The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “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. “I
ndisposed 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.”