The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

  “Though I didn’t know it at the time, of course—following Mr. Knight to the Captain’s cabin—I was not the only man on board who was secretly half in love with her, or in love, rather, with a Dantesque image of beauty and gentleness untestable, unreachable, and no doubt ultimately unreal. The half-breed Wilkins, I learned much later, had more than once made bold to speak with her. In the end, there was the great-shouldered mastiff, with a growl like a tornado’s, and Wilkins came out with his shoulder half torn away. Henceforth, she had privacy. True—this too I found out later—the first mate, Mr. Knight, sometimes spoke with her; but he wasn’t much, lately, at casual conversation. With the Captain’s daughter, as with the rest of us, when asked a question, Mr. Knight would smile, his mind still torturing that darker question that consumed him these days, and would shake his head, purse his lips, and in the end say nothing.

  “Mr. Knight and I, I ought to mention, were more familiar now. In the span between kills, life is quiet on a whaler. Mr. Knight would come near where I was working and would watch me, and to keep him on his toes I’d chat with him. I told him such tales as would make an undistracted man’s eyes pop out. Tales of pillage and murder and Lord knows what. He believed every word of it, of course, and none of it. He continued to bring books from the Captain’s cabin, and at times we talked sober philosophy. I learned early in life that any man not fiercely committed to a single point of view is as apt a philosopher as anybody else. I learnt it from performers on the Boston stage—magicians, I mean, or bunkum professors like that old devil Flint—men secretly tying and untying knots, dropping mirrors into boxes, firing pistols, pushing levers, and all the while solemnly declaiming the opinions of Leibniz or Marx or Winckelmann. Mr. Knight had a good deal of curiosity about things, for the most part on wholly unrelated subjects. He had a mind like sheepswool, not active or searching but capable of fixing like the devil on any little bur that might happen to land on it. He was puzzled by the ways of beasts and plants. He’d observed a good deal, in his random way: subtle alterations of beak and claw as one passed from equatorial latitudes north or south. He’d run across the curious theories of Goethe, in Metamorphose der Pflanzen, and the theory of “organic force” in Müller. He’d heard some strange theory that eggs feel terror, that plants can sense things and keep watch on a friend—a human being, a spider— from miles away.

  “ ‘Ye don’t believe that!’ I said.

  “ ‘It’s a proven fact. Read this.’ He extracted from his money-pouch, carefully unfolded, then handed to me a yellowed bit of paper from some science magazine. I read: At a test at Prague University we introduced a gardenia to a spider, then took the spider from the room. We released the spider on a dark stairway and had someone try to find it. Meanwhile someone else watched the sensor device which we’d affixed to the gardenia, and whenever the sensor showed excitement in the plant, the observer would shout, ‘You’re close!’ to the pursuer of the spider. In this manner, we were able to locate the spider every time.

  “ ‘Dogs,’ said Mr. Knight, ‘have been known to find their masters from a half a continent away.’ He gazed off, troubled, at the horizon.

  “Mr. Knight took an interest in astronomy, too, which he seemed to think somehow related. Whatever the subject, I held forth with the wisdom of the Man in the Moon, claiming I’d heard it from Goethe himself when we met one time in Zeeland. The first mate would pick at his chin and frown, staring, full of sorrow, at the calm night sea, and at times he’d heave a great sigh like a man condemned. I knew pretty well what his trouble was. His natural science was scuttling his religion. Then more fool he! I might have felt sympathy, if I’d let myself, but that was a luxury I couldn’t afford. It would make me one of them, one more helpless victim on that ship of slaves and prisoners. (Overweening young fool, ye may say; and I confess it.) However, I gave a bit of thought to his theories.

  “I might mention he was interested in voodoo, too—an interest he’d no doubt acquired from the Captain. Old Dirge had books on the Hindoo occult and mesmerism and the transmigration of souls. He practiced experiments in thought transference, or so I was told by Mr. Knight, and he received, whenever a whaler had mail for us, letters and packets from the British Society for Psychic Research. Mr. Knight, whenever we touched on such subjects, was like a man at the end of his tether. He had facts corpuscular and facts crepuscular, messages from Newton and news from the company of table rappers, but the connector his Methodism longed for had vanished: the moral principle, the arc-flash, the man with the halo. Mere fact was killing him. His sighs got so deep they seemed to rise out of his shoes, and the way he would screw up his eyes made me fear for his vision.

