“Is he a pastor? A minister?” She smiled evenly. “That’s sweet. He might have been, I suppose. Born too late for that, though. But never mind who or what he is, Owen. Don’t ask any further. I shan’t tell, and it doesn’t matter anyhow.”
“I’m sorry;’ I said. “I didn’t mean to pry. But I think you’re way too kind to him. If I were your father or your brother, let me tell you, I’d deal with the fellow in a proper way. I’d make him ashamed, all right. A man like that.”
“Owen, no. You don’t understand. No one knows who he is, except me. No one. And the man himself. Oh, he knows! But I’ve told no one: not my family, not my aunt, no one. I’ve simply refused, and I never will reveal his name. Never. It’s the only power I have over him.” She laughed, then was serious again. “And remember, I love him, Owen. You must try to understand, I don’t want to bring him down. He’s a public man, and I don’t want to ruin his life or scandalize his marriage or taint the lives of his innocent children. I’ve done enough damage as it is. And luckily, except for what I’ve brought upon my poor mother and father and my dear aunts, most of the damage I’ve done only to myself. And to my poor unborn child,” she added, with immense sadness in her voice.
I said I supposed she was right. But I didn’t understand.
She gazed into my face and abruptly laughed. “Really, sometimes I do wish I were a man. Look at you! You’re in as much despair over your life as I, yet the most important question you have to deal with is how to be a man of action and a man of religion. How to be more like your beloved father. You feel like neither—you’re not a man of action and not a man of religion—and so you pine away, like a poor seduced and abandoned girl.”
“You make me feel foolish.”
But so much of a man’s life is merely a matter of choice, she declared—the right choice, the wrong choice. And even if a man makes the wrong choice, he can still change it. He simply has to change his mind. “You’re a man, Owen, aren’t you? And, really, when you have good health, you men are your minds. You can become a man of action, if you want. Or of religion. Or both. You may not end up famous for it, like your beloved father, but you can be it. Tell me, Owen, isn’t that how it is?” She stared grimly down at the black waves and clenched the rail with both hands.
“Well, no,” I said. “Or at least it never has seemed as easy as that. Not to me. But perhaps I should go in now” I said to her, for she seemed not to be listening anymore. I believed that I had been dismissed. “I must bid you good night,” I said.
She looked straight out at the darkness and did not respond. “Miss Peabody, I’m going in now. I hope ... I hope that we can resume our conversation tomorrow.”
“Yes,” she said in a thin voice. “That would be nice.”
“Good night, then, Miss Peabody.”
“Yes, good night, Mister Brown.”
I drew myself away and returned the long way around the bow towards the stairs that led belowdecks to our cabin, where Father lay snoring in sleep. She was right, I knew. My troubles were as nothing compared to hers. And much as I wanted to believe that my life, my fate, was sealed and that I was trapped as fully by my character as she was by her pregnant female body, in fact, my fate was not sealed, and I wasn’t trapped. For I was, indeed, my mind. As were most men. And I could change it. I could simply change my mind, as she said.
I could believe the lie that I had told Father and become, like him, a man of religion. Perhaps belief could be willed into existence, just as unbelief could. It would not be entirely a lie anyhow, if, like Father, I was obliged to struggle against unbelief and sometimes, perhaps slightly more often than he, failed. Had he not, especially as a young man, now and then failed to sustain his faith in God?
And I could become a man of action as well. In the war against slavery, I had a wonderful cause, a wide field of worthy endeavor; and in Father I had a fearless and energetic model.
The wind had picked up slightly, and the ship had begun to slip and chop some, and the sails were snapping and the lines crackling overhead. My nausea was edging back. I grabbed up my empty chamber pot where I had left it and quickly descended to our cabin, and I went at once to my bunk and lay down to ponder these new and important matters.
I remember lying in my bunk the next morning, happily re-visiting the scene of the night before and making plans to see Sarah again that day, so that we could pursue the several strands of our conversation further. I was rehearsing sentences to say to her, repeating them to myself, as if memorizing a poem. It was a gray, blustery morning, and Father had earlier gone above for breakfast and to lead the daily prayer service, both of which I had begged off, due to my persistent nausea, which, because of the wind-roughened sea, had worsened somewhat.
