The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

  “ ‘Augusta,’ he mumbled, ‘this is Jonathan Upchurch, who’ll be yer tutor.’

  “Old Jeremiah seemed to listen to something inside his mind, looking up at nowhere. He kept one arm around the Captain, supporting him.

  “ ‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Augusta said. She patted, half stroked the dog’s head in a way that, by its very innocence, made my maleness quicken.

  “I had no choice but to look up at her now. She curtsied—just perceptibly—and gave me her bewildering smile. I could think nothing at the time, could merely bow, as clumsy as a schoolboy reciting a poem; yet I later devoted many hours—nay, more like weeks—to study of that curtsy and smile. Lying on my berth with my eyes wide open yet blind as Jeremiah’s, or balanced on a yardarm, one hand closed indifferently on a sial-hem or stay, I would summon back that tantalizing image, hunting its secret. It was impish, possibly, as if she were claiming already her inalienable scholar’s right to mock the teacher; but it was something else, too—a suggestion that she knew things from which my kind of mind was sealed off for eternity. Yet the smile was also kindly, I thought, as if she had seen all my faults at one glance—even those buried deepest in my soul’s abditorium—and had lightly, easily forgiven them. And she was, at the same time, perfunctory, formal, as if something in her father’s tone had quite by chance triggered a response of automatic gentility. Because of the direction in which my thought had been inclined to run since Mr. Knight had first brought me Boethius (he’d since brought me Edwards and Spinoza on Free Will), I saw the impishness as Augusta’s line of necessity, the kindness as free, the perfunctory quality as the random stroke of chance. Everything was suddenly clear as day. Yet the very next instant I was downright alarmed at how inadequate all my conceptions were for penetration of the mystery of Augusta.

  “She was seventeen, her father said. Her hair was jet-black—as black as her apparel—with fiery glints of blue in it, flashes like those on the wings of a raven. Though she kept her hair discreetly ribboned, it was rich, luxuriant. Her complexion was not so much fair as pale, ghostly in fact, and had the strangest conceivable effect on me: It made me tremble for her safety, filled me with an ardent and fatuate wish to be near her, protective as her giant dog—though whether it was harm from without or some mysterious egritude of mind that I feared might threaten her, I had no idea. But it was in the eyes of Augusta that I found her chief beauty and the source of her impenetrability. They were the shining gray of storm-charged twilight, larger even than the gazelle eyes of the tribe in the valley of the Nourjahad; and when Augusta was excited— by a line of poetry, an astonishing sunset, the terror of longboats lowered away, or excited perhaps by graver terrors that lurked in some corner of her mystic brain—they had a beauty which can only be described as unearthly, as though her small and perfect body were the house of some Plotinian spirit come down from a paler world to spy.

  “The Captain said, ‘Perhaps ye’d give Mr. Upchurch a general idea of how far ye’ve progressed, Augusta.’

  “She curtsied again. ‘Shall I show you my books?’ She was suddenly as innocent, as ignorant of the world of women and men, the terrible hungry expansion in my trousers, as a child of six years old.

  “ ‘That would help,’ I said, ‘yes.’

  “ ‘This way, then.’ She smiled—rather foxy, it seemed to me, or perhaps scornful of my seaman’s garb and smell, my crooked eyes. She turned away, leading us to the door. I followed, behind the dog, with the Captain and Jeremiah.

  “The dimly lit room into which the door opened was like a genteel parlor back on land, except the larger furniture was bolted down and the chairs—dark-blue velvet with studs of brass, as near as I could tell in that somber darkness—had staying chains. Here all four walls were lined with bookshelves, interrupted only by space for two doors and the great, square ports—velvet-draped and as solemn as the chairs—two oil lamps that gave out just the barest little flimmer, and a badly damaged portrait, a mustached, wild-eyed man. As I stepped toward the portrait to examine it more closely, Augusta sang out in a voice filled with, I’d have sworn, sheer terror, ‘Ah, here they are, Mr. Upchurch!’ When I turned, she reached toward me an old leather-bound volume of Ovid, her hand violently trembling. From the dog’s throat came a low, uncertain rumble.