  “Tonight, as he led me to the Captain’s cabin, I felt no temptation to converse with Mr. Knight, and, as for him, he was quiet as snow on a fencepost. I could form no opinion what manner of thoughts was molesting him, and I could gather from his long-legged walk no clue to the Captain’s disposition. I’d had no idea, before this instant, of the extent to which I was afraid of the mysterious man who’d summoned me. I thought, without a smile, of Reverend Dunkel’s talk, long ago, of Discipline, ‘her subjects standing in the stocks … limbs swollen and lacerated …’

  “At the cabin door, Mr. Knight stood listening, head bowed, for a moment. Then he knocked. The curtains on the windows were shut and I could see no light behind them. Mr. Knight knocked again and, at last, in a queerly muffled voice, the Captain called, ‘Come in, sir!’ Mr. Knight opened the door and swung it inward, then stepped back, allowing me to enter. As soon as I’d done so, groping a little, since the room was dark as an opium den, the door closed softly behind me.

  XIII

  “Take my word for it, you never in all your days did see such a room as was that one. From top to bottom the bulkheads was draped in dark red velvet—not for beauty, it was plain, but for some reason more sinister, or, at any rate, such was my immediate impression. The cloth was stained, cracked, creased, frayed, moth-eaten like a hundred-year-old theater curtain from a hall destroyed by fire. The Captain’s furniture was equally abnormal: great padded dark-green leather chairs such as captains of industry might sit in—or might have sat in years ago, when they were new—and a black oak chart-table that might have seen service, a century ago, in some conference room. In the room’s four corners there were tall narrow mirrors that it seemed to me could have only one purpose: They protected the Captain from any mortal man’s sneaking up on him. I’d heard from my father tales of the oddity of captains of whalers—they’re a fierce and arrogant breed, the whole lot of them, and more than one’s gone mad out there cruising on his terrible business—but the oddity of Captain Dirge was a little beyond what I’d ever heard mention of. There was only one lamp on, a whale-oil lantern suspended from a chain above the chart-table. It was there at that table that the Captain was sitting, and close beside him was the blind man, Jeremiah. They had their backs to me as I entered the cabin. The blind man turned his face toward me. As for the Captain, he showed no sign of awareness that I’d come. He sat humpbacked and motionless, bent over his charts, so still I’d have thought he was dead except for the occasional puff of smoke from his pipe.

  “ ‘You sent for me, sir?’ I said at last.

  “The Captain gave a curious, belated jerk but otherwise ignored me. Old Jeremiah raised a finger to his lips and said, so softly that I could barely hear him—his face all lit up like a man just interrupted from ecstasy—‘Speak quieter, lad. The Captain’s a man of most delicate sensibilities. Too much noise, too much light, and he suffers like a man in hellfire.’

  “I nodded, apologetic, and kept quiet. I’d have sworn those blind eyes were studying me hard, with the joyous fascination of a lion getting ready to come bounding off his rock, but I had, just now, no time to give thought to Jeremiah; my attention was fixed on Captain Dirge. He was a largish man dressed all in black, with a half-length cape of the kind you might see on a coachman down in front of the opera house. His hair was as black
as the clothes he wore, but streaked with gray, and it was long and curly—not hair to be vain of: coarse as the hair on a mountain goat or the stuffings in a sofa.

  “At last, slowly, jittering like a man with delirium tremens, he turned his head and revealed his bushy black beard and his pockmarked, dead-looking nose. Because of his deformity—that hump like a whale’s—his face aimed floorward, and he was forced to compensate by rolling up his eyes. It was clear the first moment you looked in those eyes that the Captain was a very sick man and, it could be, drunk to boot. I’d been aware from the instant I entered the room, though only now did I come altogether conscious of it, that the cabin reeked of whiskey worse than a distillery. He leaned forward a little, as if thinking of getting up, then thought better of it.