He did not return to check on me at his accustomed time, and it was not until late in the afternoon that he finally hove into view at the door of the tiny cabin, holding to the jambs for support against the tossing of the ship. I was lonely and glad to see him, for we had not spoken when he left, and I wanted to tell him about my meeting with the remarkable Miss Peabody.
I had no intentions, of course, of telling him what of her private condition she had revealed to me, or of her beliefs and their profound effect on me, but I thought that he would be interested in hearing about her connections to the New England abolitionists. Actually, I simply wanted to talk about her, to put her into words—to think about her in a concrete way, so that I might be emboldened to seek out her company a second time and then pursue a true friendship with her.
Father sat heavily at the foot of my bunk and placed his Bible upon the narrow shelf beside him. “How goes it, son?” he asked.
“About the same. Worse since the weather turned” I said truthfully. I lay on my side with my knees pulled nearly to my chin.
He stared down at his hands on his lap and seemed oddly preoccupied. “Can I get you something to eat? Have you been drinking water? You must drink, son,” he said in a low, disinterested way.
“I’ve taken my sips, what I can handle, at least. Nothing to eat, though, thanks.”
He sat in silence for several moments, until I asked, “What’s the matter, Father? Is something wrong?”
He sighed. “Ah, yes. There is. The girl I spoke of earlier. The one traveling with her aunt from Salem?”
“Yes? What of her?”
“Ah, the poor, distracted thing. She’s gone and thrown herself into the sea.”
I sat bolt upright and stared at him in disbelief. “What? Miss Peabody? No, that can’t be true! Not Miss Peabody!” I cried. “How could she do such a thing?”
My first thought was that I had abandoned her. Then that she had gone off and left me behind, that she had abandoned me. All my thoughts were accompanied, as if prompted, by anger. And all were of myself. I should not have left her alone. I should have stayed with her the whole night long. I might have protected her against the darkness of her mind. I might have been able to keep her here in this world, for me. I and me.
“Yes, the same,” Father said. “A sad and very disturbing act. I was obliged to preach a good while to the company this morning. I took my text from Jonah. It’s a vexed and anxious company up there today. And the poor aunt, she’s struck down with grief for her niece. I don’t understand it. She must have been a bitter, angry child. I had to struggle just to make sense of it for the others. For her troubles, to shade her against the blazing sun of a woman’s troubles, the Lord God had prepared her a gourd, and she sat beneath it and no doubt was glad of it. But when God prepared also a worm that smote the gourd and made it wither away, she was like Jonah, who wished more to die than to live. Angry as Jonah in Nineveh was that young woman. Even unto death. You know her name, Owen. How’s that?”
“I believe ... I believe that you told it to me,” I said, and lay back down.
He slowly let his breath out. “Yes. Well, I really can’t understand it. Suicide always escapes my understanding. Wherefore is light given to her who is in such
abject misery, and wherefore is given life unto the bitter in soul? Wherefore, to one who longs for death and digs for it more than for hidden treasures, to one who rejoices exceedingly and is glad when she can find the grave? Wherefore, Owen, indeed? She was a pretty, smart young thing, Owen. I liked talking with her. A little too much educated by Transcendentalism, though. But despite that, I liked her. She talked right smart to me.”
“Did anyone see her go? When did she do it?”
“Sometime in the night. No one saw. Her bed wasn’t slept in, and when her aunt woke, she sent up the alarm, and the ship was searched stem to stern. But the girl was nowhere aboard. Her aunt has collapsed into grief. And regret. And shame, no doubt.”
“Why? I mean, why regret and shame? She didn’t drive the girl to suicide. A man did that. A coward.”
“I know, I know, but her niece was in her care, and she seems to have loved the girl very much, and now she’ll have to report the sad news back to her parents in Massachusetts. The man, well, whoever he is, he’ll burn in hell. That’s for certain.”
“Maybe she’s still somewhere aboard the ship. There must be places they haven’t searched yet. No one came looking for her here, for instance.”
“I vouchsafed this place, Owen. So you wouldn’t be disturbed. No, she threw herself into the sea, poor child.”
“Horrible.”
“Yes. Horrible. She believed not, and she died in her sins.”