  “Baffled, panicky, I took the book from Augusta and opened it. I pretended to listen as she explained to me how far she’d got and what her difficulties were, but my whole attention was fixed, really, on the miraculous change that had come over her. Her words poured out in a wild flood, her bosom heaved, her gray eyes blazed, she was unable to hide the violent shaking of her fingertips. I couldn’t for the life of me think how I’d frightened her or, indeed, how any mortal could so frighten another. It made me more shy, more clumsy than ever. I suffered a curious impression of coldness, as if we were standing at the border of the mediums’ much-touted ‘Beyond.’ Whether the coldness was objective or merely an effect of my extreme agitation, something suggested by the books all around me—volumes on famous hauntings, visions, and other such matters—I was in no condition to determine. Nevertheless, I managed to bring out some expression of satisfaction with her scholarship, and we turned to her work on cyphering. She became somewhat calmer. (Was it sensual, quisquos old Ovid that unnerved her?) I turned with a nod to the Captain to impart my impression that all was sure to go well. He’d moved slightly, still leaning on Jeremiah, coming over behind me so that he stood directly in the way of my view of the painting. He responded with his curious, aloof bow, and I thought in the dimness that his face was distinctly pale. I returned my attention, what I could summon of it, to Augusta once more, and the business of determining where to take up her education was soon dispatched. I gave her lessons for preparation next morning, and we agreed that I would come to go through them with her the following afternoon. Our business finished, I suddenly became all self-consciousness again. She was looking at my chin in a way I’d got used to after nineteen years—the expression of one who is carefully not looking at my eyes. She smiled abruptly, flicked her gaze up to meet mine, then away. ‘I’m dreadfully grateful to you, Mr. Upchurch.’ I too smiled—a thing I couldn’t have managed for mere politeness—smiled because I couldn’t help it. I was enslaved. ‘The pleasure’s entirely mine,’ I said, so formal I’d likely have burst out laughing if it weren’t for her strange behavior earlier, that peculiar trembling, so that I gave the formality she seemed to require, gave it unthinkingly, as though it was the naturalest thing in the world.

  “I turned back to the Captain, trying to steal one more glance at the painting, but he gave me no chance, tottering toward me, studiously ignoring my extended hand, subtly moving me backwards toward the door. In the outer cabin he remembered something, excused himself and, with the blind man’s help, stepped back into the inner apartment for a word with his daughter. He returned looking morose and abstracted, as it seemed to me—still deathly pale—stood puffing at his pipe and staring at the floor, and told me without much animation what an excellent find I was on a whaler. Then, with Jeremiah’s assistance he led me, or rather, subtly drove me, out onto the poopdeck. There, himself keeping out of the sunlight, in the doorway, he held me a moment longer with his eye—his eyes were as dead-looking as his daughter’s were praeternaturally alive—and after an instant’s hesitation, said: ‘I appreciate yer breeding, Mr. Upchurch. I know pretty well how queer it seems to discover a young lady on a Nantuck whaler, not to mention my own …’ He gestured vaguely, indicating, perhaps, his illness, then dully finished: ‘I appreciate yer tact and discretion.’

  “ ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said.

  “He seemed not to hear me. He was thinking, I supposed, of other things—some old and familiar matter of concern: the grumblings of his sailors, or some trouble on the far-distant planet he hailed from. It came to me that he’d ingeniously blocked me from ever inquiring about the ship’s mysteries.

  “ ‘Ye’ve made friends among the men?’ he asked.
r />   “ ‘Oh yes, sir.’ I nodded.

  “He looked at me with his beard behind his fist, his head lowered, so oddly like a great, black, hunchbacked bear that a shiver went through me. His eyes became unnaturally still, full of violence, or so I imagined.

  “ ‘Good lad,’ he said at last. ‘The things of this world have their place, it may be. But keep a look-out.’

  “ ‘I will, sir,’ I said, considerably puzzled.

  “Blind Jeremiah, standing just behind the Captain, gave me a nod, a hint that Captain Dirge should be subjected to no more strain.

  “ ‘Good-night, sir,’ I said.

  “The Captain said nothing. He’d forgotten my existence, his eyes rolled up for a peek at the sky. His silk-gloved hands rested lightly on his beard, and his large, frail body was drooped on Jeremiah as if the life had all drained out of it.