  “ ‘Come over here, son, where a body can see you.’

  “I obeyed instantly, moving around to the side of the table and standing with my hands behind my back, trying to meet his eyes. It was impossible. It gave me such creeps and crawls along my spine I blame near bolted. And his face was no better. A more wrinkled, more unsightly visage I never encountered in all this world. He had bushy black eyebrows as coarse and curly as the hair that rolled down off the top of his head or ramdiked out as his mustache and beard. But no doubt the thing that made it all so horrific was that the clothes the man wore was the soul of elegance, as if the Captain took pleasure in his foul appearance and meant to set it off the way you’d set off a first-class painting.

  “He raised one silk-gloved, lace-cuffed hand to his pipe and kept it there, fingertips lightly touching the bowl, not really holding it. ‘So you’re the terrible pirate Jonathan Upchurch,’ he said.

  “I nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  “His eyes never moved at all, never flickered, never blinked. He was as still and remote from head to foot as a creature from a planet with seven times less gravity than ours, and his words, when he spoke, were as cool as an Assyrian god’s, or a spider’s. ‘Jonathan Upchurch, yer a liar,’ he said.

  “I went red, maybe purple. ‘Yes, sir.’ The confession, for all its simplicity, brought a flood of relief I could hardly understand. I felt like a man who, by sudden impulse, has dropped a hundred dollars in a collection plate.

  “Perhaps behind where the beard and mustache met he smiled— such was my impression, though Heaven knows how I could’ve formed it. His horrible face went on staring at me.

  “ ‘Yer name, sir. Yer true name.’

  “There was no escaping him, no way in the world to outbold those glittering eyes. I had, for that matter, no desire to escape. I rushed to the abyss as if I thought it my soul’s last hope. ‘Jonathan Adams Upchurch,’ I said.

  “He reached toward the whiskey bottle, then decided against it. “Where d’ye come from?’ he said.

  “ ‘Boston, sir. I was a schoolmaster.’

  “ ‘Ye telling lies again?’

  “ ‘No, sir. It’s the truth.’

  “He lowered his head some and seemed to consider it, still as eternity, except for that trembling; he looked like a malevolent, humpbacked, black-whiskered Buddha. At last he said, his voice so muffled that it might have been coming from another room, ‘There’s some aboard this ship that maintains yer from farther west. Some claims ye got a particular knowledge of the Mississippi River.’

  “ ‘Just from books,’ I said. ‘It’s a place I meant to go visit someday.’

  “He showed no sign of hearing. ‘Ye act like a man from the Mississippi River. I never been there myself, but I’ve heard stories. I b’lieve yer a Mississippi flimflam man.’

  “Why it should seem to me important that I convince Captain Dirge that I was telling the truth, after all my pains to throw the others off, is difficult to say. His fundamental inhumanness, perhaps. I may have needed to strike from him some spark of humanity to answer and reassure my own. In any case, it was desperately important, or so I thought. I reached out and almost touched him, my face no doubt clownish with agony and appeal. ‘It really is the truth, Captain.’

  “He considered some more, then granted me a queerly formal little bow and changed the subject. ‘Yer a Latin scholar, I’m given to understand.’

  “ ‘I know some Latin, yes, sir.’

  “ ‘And Greek?’

  “ ‘No, sir.’ I could feel myself blushing.

  “He slid his eyes toward old Jeremiah as if not only disappointed but fiercely annoyed. However, he went on to other questions. ‘Ye can cypher?’ he asked softly. ‘Ye know yer geography? The study of the Bible?’

