He supposed it was still early in the evening, but something had happened to his time sense.

Maybe, he thought, I have grown old and am too stupid to know it. Maybe the sun will discover me with white hair. Dried like a summer apple and no teeth. Bent on a stick, poor old Ben Cory. "Yaphoo!"

Yes, I heard that. That was me--old Cory, old Ben Cory, know him? A public shame in the middle of the street, but who'll notice old Ben Cory in the dark?

He advanced with precision on a street-lantern that showed him dingy house-fronts and the filthy gutter in the middle of the road, where a stray dog watched him sullenly, then slunk away, demoniac and lonely. Ben observed quietly that there were no pigs: his excellent judgment had chosen a time to walk on Fish Street when no pigs wallowed in it: alleluia. Of course only a fool would go to shouting "Yaphoo!" in such a place as if he were drunk, and he quite unarmed, carrying no money now to be sure, but dressed like one who had it. "I notice here," he said, "a fortuitous yet welcome opportunity." Stepping to the channel in the middle of the street, he relieved himself, with embarrassment. Untidy, but evidently in this part of town everyone did it. Startled, he thought: Oh, fine! Oh, wonderful!--now I could, while back there.... "Yaphoo!" _There we go again!_ The rest of his comment came out as a harmlessly soft muttering: "... 'sn't anybody remember poor old Ben Coree, late of Deerfield?"

Someone, somewhere, not long ago, had pronounced his name in that odd foreign way. It would be pleasant to remember about that, for it had something to do with sunlight. Meanwhile, his breeches decently buttoned, he was making excellent progress toward another lamp, Reuben's books were safe, and he was utterly sober, gruesomely sober, sober as Mr. Cotton Mather. "Sober as _all_ the mamn Dathers," said Ben, and stumbled on something soft and screamed a little. Just a dead cat. Now if he might walk on in this patient way, past the grim windows and their occasional furtive gleam, he would arrive at another wholly dark section where a man, offending no one, might run a finger down his throat, lighten ship, and proceed.

He made it.

His stomach empty, he noted that in spite of perfect sobriety he was still tremendously drunk, whereat he laughed, but wriggling companion shadows to left and right of him did not. No: they were heavy-cold, banishing all warmth of amusement; imaginary but nasty, having the creeping urgency of sick dreams. He knew them to be imaginary in the light of that pale flame of reason which stayed alive in him under a long rising and subsidence of the waves, and here he asked himself acutely: how may one diminish the force of an imaginary creation, when naming it imaginary availeth not? Shall we assert, brethren, with overweening impudicity, that the imagination, by its own act of creation, hath given unto the shadow a substance akin to that which occupieth the carnal, corporeal yaphoo?

Cannily they remained behind him, receding, if he dared turn his head, with contemptuous ease. He knew them, though: open-eyed but dead, trivial heads with nothing left of the body but a flabby band of hide such as might be left by the sliding drag of an axe. Double Indians--why? Why, because the body happens to possess a right side and a left. "Mother, I have but to remember the look of Union Street and Dock Square and Cornhill, and shall unquestionably know the Town House when I arrive at it, being in no sense too foxed for such, but deliver my mind from that page of Cicero, seeing I hurt him, heedless, heedless continually...."

The lump in his stomach swallowed that speech, bloating. How can you cancel a hurt when there's no way to turn back the clock?

You can't.

It happened. It's over.

"_Nempe quod hic alte demissius ille volabat----_" Ben retched, but the lump would not come up, and he lost interest in weeping. He supposed he ought to consider this plaguy longing to talk like a drunken man, above all to explain, thwarted by the absence of anyone who might listen. But wasn't that someone lounging by the faint lantern which ought to mark the opening of Union Street? Two in fact, two women, not imaginary. He observed them with great intelligence, their shawls and full skirts--one tall, one short; alone in this region at night, certainly whores in search of business, but never mind. They were animated, and as he approached, Ben found he could explain things in an undertone which need not disturb them.