  “The next afternoon, when I went to hear my pupil’s recitation, the Captain was fast asleep on his bunk—I saw him through the hatch. He was snoring horribly. Blind Jeremiah was nowhere to be seen. The painting they’d kept me from looking at had vanished.”

  XV

  “What a tale!” cries the guest with a laugh like an explosion. “I swear, all the lightnings of Scheherazade can’t hold a candle to it!”

  “Ye think so, do ye?” the mariner cries, and gets an eager expression.

  But the angel is staring out the window, blank. The woods have grown darker. There are crows in the trees, and even in the inn there’s an autumnal smell. The hollow-eyed dead have begun to shuffle away again, remembering their business. They move, soundlessly, through fields of sheep.

  The mariner notices the direction of the angel’s look and grows sober. “It’s always easier in the winding up than in the carrying on, of course,” says he. “There’s many a stagnating calm to slip past, that’s the truth of the matter, and many a tedious obstruction to be circumnavigated.”

  “That’s true, I’ll grant,” the guest confesses. He shows a flicker of distress and glances at the clock. But it’s early yet, inside the room, or so he appears to persuade himself. His decision grows firmer. “We’ve got our work cut out for us, that’s so.” He chuckles sternly. But the guest looks increasingly dependable, determined. He forces a somewhat louder chuckle, puts one hand on the mariner’s arm, and with the other he bangs the table. BANG! “You with the golden wings—more spirits!”

  The angel gets up quickly, absent-mindedly puts the pipe in his pocket, where it continues to smoke, goes out and at once returns with a bottle. The guest and mariner lean forward, solemn as the devil, though smiling hopefully, racking their brains. The angel pours.

  XVI

  “So began the period of my joyful enslavement. Not a spar, not a scrap of sail remained from my jolly independence—young man’s idiocy, I called it now—dressed up, bepowdered like a New York donzel, spiffed like a Frenchman on promenade. Wherever my thought turned, the world was filled with a delicious hope, as sweet with incense as Augusta’s room. I looked back on Reverend Dunkel now with profound respect, as if his sermonizing by the cellar chute had borne up from the waters of chaos and unfolded into the universe petal by petal the Brahma Himself. ‘Discipline!’—aye!—for me, too, now, it was a word wrapped in glory. No man can know what purpose the most trivial events may serve in the grand but for us inscrutable scheme of Providence. I might now thank God for having thrown me in with pirates and nearly drowning me that night, for cracking my ribs and once more dulling my wits on Latin, and driving me thence to the rigging, where … The purpose of this last was not quite so plain, God’s plan for me being, presumably, not yet revealed in all particulars; but I did not specially worry the matter. The general design was clear and radiantly blessed.

  “When I spoke of Augusta to Billy More he was astounded.

  “ ‘Preposterous,’ he said. ‘If there’s a woman on this ship, I’ll eat my hat. Yer up to yer same old tricks, I’ll wager!’ Though he smiled, he looked crafty, like Ebenezer Frye at the county fair when he considers he may have been hornswoggled.

  “ ‘Think what ye please,’ says I. ‘What I know I know, that’s all.’

  “Wilkins was laboring at his low bench behind us, or pretending to—bent over like a monkey, till his eyes were three, four inches from the coils he struggled with. With every further hour he put in on those clock-parts, the thing he was constructing looked less like a clock, though it resembled nothing else much neither.

  “ ‘The Captain claims it’s his daughter, ye say?’ says Billy More.

  “ ‘So he introduced her,’ says I, and continues my devilish careful shoe-shining.

  “ ‘Well I be damned,’ he says, and shakes his head, grinning. He calls over to Wilkins—acting, just now, as if Wilkins and he was boon companions: ‘Ye heard the latest from our pirate, Wilkins?’

  “Wilkins tips up his wicked little frog-head—frog-mouth half-open, eyes like shaded lanterns.

  “ ‘He’s deep, that Jonathan Upchurch,’ says Wilkins, and he gives me a wink. What he uses for twiddling those screws like mites’ eggs is a double-edge dagger about six inches long and lighter in his hand than a partridge feather. ‘He’ll come to no good, you mark my word,’ says Wilkins, and gives me another good wink. ‘If he ain’t up to some kind of confidence game, then I’ll be a bow-legged albatross.’

  “ ‘Tell us what she looks like,’ says Billy More.