Father went on like that for a while longer, as he often did after preaching or following a particularly upsetting event, muttering scraps and bits of Bible afterward, like sparks flaring in a dying fire. But I barely heard him. I drew into myself and tried to shut my eyes against the vision of the young woman dropping into the black sea, where she is cuffed and rolled and then embraced by the waves, until she is drawn down by the awful weight of her soaked clothing, her long, dark hair coming undone and fanning out above her head as she descends, her arms extended as if for balance, head thrown back for a last glimpse of the starry night above, and when she has no breath remaining, she opens her mouth, and the cold water that surrounds her rushes in and fills her, and her icy body plunges unresisting through the ocean like a shaft of light.
Again and again, I tried to wipe the vision from my eyes, to listen to Father, who was speaking of Deuteronomy now and the laws of treating with those who violate virgins, of the unknown man who had driven this young woman to such an extremity of despair that she would reject the light that God had given her. But his words flew past me like birds.
I hadn’t loved the woman, of course. But I knew that I might have swiftly come to that, and thus her death struck me a blow all out of proportion to the length of our acquaintance. My pain was like an echo of a cry that I had made long years before. Again, I felt not that I had abandoned her but that she had abandoned me, and somehow, as the hours passed, it did not feel like vanity to think that. It felt like anger.
Now I had even more reason to keep to my quarters, and so for the few remaining days of the crossing I nursed my sickness with hurt and gloom and a curiously satisfying kind of mourning—satisfying in that I counted and contemplated all those whom I had lost so far in my short life, and in so doing was distracted from my nausea and general giddiness. Father came and went like a recurrent dream, and I barely knew whether it was night or day.
Until one morning when I woke, and my stomach for the first time seemed settled, and I was genuinely hungry. I sat up in my bunk and placed my feet down on the deck: the ship felt steady beneath me—although clearly we were still at sea and had not yet made land. The waters that carried us had changed, however, as if we had come in off the ocean and were traversing a lake instead.
Then Father appeared at the entrance to our cabin and in high spirits informed me that we had just passed the Scilly Islands off Cornwall and were coasting north in the Irish Sea, headed towards Liverpool. “We’re in Cromwell’s waters,” he said with pleasure. “Imagine that, Owen! Come up and see the headlands off the starboard side. You’ll imagine Cromwell’s forces setting off to conquer and convert the Irish from paganism and papistry. Celts and Angles, Vikings and Romans, Picts and Normans—they’ve been sailing back and forth across these waters for centuries! Conquering and converting one another for a thousand years! It’s wonderful, isn’t it? The mad enthusiasm of these people!” He laughed.
He kept smiling happily and set about packing our two valises, our small luggage. “They’re not like us Yankees, are they? We’re a continental people, you know; they’re island people. And what a difference that makes, eh? They’re like the Fijis and the Hawaiians and those fierce, painted Caribs in their long, sea-going canoes, subduing their island neighbors and then a generation or two later being subdued right back. These days, of course, the Anglo-Saxons are on top and thinking it’ll last for all time. But you wait: someday soon the rowdy Celts’ll be back, and then the Picts. And who knows, maybe the Normans will make another run for it, eh? Napoleon nearly did it, and not too long ago.”
“Could be” I said. “Could be,” I gathered my gear and, after washing my face and neck and dressing in my one fresh shirt, went up on the main deck to enjoy the sight of land. There I saw from north to south a long row of white, low cliffs and beyond them a strip of cultivated fields, bright green, despite the lateness of the season, and overhead a pillowy bank of soft clouds breaking off to a blue sky. There seemed little more than small fishing villages along the shore; the ship was too far out for me to distinguish individual dwellings. No ports or large towns. It was hard to imagine, as Father had, the righteous armies of the faithful massing there.
The salty air was cool against my face. A fair wind blew out of the southwest, and the wheel churned steadily as a mill, and the sails bellied nicely and helped push the ship smartly north. Terns and gulls swooped low over the boat, and several of the passengers—bored merchantmen and supercargoes in shirtsleeves and a grim young man in a frock coat, whom I took to be the atheistic journalist, Mr. Forbes—idly tossed the raucous birds bits of biscuit. The merchants laughed to see the birds fighting amongst themselves and stealing crumbs from one another. The journalist, who watched the men instead of the birds, appeared to be sourly proving some other point.
