“What has this to do with Captain Jenks?”
“Surely it’s plain? The man you childishly call Captain was one of those who began to ask themselves: What if this wild, shabby, tedious Irishman hath glimpsed something of value after all? What if there are new lands for the taking in the western sea, and why should this miserable noisy Sligo man, this old Shawn, why should he have any part of it?… Why, I couldn’t believe this of Peter Jenks myself for a long time—never came to me that he was one of ’em, till he hired that man Hanson in the room of me—and that in despite of your great-uncle.”
“But—”
“Whisht, Ben! You’ll be telling me your great-uncle gave me no promise hard and fast, but I know men’s hearts. But for Jenks, I’d’ve had my way, and glory in it for Mr. Kenny as well as me, don’t you doubt it. It wasn’t to be. When he took on that agent Hanson, sure my voice was plain enough, I could see how they’d been planning it all the while. You see now, don’t you? Had I not taken Artemis from him, Jenks would have her now the other side of the Horn, and Boston would never see her again. But I, Ben—why, I shall give her back the name of Artemis, and I’ll send her home, when she’s taken us to the new country.…” In the silence Ben caught the glint of something—merely the copper farthing; at length Shawn spoke again, quietly: “True, Ben—nothing before you now but the Line, and the South Atlantic, and the Horn. Nothing below you but the Atlantic. And once on a time wasn’t I a boy of your age who believed that God was over me?” He was moving away. Ben thought he might be weeping, but his voice often sounded so when his eyes were dry. “And over you, over all that breathe. Oh, but in those days I was that young and foolish you wouldn’t know the misguided thoughts that would seize hold of me and deceive, for the voices I heard then were not God’s voice, they were far other. Maybe even now I’m not certain of anything, except that I cannot die until I’ve looked again on the color of the western sea.” He returned swift and silent out of the shadow and stood close to the helm, eyes level with Ben’s; no taller than Ben. Not even as tall, perhaps. “What now? Why did I say that, Ben? Why did I say, the color of the western sea?”
Ben supposed his right hand could flash away from the tiller to his belt, if it must. “How could I know why you say any of the things you do?”
“Ah? But you must sail with me, all the way. Will you not say it? Will you be forcing me to destroy you? Then I’ll be alone, Ben. These men with us—what are they but phantoms, all of ’em? Knife ’em, they’d bleed smoke—not blood, Ben—smoke, and drift away downwind. None aboard but you and me, now that’s no lie.…”
But Ben, for sheer pity and disgust, terror and bewilderment, self-blame and homesickness and again pity, could not speak at all, and Shawn moved away, himself like smoke, past another black shadow by the mizzen that must have heard all he said; at this Shawn snarled: “If the wind changes, Mr. Marsh, you needn’t be calling me—I shall know it.”
Under Ben’s hand beautiful Diana ran southward, cutting away the miles with a timeless whisper at her bow; but during the night the wind fell off, the air growing dull, silent, and in the morning dead. The sun rose on sails become slack, bemused in idleness on a mirror sea.
* * * *
“I wondered, in fact, that she had not long ago destroyed herself in one of those seizures.”
“They seldom do, Reuben, though often they injure themselves. She is nearly forty, that woman we saw today—I’ve known her bite her tongue and bruise herself, but nothing worse. As a rule they die somewhat young. It’s as well you saw her so—the condition is not too rare and you’ll encounter it again.”
“And the books?”
“Have nothing to offer but speculation and bad advice. Nothing I’ve tried ever had the slightest effect.… What’s that?—I mean the one that called from back there in the pasture.”
“Red-winged blackbird.”
“I wish I knew ’em all, the way you do.”
“Brought up with ’em in the wilderness, Amadeus. But nobody could know them all.… Do the books tell anything of the cause?”