  “I oblige him as well as I’m able to—I’ve never yet seen her except once by starlight and twice in the dimness of that inner room— and Billy More’s face gets increasingly astonished. At last he breaks in on me, thumping on his big bony knees with his fists. ‘I swear, the more I see of ye, Johnny, the more I wonder if ye really was a pirate once. Ye’ve set down the Captain’s daughter to a T. I’ve seen her myself, fact is—though never on shipboards.’

  “ ‘I hope ye got a spare hat,’ says I.

  “ ‘Ha ha,’ says Billy More, and sits watching my shoe-rag slap.

  “If he was still uncertain, the fault wasn’t altogether his, I confess. Despite all Augusta’s good influence on me, I was too much the son of my yarn-spinning, card-forcing, tricky-footed father to make everything as plain as I might’ve done. There’s a curious pleasure, for a certain kind of soul, in keeping a card or two tucked in his suspenders. (Even that palaverer Reverend Dunkel knew it, telling me that time that the part ye understand is ‘irrelevant.’) What I said to Billy More was the solemn truth, but something in my spirit—some wisdom as old as the Devonian fish, it may well be—made me frame it with a smile like Pious John the Pirate’s. What we claim we desire in this vale of tears is resplendent truth, distinct bits of certainty that ring like dubloons, but that very claim is, like everything else in the universe, a skinner, a bamboozle, an ingenious little trick for out-sharping the card-shark gods.

  “With the Captain’s daughter, nevertheless, I meant to be as honest as the day is long, whatever my manner was with commoner souls. So I curled my tresses on my fingers and shined ‘em with candle-wax, nights, and polished my teeth till they glittered and winked like Hawaiian pearls, and I let no syllable fall from my lips that wouldn’t be proper at a Synod meeting. There’s honesty for you in the grand old sense!—foolsgold from Plato and the Bible (as journals for young ladies construe it). I was in love, in short. As instinctively cunning as the peacock displaying what he normally drags indifferently through dirt. And exactly like the peacock or the preening mouse, I was fooled myself, to the bottom of my soul, by my antics—and also by Augusta’s.

  “As I worked with her, almost every afternoon, what had struck me most powerfully at first began to have a lessened effect—her extraordinary beauty. Like the ship’s darker mysteries, her beauty became familiar, and in time I hardly noticed it, as a rich man hardly notices his wealth. I would notice it, to be precise, only when Augusta betrayed what I swore was her ‘true’ nature.

  “At times Augusta was the emblem of virginal simplicity and goodness. Smiling at her
work and enjoying it, enjoying the roll of the sea, enjoying my company, too—reddened sunlight needling through the curtained, stained-glass ports and coming back to life in her coal-black hair, her ghostly features innocently relaxed, sweetly unguarded— she made me understand the medieval image of the Virgin Mary, and not as some vulnerary hope for the desperate but as an actual human possibility, a fleshed ideal. I reveled, at such moments, in the quickness of her mind, her uncanny gift for piercing to the heart of the most abstruse speculations, questions that should puzzle a woman three, four times her age; and I reveled in the sensibleness of her emotions, her ability for instance to write poems precisely descriptive of her feelings and poised precisely between over- and under-valuation of the emotion’s place in the general scheme of things. My pleasure wasn’t grounded in the faa that it was I who’d made clear what the metaphysical problem was, nor, in the case of her poems, that it was I who’d taught her the poetic means that freed her to make every poem her spirit’s own portrait. My pleasure came out of the Truth itself, which I’d helped her to reach and which embraced us both and would outlast us both.

  “She’d hone away at a poem for hours, until I began to fear that her father would be cross at my failing to press her on her other studies. It was more than diligence, that poetry writing, it seemed to me. It was as if, with a finely wrought lady’s bower of decisions and spells, she was striving, superhumanly intense, to lock out the enemy who’d stolen already as near as her death-pale cheeks. With the instinctual wisdom of the frail, she meant to seize the good, know its value beyond mere convention, and raise up that value like an exorcist’s cross against extinction. She gave me, for instance, this curious poem, which she handed over with a shy smile and the words, ‘Here’s a grave little love poem for you, Jonathan.’ It was called ‘An Invitation.’

  After the last

  Grave bell,

  After the ghost