But like the gulls, I was hungry, and I quickly made my way to the galley, where, although it was long after the hour when breakfast was normally served, I talked the cook into giving me several slices of hard bread and a portion of ’scouse, salt beef and potatoes and peppers mixed in gravy, and a mug of warm cider. Sitting myself down in the sunshine on a bulkhead, I ate and drank, and in short order I was a new man, ready to come ashore, eager to walk on solid ground again.
My melancholy preoccupations had begun to dissipate and scatter like yesterday’s storm clouds in today’s bright sun, when I saw standing portside, next to the rail near the bow, a woman whom I took at once to be Miss Peabody’s aunt. She was situated exactly where I had last seen my friend, when I departed from her that fateful night.
The woman looked somewhat beyond middle-age and was large, unusually so, shaped like a bronze bell, and seemed the picture of solitude and loneliness. She wore a long, black dress with hat and gloves, and her face was covered with a black veil. I could not make out her expression, because of the veil, but she appeared to be looking back out to sea, gazing in the direction we had come, as if making her final goodbye to her poor, drowned niece.
I knew that there was nothing I could do or say that would comfort her. It was such a sad sight, and it so threatened to drop me back into my recent gloom, that I could not bear to watch her, so I picked myself up and strolled back to the stern of the ship, to make there my first casual conversations with the sailors and other men in the crew, conversations and inquiries that, had I not been stricken with seasickness, I would have undertaken at the very beginning of our journey. Now, as we neared our landing at Liverpool, despite the tragic death of Miss Sarah Peabody, and despite my lengthy illness, I found myself in exc
ellent spirits, healthy and well-fed, newly befriended by cheerful, sturdy workingmen, and, concerning our business here, fast becoming as optimistic as the Old Man. I saw that there had been completed, almost without my intending or even hoping for it, a thorough-going transformation in my character and in my relation to my father. The process had commenced in earnest in Boston and had continued during the crossing and now, somehow, inexplicably, it seemed to have been completed by the sad, wasted death of the young woman Sarah Peabody—all accomplished, for the most part, without my awareness or understanding. Until it was over, that is, when—by remembering who and how I had been before, especially in relation to Father—I realized that I had become, in an important sense, a new man. No more the disgruntled, sulky boy who followed his Old Man around and waited for orders that he could resent. No more the pouting, conflicted ape. This new fellow, who had been a reluctant follower, was now an enthusiast, was a proper lieutenant, was a fellow believer! He might fail here and there—fail to act, fail to believe—but he would no longer question his aspirations or his commitment.
Thus I fairly bounced down the gangplank ahead of Father as we disembarked at the crowded quay on the Mersey River, where the Cumbria had docked and was already being unloaded by husky lumpers and stevedores and loaded onto carts and wagons by teamsters. It was a noisy, chaotic hub-bub of a scene: hawkers and higglers in tiny stalls, men in tall beaver hats on horseback and in carriages making their way through the crowd, ragged beggars on crutches with hands held out, a musician in a harlequin’s suit with a monkey on his shoulder and a dancing dog on a string, and meandering gangs of urchins and skinny men in caps who looked like cutpurses; there were merchants, clerks, supercargoes, and shipping agents ticking off goods received and goods about to head out, and shirtless, orange-haired Irishmen lugging barrels and crates. Here and there, a distinguished-looking gentleman or lady arrived by carriage to greet a visitor or collect a parcel. People called and bawled to one another and sometimes grabbed my sleeve and tried to sell me food off their smoking carts: greasy, fried fish wrapped in paper, roasted potatoes, bits of meat on skewers; and old ladies carrying trays filled with jellied sweets accosted me at every turn; everyone was shouting at me, it seemed, but I understood barely a word I heard. Their pronunciation and the speed with which they spoke was all off. It was as if I were not in an English-speaking country at all, or as if I myself did not speak English. There were Negro men working alongside the whites, and Hindoos with turbans, and bearded men in black coats and hats whom I took to be Jews. There were tall, blond, white-skinned Swedes and florid Russians and even a few in the crowd whom I recognized as Americans, long-faced Yankees in black, and tanned Southerners with walking sticks and broad hats and pale suits. I felt that I had arrived in Phoenicia.
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