“I am not certain that I myself understand you, Charity.”
“I must say more then?… But perhaps you will tell me, as my mother would, that at my years I can know nothing of love, and yet I do.… Sometimes I’ll see a sail that looks from a distance like the Artemis. But I watch any sail that appears, because—because who can say what manner of ship it will be that brings him home?—and now you are weeping, but Mr. Hibbs, I never intended—”
“Nay, I—am not. The fireplace a’n’t drawing properly—I’ll push these logs further back.”
“I am a beast.”
“Hush!… I think he will come home, Charity—older, as you are, but what you saw in him will not be greatly changed.… But I may be your gray-headed counselor, and—friend?”
“Of course. You aren’t gray.”
“Soon enough.”
“What is it, Mr. Hibbs—what is it that doth compel one to—eh, as they say, to give away the whole heart to another? I would be better, I would be happier, I suppose, if I.…”
“I could wish for mine own sake that I knew the answer to that. Why, Charity, it seems we love where we must and no help for it.”
“I remember I was not happy, very far from it, a year and more ago, when I was a silly child, had not even met him, indeed had none to love but—oh, poor Sultan. Clarissa of course, but it seems to me I never knew I loved her until I lost her, only took her for granted like sunlight until the day she was no longer there.”
“Sultan?”
“Don’t you remember Sultan, Mr. Hibbs? Why, the child I was would never forgive your forgetting Sultan. He died, very fat and ancient, soon after we moved to Dorchester. It was the sea air, my mother said. I wept like a fountain. But I think it was some while before then that I had ceased to feel like a child.”
Chapter Three
The island fell away in the west. All day long, and for three days more, the ketch Diana held the northeast trade off her larboard bow, close-hauled. Ben supposed that presently Shawn would turn south and prepare for another chicken-thief raid somewhere in the Leeward Islands. On the fifth day he did shift course, but not much, the unchanging wind now on the larboard beam, the Diana’s direction southeast.
A withdrawn, taciturn mood had come over Captain Shawn. The members of his ragamuffin crew, including Ben, felt it as schoolboys feel a teacher’s cold in the head. For Ben there was the growing urgency of that secret whisper: Something I can do.…
Ben was forced to admit that, whatever else might have happened to the year, he had learned a little seamanship. He had acquired sea-legs even before the capture of Artemis. He was never seasick—Shawn himself knew green moments from time to time. Ben had learned the ropes—no mystery after all but quite simple once you agreed to use your head and accept the buckle end of Marsh’s belt as a parallel to the sarcasm of Gideon Hibbs. Marsh was acidly fair about that: as soon as Ben’s hand had learned to jump for the right rope at the right instant, the belt was no longer used.
Shawn’s instruction had followed a different idiom—articulate explanation, with continuing patience (not displayed toward anyone but Ben). Somehow the Irishman conveyed: Let’s forget that we seem to be enemies; let’s consider this logic of navigation, the sextant, the tiller, the handling of sail, powers of wind and current and the pattern of the clear stars; let’s do this as though we were not afraid to turn our backs to each other, you with the knife I let you keep, and I with mine. Ben could respond to this; could not help responding.
The secret whisper continued in the dark.
Ben’s body was learning too, his hands calloused and enlarged, his shoulders thickened. Already wiry and tough, he was aware of a burgeoning strength that never reached exhaustion even in the occasional days of bad weather when the mainsail could stiffen and fight back like a living beast. When Ben stripped for swimming, as he had done back there at the island to the amused horror of all aboard, he had noticed a whiplash hardness in leg and thigh, surely much greater than he had possessed a year ago. Ben had been startled to learn—last July, when the Diana put in for careening at another lonely island—that not one other man aboard could swim. So Ben, who had learned it fishlike in the waters of the Pocumtuck River with Reuben darting around him, a little demon of gold and ivory, frolicked alone in the surf and beyond it, amazed and delighted at the buoyancy of salt water and the untiring almightiness of the waves. Even to Shawn it was a mystery. Manuel giggled helplessly. Tom Ball appeared to regard it as a black art.
