'What did you do?' we asked Cave.
'I read to him.'
He took out his Bible which he had carried inside his jacket.
'It is your Bible, not his. He is a Roman.'
'That need not matter.'
'What passage did you read him?'
'Whatever page I opened at.' He shrugged. 'A genealogy. It had no meaning for him, he does not understand the English. It would not matter if it were a Bible or a book of tides.'
Men spoke in whispers for fear the sound would carry in the sharpness of the clearing air.
'Before God, how can this be?'
'How is it that he has done such a thing, this man whom we all knew as no more than an ordinary man, like as not to any one of us? How was that that he alone of all of us could drive this devil out?'
'He came down from the mountain so calm and easy, as if he would have us think that nothing had occurred.'
'He has some power. He hides it from us.'
'Did you hear what he said? He said it would not matter if it were a book of tides from which he read. Did he dare to do this thing without the help of God?'
'No,' I said, 'it is not that. It is just that the man does not know English, that it matters not what words they were but what words he believed them to be.'
I thought it wrong that they talked so, that such suspicion might surround an act of goodness which we had each one of us observed. I did not like the direction in which their words tended. Questions passed from man to man, spun amongst us like the strands of the thinning mist.
'He knows something about this place that we do not know, something that allowed his survival.'
'No ordinary man could have lived that winter through. Didn't we all say that from the first?'
'Then how?'
'There is some power in this beyond nature.'
'And consider, the extraordinary stillness of the air these past days, is that also of nature?'
'It gives a man the need to pray.'
I heard it said that it was Cave who had held us there beyond our time of departure, that it was in his power to call the winds to take us away. There was a whisper even, light as vapour and I could not say from whom it had come, that the lost boat was bewitched by him.
Even when we set sail these thoughts did not die but surrounded Cave and kept him apart.
England
20
ASLUGGlSH SEA, a smear of green, a grey rivermouth that we rode up with the tide. It was many years since Cave had set foot in his native land but he did not say how many.
I had thought that England would make him glad. Yet I saw no sign of it, no expression on him but a kind of vague bewilderment. I saw him on the gangplank, he was so tall and spare that he made a distinct figure among those who surrounded him, and he stood and hesitated a moment as if he must build up nerve for what would follow. And then he gave a kind of shrug, and stretched that long body that had been cramped up so many days on the ship, and stepped down on to the crowded quay. For some way his head showed above the level of the crowd, and he broke a passage through it with determined strides so that the world seemed to ripple back and did not touch him.
So it was wherever he went in the months that followed. He held himself intact from men and none came close to him. I can say this because I spent more time with him than anyone. For some months I travelled and lived with him and yet even I could not have said truthfully that I knew him, that I knew what went on within him, though I observed him closely, with the kind of close and superficial attention a boy will give to a man who might be his model or his hero, though I could have enumerated so many of the little intimacies of his life, what were his tics of manner, how he chewed his meat and when his bowels moved, the way his fingers quivered as they reached for his fiddle or hovered about the narrow bowl of his pipe, how he slept with a thin snore and mutterings that sometimes seemed so coherent that I looked for meaning in them, only they were in no language that I have heard before or since.
It was because of the Captain that I went with him. But for Captain Marmaduke I think that Cave would have vanished then and there from my life, striding out of it with the barrel of heels to sell, and his chest and his violin and his wager. His story would have remained as a curious memory, no more, maturing into something distant and half-believed like a myth. I would not have come back to puzzle over him after twenty years, nor been driven as I was last summer to leave my home for a time and attempt to seek him out.
When the cargo was dispersed each man of the crew came to the Heartsease — an ill name it had become - to collect the share that was due to him and take his leave of the Captain, who had remained black with grief in his cabin all the time since we had come in and scarcely set foot ashore. For Thomas Cave there was the money from the wager, that we had signed for all of a long year before, in addition to his pay from this voyage and what I had held for him from the previous one: some considerable wealth this was, all in all, though you would not have thought it for the meagre look on him. The Captain in parting asked what he would do with it and Cave answered only that it would take him home, and spoke the word like it was a strange and surprising destination.
'In Heaven's Name, man, it will take you farther than that!' said the Captain, waking for a moment from his sad stupor, and Cave said only yes, that he trusted so.
There was a pause between them then, each man lost once more in some grim thought of his own, and then the Captain came back to himself and reached out his hand to Cave and said that he was a brave man and wished him luck.
Then his eye chanced on me and it seemed that he spoke on impulse: 'Take the boy with you, Thomas, as he's headed in the same direction.' I think that it was a kind of care for me because I made him think of Edward. And he pointed out a ship that was readying for Yarmouth and said that her master was a friend of his, and we were gone that same day.