“Nothing worth your notice. Speculation, most of it not based on clinical observation. And (as you suggest) without at least some knowledge of immediate causes, treatment’s only a blind groping. We must try it of course, because sometimes a guess is correct. But somehow we must also push back along the chain of causes—widen the area of light—somehow.… As you may or may not know, there are many going about in the world far madder than that poor epileptic, who is not really mad at all but merely drops into her fit from time to time, and usually comes out of it unharmed. A fearful thing to watch, Ru—I dare say you still feel it in your stomach. But some of the forms of madness that don’t so loudly announce themselves are much worse.”
“The world may be a mad place, Amadeus, but there go the peeper frogs. I told you they might, on such an afternoon.”
“So they do. You don’t suppose—?”
“If we continue to the pond, they’ll stop. However, should we then squat patient in our boots, the thing might be done—imitating boulders, you know. We might, as it were, rock ourselves into the semblance of a natural outgrowth.”
“Who now hath plumbed the depths of a contumelious paronomasia?”
“Ha!”
“That log looks more comfortable.”
“If the ants on it are black, yes. If red, no.”
“They look black, the few I see. Is there a difference?”
“Oh, my friend! How did you survive till I came to you?”
“Don’t know.”
“Yes, they’re black.… By the madder ones, you mean the raving kind? Those with wild delusions?”
“Those, and others. I was thinking of the quieter sort, who are seldom called mad. Men and women eaten up with suspicion. So that—I think you’ve never encountered this, but beware of it if you do—so that everything happening within their purview must be bent to the shape of that suspicion; and to hear them talk you’d suppose the whole world was allied in conspiracy against them. I’d guess that such a state of mind is begotten of a most fearful vanity. And what evil is commoner than vanity? Of course that particular sickness of the mind is only one of its fruits. How seldom do you find anyone who hath ever attempted to look on his own life with something like the eye of eternity! But without at least some detachment, vanity is bound to grow.”
“As for example the seeming humility of proper Christians?”
“Oh, that, yes—but don’t trouble thyself too much about that. It would seem they need it. Well, and there are those madder ones devoured by jealousy, spite, greed, and fears of a hundred kinds, mostly groundless. It’s no-way true that all is vanity, but I think you may say that vanity is the source of nearly all the saddest things in human nature. Nay, I think our poor wench with the fits, by comparison with many respectable souls, is quite sane.”
“And so what is madness?”
“Do thou tell me, thou who gavest me once a definition of health that serves me still.”
“A—a gross exaggeration of some natural activity of the mind? ‘Lilies that fester.…’”
“I’m pleased I made thee discover the Sonnets. Yes, that might serve.… But the hunger for verifiable knowledge—now there’s an activity of the mind, natural I think, but sluggish or nonexistent in most men, and in a few like thee and me, very intense: are we then mad?”
“If such hunger for knowledge became painful or annoying to others, Amadeus, I am sure we would be called mad.”
“Mm-yas—thought I’d caught thee, but (as usual) I’m caught instead. So consider—would you say there are any activities of the mind that would not deserve the name of madness if sorely exaggerated?”
“Maybe none. That hunger for knowledge could become a thing I’d call madness, if the pursuit of it caused a man to neglect too
many other matters—such as sunlight and peeper frogs and Charity’s pictures and the brightness of a swallow flying.”
“I’ll agree. I dare say anything out of proportion may become a madness. Even generosity. Even love.”
“But Amadeus, I do ever think that love is not a thing, but more like a region where we travel. Something of that I said once to Ben. I can’t remember when it was, and he may not have understood it—I’m sure I said it badly. Like a region, where we travel with—oh, some vision, some of the time. As sleep is like a region, and waking. Do I still say it badly, Amadeus? I mean that no one can give his friend a handful of sunlight, but may walk in it with him, and so love him.”
* * * *
After scant and haunted sleep, Ben woke to stillness where motion should have been. Stumbling up on deck long before the beginning of the forenoon watch, he saw Shawn on the quarterdeck deep in a stillness of his own, ignoring Tom Ball who muttered at him, and Joey Mills who stood by the helm but had nothing to do there, for the Diana had lost all way, the sails were dead rags, and if some profound current still moved her there was nothing to tell of it in this deathlike air under a brazen sun.