Once in November, during a lesson on the sextant, Shawn had happened to stretch and flex his shoulders, and Ben discovered that he was fully as tall as Captain Shawn. Another time, Ben spoke with careless sharpness to Joey Mills—the old man’s garrulity could be a nuisance—and Joey had drawn back in manifest physical fright, astonishing to Ben until he understood: Well, I could break him in two, couldn’t I?
Manuel? One fist, and Manuel would cringe and run.
Ledyard? Maybe, just maybe. That would be a near thing.
Ball? French Jack? Well, hardly. And still, either of them might think twice before starting anything unarmed, or alone.
Dummy? Never, if he got a grip.
Judah Marsh? Why, knives put aside, by God, I could flatten him like a bug, and wash my hands.
Shawn?…
The whisper continued in the dark.
Since leaving the island under the northeast trade, Captain Shawn had spent most of his time in the locked cabin, or on deck in a black and scowling silence. He ordered the log cast unreasonably often; it was plain the Diana was maintaining an even speed, better than nine knots. Ben was present whenever Shawn checked his bearings, and could make his own calculations. When his trick at the helm began at midnight on the seventh night out from the island, the Diana had crossed the 18th parallel and was surely far east of the Leewards, too far if Shawn intended any business with them, and was still running blandly southeast. Why?…
In these wartime years, with no pressure of maritime unemployment to drive hungry men into piracy, some furtive harbors throughout the Caribbean still nourished the old trade, and at some outwardly respectable ports a vessel of dubious virtue could still put in to dispose of this and that with few questions asked. So much had been common talk at Boston; Ben heard it again from the half-timid chatter of Joey Mills. Captain Shawn might have found men in those ports to make up his complement; he never went near one of them, all year long. Joey Mills dared to ask why, and shook his head and spat over the rail. “Tell you why,” said Joey Mills, watching Ben with squirrely courage and making sure no one else could hear. “He’ll get more men, he says, from the fine prize we a’n’t seen yet—or if we seen it we been evermore tacking somewheres else, God almighty damn. But this here ketch, Ben Cory, let alone it seems she a’n’t bound for nowhere, she a’n’t got nothing. Salt cod, God almighty damn. Put in at one of them places, nothing to trade, he’d be laughed at. They’d give him salt cod, yah. I allow he can’t bear no laughing at—now don’t betray me, don’t never let it out I said no such of a thing—you wouldn’t, boy?” Before Ben could even promise, he chuckled in apology and fled, and avoided Ben for days.…
Far away ahead this midnight, over the curve of the world, stood the shoulder of Africa. Somewhere in the south—Ben gazed off idly to his right in the murmurous dark—down there beyond the Line, the Spanish and Portuguese settlements of the southern continent. Down there too—so far that one’s thought hardly dared trouble with it—the wild cold legendary region of the Horn, Magellan’s gateway, the path to the western sea.
Here in the undemanding night Ben found it possible to command the earth to be not vast but small. Merely to point with the right arm toward the Horn—did not that reduce the world to a modest map that might be held in fancy, handled, contemplated?—never mind the thousands of leagues of open sea where that right arm was
no greater than one splash of foam. The paradox was familiar. Mr. Gideon Hibbs had touched on it at the borders of philosophy: how, if the container be greater than the thing contained, that organ in the skull must be somehow wider than a galaxy.…
The shadow coming slowly aft might be Manuel, ready to relieve Ben at the tiller. No—too soon, and Manuel was aloft. Moonrise had begun some while ago at Ben’s left shoulder, magnificent and calm. The shadow was not Manuel but Daniel Shawn, prowling the dark as he often did when, as Ben supposed, he could not sleep. Ben suppressed a word of greeting. His arm over the tiller held firm with elastic readiness for all of the Diana’s whims, as Shawn himself had patiently taught him it must do. Captain Shawn stood a long time at the after rail gazing northwestward.
It could happen some night, Ben knew, out of a silence like this. The unknowable driven brain could abruptly decide that Ben Cory must no longer live. What is madness?… After the decision, execution—but not immediate, perhaps. It did not seem to be Shawn’s way to kill with his own hand.