"Hoy!" Ben thought that was the tall girl; certainly she was the one who delivered that birdy whistle. "Looking for something?"

"Regret," said Ben. "Spent ball, just had some. Otherwise pleased and proud, my word on it."

Both laughed obligingly. The tall girl said: "Phew! Drunk as a lord and him na' but a boy. Feel sorry for 'm, I do."

"Someone else said that a while ago." Ben spoke stiffly, wounded. "No occasion for it. Not worthy of sorrow in sight of God or man."

"Drunk as a lord and running on like a canting parson. It wants 'a wipe its little nose. How they hangin', m' lud?"

But the small plump girl had stepped into Ben's path, and Ben could see her smile was amiable, swimming and shifting in the cold light. She was young, he thought, and pretty. "Sorry. Another time."

"Ay, but sha'n't I walk a bit way with you? You're rotten drunk, boy, and dressed so fine, someone'll rob you."

"No money. Few farthings left."

"A stoodent, Lottie. Look at them books. Oh, do fetch 'em out, m' lud. Read a girl bloody something, do!"

But plump Lottie said: "Leave me walk on a way with you, if you be going by Cornhill." Not waiting for consent, she had his arm, ignoring some under-the-breath comment from her companion, which Ben also preferred to overlook. "That's my way too. Come on--I won't bite you, boy."

"He can read the books," said the tall girl--"between times, like."

"You're kind," Ben said. "I've often marveled how kind people can be, I mean when one's not expecting it. My mother and father were killed at Deerfield. I am, as you say, drunk and not speaking plain."

Lottie was keeping step somehow with his long rambling legs, the other girl forgotten though she had sent after them a little miauling cry. Ben tried to shorten his pace; the legs were riotously disobedient; he could no longer think of them as trustworthy comrades; this was sad. "Drunk as a pig," she said, and giggled warmly. "But you got a sweet face."

"It's merely a kind of good nature," said Ben judicially, disturbed by the sin of vanity. "One can be too good-natured, now that's no lie."

"I'm good-natured too."

"You think a man and woman ought to marry if they have serious 'ligious differences?"

"Ha? I don't know. Walk easy-don't give in to it, boy.... You're to be married?"

"Not fitting. Do you believe in God?"

"Hoy, don't talk so loud! You're drunk."

"Yes.... Can you make up for a hurt when there's no way to turn back the clock?"

"Now it don't do no good to cry. Come on. You can walk."

"Of course I can walk. You don't understand. It can't be done, that's the answer. It happened. It happened in the wilderness. It's over. Goes away from you the way the spring goes and the summer too. You think I could cry when I saw my people killed? God damn it, if we wept for every sufficient reason we'd've all drowned long ago. What did you say, Lottie?"

"Nothing, boy. Come on."

"No, you said something about marrying. Did you not?" He lurched against her and gasped an apology for clumsiness. "That's not even been spoke of, I suppose I'm too young, but she--now pray understand, what _I_ don't understand is this: how a man could love a woman so much and nevertheless go and--go and----"

He stopped, embarrassed, realizing that she was undoubtedly a whore, and therefore he could not, without unkindness--through intricate labor of thought he heard her remark: "You'll learn...." The street was a forest, a wilderness where Ben could feel the power of snow on branches suffering for the coming of spring, and in this jungle he was now marvelously ready for the act of love, and had no money. "Come along, love, come along. You live here in Boston?"

"Nay, Roxbury." He watched the pale flame of reason surviving the onslaught of another wave. Was this forest under the sea? A wilderness not of snow-burdened hemlock but of oozing weed, monstrous, ancient. Here monsters lazily glided above dead ships and men unburied, a wilderness where no spring had ever dawned since the beginning of the world. "I don't know where he is, Lottie. The men from Hatfield buried all the dead they could find--later in the day, you understand, after the French were driven out, but I don't know where he lieth or my mother. I'll go back some day, but only if my brother wishes to go with me. Thou hast dove's eyes."

"What?"

"Thou art fair, my love."