Ben remained forward, to avoid Shawn. Matthew Ledyard was lounging near the bow with nothing to do. His stare was not unfriendly; he even wished Ben a laconic good morning. Maybe he wanted to break his custom and share a word or two out of his permanent gloom. Like Ben, in these tropic days Ledyard had discarded shirt and jacket, wearing nothing above his belt but a kerchief around his head to moderate the sun and hold sweat out of his eyes. His gaunt chest was darkly tanned; it had never seemed to Ben that the purple splash on Ledyard’s face was particularly ugly—once you grew used to it, it was a nothing, no more than another man’s scar or mole. Unnecessarily Ledyard said: “We’re in for a calm.”
For several days a carrion reek had corrupted the air of the forecastle, and the murky hell-hole of the galley where French Jack prepared his strange offerings. Likely more barrels of the salt cod had gone bad and ought to be hunted out. Mr. Ball claimed the whole dirty cargo was spoiled and should be heaved overside, but French Jack explained that cod smelt that way anyhow; in spite of the pride of a Boston man, Ben was inclined to agree. With no breeze to sweep the nastiness away, the stench overhung the deck also, as though the Diana herself were exhaling corruption in a mortal sickness. To come up into this from the fetid forecastle was for Ben like waking to a continuation of nightmare. He was in a mood to fume and curse at anyone—particularly at Shawn, and that not for the large and just reasons, but simply for a certain standing order that forbade any of the hands to sleep on deck. For Ledyard, however, Ben managed a smile and a grunt of agreement. “Hope I may spend some of my trick aloft.”
“Ay—stinks, don’t it?” And Ledyard startled Ben exceedingly by adding: “Like a dead man’s dream it is. A fair hope gone rotten.”
Ben grew alert. Ledyard had never said anything like that to him before. “Maybe it’ll be as bad at the masthead. This morning I believe we could stink out Father Neptune himself. Is no one aloft?”
“I was. Captain called me down. Seems dem’d foolish even to him to keep a lookout now—if we’re becalmed so’s everything else that might be about.” He glanced aft and continued, a murmur in his smallest voice: “Cory, him and Mr. Ball was just now speaking of breaking out the boat and towing her. Understand that? Take at least six men at the oars to move her. Six men in a boat, in this sun, nothing to their bellies but p’ison stew or salt cod.… Step further away from the hatch, will you?” He lounged away to the bow, and Ben followed him as casually as he might, noticing how, with no way on her at all, the Diana had at some time since the wind died turned completely about, her lifeless bow pointing homeward to the north. Ben stood with the blaze of the morning sun behind him and watched the fire of it on the battlefield of Ledyard’s face. “You might say, Cory, if so be he wants to kill all us mis’able scrannel hands, us buggerly rascals, that’s what he’ll do. Just get us out there at the oars in the sun, to tow the old bitch, that’s all it needs.” His browned sturdy arms spread out along the rail, Matthew Ledyard looked much like a man crucified, his dark face unflinching in the sun. “And I wonder would you be out there too—Mister Cory? Pulling an oar? With your charmed young life, so even the tropic sun won’t strike you down? Or back here on the deck belike, so to sail with Captain Shawn when the rest of us is maybe dried up and burnt too black to stink? Or will you now be trundling aft to tell the Captain what old Ledyard said to you?”
Ben dropped his hand on the man’s iron wrist. It did not move away. Ledyard’s intense stare did not seem to be one of wrath, for all his words. “I have never carried tales to Shawn and you know it.”
“Ya-ah—maybe I do know it. Maybe I wished to learn if you could ever be angered any way at all.”