We came to Yarmouth and then here to Swole, and for all that time there were others about us, sailors and a couple of others paying passage like ourselves, and Cave was shy amongst us. Once he heard me begin to tell the story of the wager, too loud I am sure, I was puffed up with the adventure though I had had in truth only the tiniest piece in it, and Cave interrupted me then and called me to him; and that was the only time that I can remember him taking an active part in our intercourse. I thought that he was to tell me off for giving away among strangers the knowledge of the money he carried, knowledge that might travel about him and bring the thieves on him when we touched land, but it was not that. No, he told me only but in hard terms that he would have me not speak any further word of what he had done, wager or no wager, nor even to suggest to any man that such a winter might be lived.
'Not a word, my boy, promise me that. Let no man conceive it possible, no man follow me there.'
'Why? Was it so terrible as that?'
'You misunderstand me,' he said, and there was a bitter note in his voice. 'It is not for the men I say this, but for the rest. Let the men look out for themselves.'
I confess that I was at first a little afraid of him. Not of any physical aspect of him, but of something else, what he was or what he knew. I was not altogether without superstition. Yet from Swole we went for two days on foot, the pair of us alone skirting the marsh and then cutting across the open heath going inland, and in that time we did not speak much, nor did he say anything particular to put my mind at rest, but only walked, and I learnt that there is no better companionship than to walk with a man, stride for stride. In the silence of walking I watched him, and as the hours and the miles passed my wariness faded, and I came to trust him, if for nothing more than the steadiness of his pace, which kept even throughout the day, and the wintry clarity of his eyes.
When we reached my home my family welcomed us with joy and tears, my little sister shot up like a woman and my mother crying at seeing another of her children being so grown and travelled. They took Cave in as my friend and he stayed with us till Christmas but soon as that day wa
s passed he came to some silent decision, took up his few things and said that he would be gone.
My mother, who was a woman full of heart, took me aside.
'What great sorrow is it in your friend that he has no other person to hold to, that he broods so, all alone?'
I thought that good reason to break my promise, just this once, to my mother alone, and recounted to her the extraordinary tale of his hermitude.
'There's something more, something behind it all,' she went on, but I told her grandly that such was the life of the sea, that an adventurer such as Cave had seen more on this earth than a mere woman could possibly imagine, and she laughed and said what a man I had become, though she looked at me like I was still a child as she said it.
Later she came to me again, and she had packed some provisions, cheese and bacon, and told me that she could see what I wanted, that it would do no harm and might indeed be kindness to keep company with him a while more before I went back to sea.
'You do not have to go.' Cave hesitated as we walked away, looked at me and back at my family waving. 'Why not stay with them?'
'There are too many of us to make a living there.'
'There's other work besides the sea.'
'It's what I want.'
'What do you want?'
'To travel, see the world. You know how it is.'
'Do I?'
'Oh yes, sir. Think of all the places you and the others have told me of, the wonders in them. The Azores and the islands of the Indies, the forests of Virginia and the painted people there, the river big as a sea where Raleigh sailed in search of Eldorado. The beasts and creatures and coloured birds, the naked coal-skinned women whom they sell for slaves. I would not know about these things if you had not told me of them.'
'But those are only stories,' he said. 'You can hear them at home by the fire.'
I thought that odd in a man that had gone and seen so much as he.
Cave chose our way though I could not tell if there was sense in the road he took. In winter so much of the land looked alike, the stripped fields, the glassy river that spilled out across the meadows, the bent black arms of the trees, the holes and ruts that we must watch beneath our feet.
'Where do we go?' I asked.
He looked to the horizon. That's what Cave did, he looked to the horizon or he looked to the ground before him; his eyes rarely seemed to pause on the level between where they might meet another's.
'Will we go on now to the village that you come from?'
There was a hamlet that we passed through, early, so early that the day was only beginning in it. The steam of morning rose from the pig pens in the yards beside the road where we walked, rising into the cold air off the animals' backs as they came out to eat, and from the sheds behind came the lowing of cattle and the shuffle of milking.
Cave stood in the middle of the street and surveyed it, stood so still that the hens came and pecked about the mud where it was turned by his stick.
'Is this it? Are we there?'
He looked from one house to the next, at door and window and thatch and chimney, looked at the people who passed as if they also were made of wood and mud and straw. A cold drizzle had begun to fall and put their heads down so that they did not seem to see us. They were bleary anyway and blinkered before their work that time of day.
'Shall we stop?'
'No,' said Cave, 'it is too early to stop. We might do many miles today.' He wore no hat and already his hair and beard were dark with the rain and stuck about his face.
When I hesitated he said again, 'Let us go on. I have no business here.'
The rain fell harder as he spoke and the place seemed to contract before us. I was sure that this was it, this must have been his home, and I felt a terrible disappointment for him. It was so bleak and grey, and on this one morning most of all, full of blind bent people. I felt young as a child and helpless to speak, though all my nature wished to cheer him.
We had walked some way beyond the village when a cart came up behind and because of the rain it picked us up. We sat in the back with a sack over our two heads and as long as the rain fell the carter barely spoke to us nor we to him. When the rain cleared he stopped for the horse to eat, and I remember that I thought to entertain the others by clowning on the grass. I used to do that in those days. I had quite a skill in tumbling, could have joined a fair, so people said. So I warmed myself and them by performing my repertory of tricks, and because the ground was wet I slipped and fell about this way and that, until they began to laugh.