"You _are_ drunk. I'll see you to Newbury Street if you like--that's your way to Roxbury."

"Most kind. Oh, I wish----"

"You're drunk, and no money--remember? I'm good-natured too, but not that good-natured. Now see can you walk without my hand."

"Of course I can," said Ben with resentment. "Was I not doing so when we met?"

"Not too bloody well," she said, and laughed so cheerfully that he was obliged to join in it, knowing that for a while she still walked on beside him. At a later time, in the sedate quiet of Newbury Street, she was gone. Ben looked back and could still see her, turning a corner, more clearly visible than when she had been near to him. In gentle wonder Ben observed she was slightly hunchbacked, and not young, perhaps not much like the image his mind had drawn of her, that image no more substantial than the shadow of a bird in passage above the leaves in a wilderness of spring.

John Kenny said: "You might as well, Mr. Hibbs. I dare say he was invited to dine at the Jenks', but he'll have no lantern, and I don't like it. Take Rob Grimes with you. Of course, Reuben, you may go with them." Mr. Kenny winced at the pain in his foot which was his common evening companion. "He won't have been invited to stay the night--a house guest would set poor Madam Jenks all of a doodah."

"It's my fault," said Gideon Hibbs.

Mr. Kenny grunted in pain and impatience. "Do you also take that brace of pistols, mine and the one that was George's, they're in my bedroom cabinet. Won't need them, but no harm in carrying them."

Reuben turned from the window, the brightness of the dining room beating down on his mask. "I'll fetch them, sir, and I think I'll wear Ben's knife, seeing he left it behind."

Mr. Kenny relaxed enough to chuckle. "Heh, a small army!--I pity any malefactors in your path. Nay, 'tis only sensible. Well, go as far as the fort anyway. The road's lighted well enough on the Boston side, but I pray you take care passing the Neck. If my God-damned foot wasn't so horrid bad tonight--well, get along, gentlemen! Must you stay for my senile chattering?"

Gnarled, small, ancient and unexcited, Rob Grimes marched in front with the lantern, a pistol jammed in his belt absurd and piratical. Mr. Hibbs carried the other under his flapping great-coat. Eased by physical activity, Reuben's own anxiety lessened: Ben was probably in no trouble, Ben with his wilderness eyes and other senses, and would be sure to relish the comic value of this escort. Presently Reuben was dubiously enjoying the gaunt majesty of Gideon Hibbs in a three-cornered hat, and elaborating comments for Ben's later entertainment.

Mr. Hibbs was not amused. Reuben could feel in him the intense mirthless zeal of a sedentary soul obliged to take the responsibility for something athletic. Maybe, Reuben speculated, a walk in the dark on the Roxbury road did approach the borders of philosophy. He sniffed the east wind, its wild smell of sea-wrack and approaching rain. His hand touched Ben's beloved knife and fell away.

"Said nothing to you, Reuben, about remaining late?"

Mr. Hibbs had asked that twice already. "No, sir."

"'F I may make so bold"--the thick voice of Rob Grimes floated back on a beery chuckle--"some doxy be a-bouncing under him this 'ere moment. Boy's had the look of a stud colt come a year now--blarst it to Jesus, you can't 'old 'em beyant a certain age."

"None of that!" said Mr. Hibbs, who for courtesy would never have spoken so to Grimes in the presence of Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury. Rob grunted, uncrushed. "Reuben, hath Benjamin spoke any word to you lately to suggest a disturbance or over-concern with--hm--with----"

"With the mounting of smocks? No, sir."

"Reuben, I await your apology. I remind you that your favored position doth neither protect nor justify you in assuming the conversation of a roustabout. From evil speech evil conduct. I am waiting."

"I'm sorry, sir," said Reuben, and discovered distractedly that he was, a little. Shocking Mr. Hibbs was too cheap a victory. "I'm truly sorry, Mr. Hibbs. I do speak heedless, and will try to mend."

The great shadow of Gideon Hibbs grunted forgiveness. It almost always