He was capable of it. Joey Mills had told Ben how, in the battle with the Schouven, Shawn had boarded the sloop with the rest, two pistols in his belt. Disdaining a cutlass after the pistols were empty, Shawn went in howling with his short knife, and that on a tall Dutchman with long arms—as if, Mills muttered, death was a nothing to Captain Shawn, or welcome. But Shawn wasn’t for dying that day.
Quite gently Shawn asked; “All quiet, Ben?”
“Yea, quiet.” Not “Yea, sir.” Not “Yea, Captain.” The self clinging to integrity will snatch at trivia. But for Ben there was a kind of upside-down shame in reflecting that anyone else aboard who omitted the formula of humility would very quickly be instructed with a rope’s end. And so, Ben Cory thought, it seems Ben Cory doth care about the opinion of others, be they only the rats aboard a pirate ketch, the which would be dem’d good and comical—could I be telling it to Ru before the fire in Uncle John’s library, and sweet Kate maybe bringing us a plate of—
“Ben, who’s aloft?”
“Manuel.”
“Have you chanced to look aft, the last half-hour, boy?”
“No. Watching the bow, so to keep the bearing you ordered.”
“Then give me the helm, and take this glass”—Shawn’s voice was rising curiously—“and look well abaft, and tell me what you see at all.”
“Where away?”
“God damn it,” said Shawn, still rather softly, “find it yourself!” He thrust the spyglass into Ben’s hand and snatched the tiller, humming in his teeth and not pleasantly.
Ben searched the northwestern arc, and found nothing but empty sea. Something to throw him off his guard?—he lowered the glass quickly, but Shawn was not even watching him. Shawn was staring forward, head high, the moon’s whiteness displaying his face, cold and suffering and proud.
“I don’t find anything.”
“Look again.”
“I see the stars, a quiet sea, and not another thing.”
“Judah!” Marsh hurried aft. “Take the glass, Mr. Marsh. See what you can find to the northwest.”
Ben stood away from them. He saw Marsh stiffen with uneasiness or bewilderment; fidget, and mutter, and rub the glass with an end of his shirt. “Mr. Shawn, sir, my one glim a’n’t too sharp.”
Shawn immensely filled his lungs and slowly let the breath go. “You too maybe?… Well—it may be gone.” It might be easier, Ben thought, to endure the ache of waiting if Shawn himself would look aft again, but he would not.
“Was it a sail, Captain?”
“It wasn’t the Lamb of God walking upon the waters, Mr. Marsh. I am changing course two points. Sou’-sou’east, d’you hear? Call that fool Manuel from aloft, who wouldn’t be seeing the entire Royal Navy and it half a mile to wind’ard. He and Dummy will make ready to haul me the tack—will you move, man?” Marsh vanished forward; Ben heard his thin snarl crying Manuel down from the masthead. “Well, Cory?—get to the mizzen, damn you!” Ready in his place—what else?—Ben presently heard Marsh’s advisory shout. “Cory, Mother of God, can’t you speak up like a seaman?”
“Ready!”
“Lee-oh!” The Diana answered calmly, undismayed. “Trim her!” Ben had already done so, handily. “Will you sheet her in, you bloody farmer? Oh, dear Mother of God, for men to sail with me!…” Undismayed, the Diana settled to her new course under the friendly wind. A small maneuver—a crew of boys could have done it in this soft landsman’s weather. Ben knew that Shawn had no cause to rave at his part in it; knew also in a moment that the crying voice climbing from the region of the helm was no longer concerned with him. “Speak plainer! I cannot hear you.… Oh, but I will go alone if I must. Have I not alway gone alone? Have I not alway made mine own law—as I am directed, as I am directed—but thou knowest I am compassed about.… Plainer! Speak plain!—or send me a wind and not this damned crawling breeze! Am I to meet them in a bloody calm?… Then, most soberly and quietly: “Ben—aft with you!”
Ben returned aft, being on duty and having perhaps no choice. “Am I to take the helm again?”
“First look, only once more. Man dear, don’t you see?—it could be I’m growing old and foolish, but—but for all you hate me, you can’t call me fool, Beneen, you can’t do that.”
“I never have.”
“Then look once more—the way I might’ve been deceived—the way the Devil’s minions are in the thing tonight, now that’s no lie. I waited too long, so I did. I cast about, while time wasted, praying for the easier course—a fleet—men enough—seeing I could not have the support of those who should have understood me. I prayed for the easier course, so I did, but I tell you now, Beneen, a man must never do that.”