When the cart went on, we talked. 'Where have you been?' the carter asked, and I thought that it was my chance now to impress him with stories of a frozen sea and mountains made of ice, great white bears and fish as big as houses.
But the man had travelled no further afield than Stow-market and had never seen the sea. 'There are some big fish about, that's true. They do say you know there's a pike in the river here long as a horse. A great old beast with teeth like a saw. It'll swallow a duck whole, snatch it down in the water and swallow it, just like that.'
Then it rained again and we were back with the sack above our heads.
'I'm sorry, lad, I could not stop there this morning,' Cave said at last. 'Too much time had passed. The place was full of strangers. There was no purpose in my being there.'
I was so young then, bold, certain. 'But you cannot say that. You were hardly there a moment. And the people we saw, they'll be no other than the people that you knew grown older, or at least the children of the people that you knew. If you'd said who you were, someone would have known you for sure.'
Cave looked out along the road. His face bore a sheen of moisture from the rain.
Was it true, the reason he gave? I have thought many times about it in the years since then, what precisely it was drove Thomas Cave away: whether it was as he said, the strangeness of the place, or whether it was its very familiarity, that threatened somehow to close in on him.
I parted from him soon after, to make my way back to Swole. We had come to a place where the river became tidal and we could begin to smell the sea.
'Will you not come on a little further?' I asked, and Cave said no, that he had come far enough, and looked down to his feet on the fresh grass. He would keep to the land now. He was done with the sea. There was a church in that village with a roof like a barn and he laid his things down and his big cloak like a blanket and said that he would sleep in its porch.
At the last moment, in an entirely unexpected gesture, he spread his arms and hugged me, and in that touch I knew all of a sudden how great my affection for this man had grown. And then I turned as I must and left him in the porch, and walked out beneath the gulls and the wide sky.
'Lad,' he called, as I reached the gate. 'Take this. I have no need of so much.' He pulled out his purse from inside his shirt and gave me some coins from it, pressed them into my outstretched flushed hand with his own cold fumbling one. 'I insist.' Again but tremblingly we embraced, and I walked on two miles before the sun set behind me.
I knew nothing more of him for well on twenty years.
21
IT WAS ON a summer evening like this one that I first heard of Cave again. I had been here at Swole some years, living here. I must have been about the age that he was that long winter. It is a time when a man - a man like myself at any rate for I cannot begin to speak for him - knows the urge to settle and be with his family and feel the land beneath his feet.
I had found myself a wife and gone into business in association with my cousin who was at Aldborow, trading along the coast. Though it was hard - business has been hard these past years, the state of the country poor and nothing easy - it had gone well enough. The summer was fair, the evenings long and calm, and I had taken to spending them as I do this one, here before the shore. A finer time of day I cannot imagine, when the air is still and warm, and the light long, and the fishermen spread and stitch their nets, and the sun sets behind our backs while the sea slowly
dulls before us. I was sitting pretty much as now, with my back to a flint wall, listening with only half an ear, watching the sea before me, watching the ships. Strange how you look out every now and then to see the passing ships, and it's so still on the shore that you think they must be fixed there, and yet you fill your pipe and look out again, and their positions have been rearranged though they have not appeared to move.
The talk was of a man who had knowledge of the North.
'Did you know him, Mister Goodlard? He must have been a whaler like yourself
I think that it was a moment before I took in the woman's question. I was watching the children run and play at the sea's edge. My own two were among them. They all ran into the waves and did not mind that they got wet because the water and the evening were warm.
'Could be this man was someone you had known?'
'Who's that?'
'The fishermen met a man down the coast, they said he had been a whaler.'
'What was his name?' I asked, and she said that she did not know his name.
I told her that the northern seas were huge and that there were on them a hundred whaleships from England alone. I could hardly be expected to know every man or every crew.
The woman talked on.
This man had ice in him, she said, a tall, thin, bent man with the cold sea in his eyes. He came to their villages alone and sudden like a late spring frost, and brought with him a chilly touch that stilled madmen, cooled women in the pangs of labour and dispelled pain in the dying. It was said that he had the power to drive out devils.
At first I thought nothing of it. There were so many stories. There were so many who wandered the country, and in these eastern counties they said more than anywhere, not only merchants and pedlars and vagabonds but men with ideas in their heads, all kind of preachers and healers and prophesiers, and every one of them with some story to tell of the strange and the magical and the unexplained. I had been out of England long. I cannot tell you how disconcerting it had been at first, how it had made me feel alone and a foreigner, coming home to my own land from years at sea to walk in the crowded street or sit here on the shore before the boats and hear such a bemusing mass of talk. But I had learnt to let it by, to smoke and look and nod and appear to listen, and not to give offence. So many speakers there were, so many extraordinary tales: how should I distinguish amongst them? How, in all of that garrulous discourse, should I pay attention to talk of one lone man?
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 14