“I can.” Ledyard’s heavy brows lifted; his brown eyes in the sun squeezed down to little fires. “I can, and since you’re a-mind to speak to me at last, I’ll say this: the hope was never fair, it was rotten in the beginning, and I told him so. He lets me live because he imagines he can change me into one like himself, no other reason. He cannot. As for me, I swallow the puky food and haul on the ropes and jump to Marsh’s orders because I wish to live, no other reason. I’m not Shawn’s man.”
“Whose then?”
“My own.”
“That’d be the hard thing to prove in the sight of God.”
“And you shall be your own man, nothing less.”
“Shall I so?” Ledyard winced heavily and turned his face away from the beating of the sun at last, but Ben tightened his grip. “How could that be, now? You don’t know, boy, you don’t know—”
“Why, I say it shall be.”
“And who a devil’s name are you? A boy—a—”
“Benjamin Cory, son of Joseph Cory of Deerfield, adopted son of Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury, who owns this ketch. Look back at me!”
Ledyard did so, plainly with great effort—changed; certainly without wrath, perhaps even without curiosity. It seemed to Ben that what he must say was only something that Ledyard would surely have been saying to himself, and for a long time. “You will believe it, Matthew Ledyard, so now listen to me. She is not the old bitch. She is the ketch Artemis out of Boston, and the man who’s a second father to me, whom you served well for nearly the length of my life—he had a hand in designing her. My brother and I climbed about on her ribs when she was a-building up the Mystic River—you were there. Since those days I have loved her, as Kenny’s vessel and mine, sir, mine—and you were her carpenter, and Peter Jenks is her captain.” Ledyard groaned at the sound of that name and jerked his hand away and pounded it on the rail. Ben reached out quickly and tapped his purple cheek. “Look back at me, I say! Chips—what’s the name of this ketch?”
“The ketch is the Artemis,” he said, harshly and choking on it. “Step away from me, Cory, or they’ll notice us from the quarterdeck.”
Ben did so, instinct urging him to wait, to look away, to lounge at the bow in the semblance of idleness till Ledyard’s whisper came: “What will you do?”
“Who would be with us?”
Dubiously the whisper said: “Joey Mills. But he’s old and puny.”
“Are you sure of him?”
“Sure enough. We—have spoke of it. But—”
“I’ve seen him wear a pistol sometimes. I suppose he could use it?” Ledyard grunted. “I suppose he might even bear a message from me to Captain Jenks?”
“Oh, my God!… You mean it, don’t you?”
“I will ask you to cease doubting it. Now, how many men would it require, to get Artemis home to Boston?”
“God!… Three or four hands could do it somehow.” He sounded calmer. Glancing at him again, Ben found his face no less a battlefield, even more perhaps, but it had grown sharp with intelligence.
“On such a thing as that, Mr. Cory, you’d be obliged to play it timid, understand me? Reef in at the first hint of dirty weather, if you’ll take an old seaman’s word for it. Comes fast, do you see? You remember we rode out a bad one off Grenada last year, and it was all hands hop to it, and even then it near-about caught us. Now imagine two or three men trying to get her snug in the time we did it then! Remember you got to keep one at the helm. All the same—all the same, sir, three or four hands could do it. That—is your intention?”
“It’s my intention to try. What about Dummy?”
“Shawn’s dog. Jack’s another dog, a mad one.”
“That’s mostly show, I think. It makes others let him alone.”
“Maybe, but don’t trust him, Mr. Cory. He’s not—with us.”
“Manuel?”
“Can neither fight nor hold his tongue.… If you—if we can take care of Shawn and the others, you would release the Captain?”
“Certainly.”
“Then I … Mr. Cory, I’ll beg you for your word on a—on two things, if I may.”
“What?”
“If we can do it, and if Captain Jenks is free, put in a word for me. Let him know that whatever else I did, I tried to change back to what I was. Let him know I went back. Those would be the words, Mr. Cory. Say to him, if so be I can’t say it myself, say that Matthew Ledyard went back.”
The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 101