The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “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 showe
d 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 Ed
en. 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.