And Ben looked again, and found nothing. “It was a sail?”
“I thought so. I thought so, Ben.”
“If you’ll call Manuel aft, whose eyes are good as mine—”
“Manuel is it? Have I time for the witless, when—but I may have been deceived. Not there, you say, and I’m believing you. Nothing?”
“Nothing. Sometimes, Mr. Shawn, I’ve been fooled at night by a whale’s spouting. The spray of him seems to hang in the air a while, and I suppose moonlight may lend it the look of a sail.” Shawn laughed a little, his breathing slower. He seemed not annoyed that an untamed pup should be instructing him concerning sea-born illusions. “Well, do you take the helm again, and this’ll be your bearing, steady as she goes.”
“May I ask, Mr. Shawn, is this course for Martinique?”
“It seems to be gone and that’s the truth, and yet I could have sworn—what? Martinique? Why, if my reckoning is right, her present course maintained will bear her a very far way to the east of Martinique.”
“Nothing before us then but the South Atlantic.”
“The Line, the South Atlantic, and the Horn. No more waiting. No more of this petty cruising about. No more—piracy. Do you hear me?”
“Less than a year ago I might have jumped at the sound of that.”
“Not now?”
“You’re not speaking to a boy now, Mr. Shawn.”
“’Deed so, friend? When did that happen?”
“Who can ever say? It happened.… Mr. Shawn, I’ve asked you a dozen times, and have been refused, and now I say again: I wish to go in that cabin and speak with Captain Jenks.”
“And I’ll be telling you for maybe the hundredth time, Ben, he is not captain of this or any other vessel.… Ben, with all the charity I’ve seen in you, can you not hear a man acknowledge his error? I said, no more piracy. I have done wrong, almost betraying my purpose. I say now—and this is like something you once said to me yourself—henceforth I will not lift my hand against any man except to defend my life and my purpose. Jenks?—why, I think he can be released, and you too if it must be so. I shall be for
ced to put in at some Brazilian port for water and provisions, and there, I think—well, we shall see. Can I say more?”
“Yes, you could, Mr. Shawn, because I’m asking you again: Why do you hold him at all? Mills says you question him continually, and he answers nothing.”
“That’s true.” Shawn gazed steadily northward, at the open sea. “Answers nothing, and will any man hold such a silence with nothing to hide?”
“Hide, Mr. Shawn? Captain Jenks, hide?”
“Must I say again, he is not captain now?… Ben, did you know I spent more than a year in that sorry city of Boston?”
“No, how should I?”
“Oh, you might’ve.… More than a year, seeking support for the greatest venture a man’s spirit ever conceived. I was ignored, laughed at, brushed aside. I sought out the merchants, for behind all the pious canting they’ve become the rulers of your Boston and I suppose you know it. Sought ’em out one after another, and spilled my heart, the while they looked at my poor clothes and shuffled their feet and remembered important business. I sought audience with your Governor Dudley himself—Mother of God, would he even admit me to the bloody presence? Queen Anne’s man, body and soul.… Somehow, Ben—and mark this, I pray you—at some time that miserable year, the story was passed about that I had been with John Quelch. And—why, damn their souls, so I was, for a while. I did ship with him, being penniless and starving, and escaped him as soon as I might. He was evil, Ben, a common pirate, it was right he should hang. I served him briefly, I did that, having no choice, and the rumor of it was made a cause why I should be persecuted, ignored, laughed at, brushed aside. Compassed about.… And still, didn’t I ask far less than was asked by Cabot, Drake, Magellan? A trifle of support, mind you, a tiny fleet, a sound crew, a charter to explore—don’t you see any man of them might have compounded his fortune a hundred times and written his name in history beside my own? But would they? You know the answer, and they shall know the whole of it too, in time.… And somehow, Ben—while I went from one to another wearing my heart out—somehow a few of them did finally understand a little of what I so recklessly told concerning this venture. Certain of them began to think: Why not the venture without the man? You see? Have you ever heard of such a thing as stealing a man’s dreams?”
The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 100