  “Weak-kneed, trembling, I answered all his questions with scrupulous honesty. He bore down with such energy on the interrogation—though neither his face nor his body ever moved, and his voice was just a whisper—that I began to be a little befuddled and confused, almost wondering if I ever really had, as I claimed, been a schoolmaster. Drunk or not—I was now pretty certain he was drunk—Captain Dirge’s words came out relatively clear—though hushed and muffled, if not slurred—and his wits were as sharp as a lawyer’s. What he had in mind I had no idea. His face showed absolutely nothing, not merely because of the dimness in the room, though that was part of it, but mainly because he was capable of masking all hint of emotion, if he felt any. He would’ve been a marvel of a poker player. (He had, on one side of his table, a chess game in progress.) It suddenly struck me he was quizzing me exactly like a prospective employer, minutely testing not only my acquaintance with my subject matter but my morality as well. The very instant that thought occurred to me, an incredible speculation began to tremble into life at the back of my mind. I felt the blush rising through my neck again, and a terrible excitement invaded my chest, such a turbulence of hope and dread that my voice became a quaver. Somewhere here on the Jerusalem Captain Dirge had a daughter—far from home, far from school—! The Captain noticed my agitation and immediately broke off his questionings.

  “ ‘Ye must forgive me,’ he said, sitting motionless’ as ever. ‘I don’t ask ye these things, as it may seem, from idle curiosity.’ He turned and looked toward the door leading to his inner chambers. It seemed to me from the way he sat bent over, his head inclined toward the small, closed door, that he meant to call her, his daughter—the beautiful Augusta! I’d sink away in a deliquium at sight of her, I thought. My head became filled with the vision of her standing above me, with soft, blinking starlight behind her, and I felt a faintness coming over me even now. Would I dare to speak to her? Unthinkable! She’d laugh me to scorn, remembering that first encounter with me, Jonathan Upchurch laid out flat on his back, having gone down the poopdeck companionway head over heels like a bumpkin at the fair. Never in this world, after such an embarrassment, could I face my vision of feminine perfection, my soul’s desire, Augusta. Yet now I was certain he meant to call her in, and my hope that he would was as boundless as my shame and dread.

  “He turned to study me, expressionless as always. ‘Ye seem very young to be a schoolmaster.’

  “ ‘Nineteen, sir,’ I said.

  “For once what he was thinking shone clear in his eyes, or so it seemed to me: that nineteen is very young indeed, and that nothing on earth is more flatly ridiculous, more outlandish and tiresome, than youth. But he did not say it.

  “I added, ‘Almost twenty, actually.’ A bold-faced lie. Yet my voice was firm, my stance, it seemed to me, casual. I amazed myself.

  “The Captain touched blind Jeremiah’s arm, feebly signaling for help, and Jeremiah stood up and assisted Captain Dirge to his feet. The Captain said, ‘I have a daughter, Mr. Upchurch, that I’d like ye to act as a tutor for.’

  “I pretended to hesitate.

  “ ‘Her name’s Augusta.’

  “My throat went dry as cobwebs and locked up my voice. “Captain Dirge, leaning hard on the blind man, went over to the door, opened it a crack, and called his daughter to the room”.

  XIV

  “Augusta! Not the greatest of alchemists could have unlocked the mysteries of my dark Rosarium or expl
ained her contradictions. She was as elusive and baffling as the world itself. Emblem of womanly generosity, yet spiteful and mean; honest as sunlight, yet devious, wily; soft, unbelievably gentle, yet ferocious. She was a place, a climate, a direction, but I could find no bearings. She was Arcadia and Sodom, the ideal pattern of Nature, the idea of Evil. I knew all this, with a part of my mind, from the first instant. It was as if we’d been acquainted for centuries.

  “When she came through the door I glanced away, watching the monster who accompanied her, Alastor, her low-slung mastiff, dusty, heavy as a lion. He merely rolled his glance past me. The girl, without seeming to do so, studied me. I felt myself turning pure object, stulted—flatfooted and defeatured as a cider barrel—and then the next instant I was a riot of particulars, all ill-considered, flambuginous. I was dizzy with the awareness of the undue proportions of my hands and feet, and I was sickened with shame at the flaw I had heretofore suffered more or less philosophically, my eyes’ misalignment. The room filled solid with her Edenic and unartificial scent, the delicate, slaughtering sound of her rustling skirt.

  “The Captain stood bent over, puffing at his pipe, uglier than ever beside his daughter.