Chapter XXIX

The forecastle of the _Bright Nancy_ became for a time David Scott’s sea home--his and Olafson’s. The seamen there were just Dory and Dannet and others again. I was content to work so and journey so to Philadelphia. A stormy voyage gave the less time for thinking how much finer was poop than forecastle.

It did not trouble me. The light held for me, though with an unequal strength. Sometimes it sank and there was almost darkness, but never the darkness that had been. The pain was the yearning for more and more light.

We passed Cape Fear and passed Hatteras of rough seas, and saw on a morning the coasts of Virginia. I turned and turned again my eyes that way. We passed Virginia and passed Maryland and entered the great bay and river of Delaware, and sailing up the latter came to the Colony, great as a kingdom--they are all great as kingdoms--named for William Penn, and so anchored at last before the city of Philadelphia that held twenty thousand souls.

Olafson and I talked it over together. The _Bright Nancy_ was a ship considerably to our liking. A great number of things about her might have been worse than they were. But that aside, I had determined, before she anchored, before I trod a Philadelphia quay, to renew with her Captain for one voyage more. To Olafson I said that I liked the ship and that I wanted the sea for just a little longer--but I did not say what I felt and that was that I must stay upon the _Bright Nancy_. Each time my mind turned to leaving her here and now I felt an arresting touch. I did not tell him, or perhaps I did tell him.

But when I said that my going just this one other voyage with the _Bright Nancy_ must not affect him, who could surely with time get his mate’s berth somewhere, Olafson shook his head and smiled through his golden beard. “I’ve never been what you call an ambitious man. She’s a tidy ship and I like her name. I’ll stay by her as long as you do.”

So it was settled. One more voyage; we’d go one more voyage. She bought her sugar at Havana and brought it only to Philadelphia.

We anchored. When we had unladed her and made her more tidy than before, we seamen went ashore. Olafson and I kept together. The _Bright Nancy_ would be ten days here, in the stately river, before the quay below High Street. Olafson knew a sailors’ tavern, The Good Merchant Seaman.

Here we settled ourselves, and he went off to find the man of his own country who dwelled and prospered in this city. In two hours he returned. “He is dead, and his family have gone into the country. The warehouse is sold and the business wound up.--So, you see, it is the _Bright Nancy_ for us both!”

“Just for a little while then, Jan,” I said.

He sat and drank ale and then we went out to see the town. It was a pleasant, leafy place--the season was high summer--with good docks and warehouses and much shipping in the river, with wide straight streets and churches and brick dwellings in ample gardens. There seemed a civility plain and real. I thought, “I could clerk it here--studying and thinking when work was over. Long walks, studying and thinking----” I thought. “Later on I might teach----”

For two days Olafson and I sauntered and gazed together, but then old shipmates found him, and he must go with them, and I wandered alone.

The streets so busy, the many people, pleased me. I saw rich and poor, high and low, city folk and country folk coming into town, hunters and rangers and Indians from farther away than the planted fields, coming to William Penn’s town on errands of their own. It pleased me to make out in the stream men and women whom I was sure were Quakers--though for some reason I never went to their meeting house.

Upon the streets, coming and going, I met or passed Negro men and women--slaves. They seemed chiefly house servants or grooms or porters, for this was town, not farms or plantations. Nor were they anything like so numerous as they would have been in a like-sized town in any one of the great southern, planting Colonies. Those that I saw had evidently been born in this country, or at least been brought very young from Africa. They were fairly clad and cheerful enough; and in Charlestown and Kingston and Williamsburg one saw the same.

But the white man had enslaved them all and kept them enslaved. I saw beyond the Delaware, out upon the great sea, and there were the ships that crossed and crossed, the _Sherwood Oak_, the _Fancy_, the _Sharon_, the _Amelia_, the _Wreath_, the _Janet_ and so many more there was no counting them. I saw Daga, and the factories at Whidah, and Bonny, and Calabar and where not. I saw the Sugar Islands, and the rice and cotton and tobacco lands, and these northern towns as well.

Wandering and questioning as I did, I found that in this city there were well-to-do Quakers or Friends who owned slaves. It came to me with a kind of shock, remembering my Quaker and the paper he had read me. The man that I questioned about this said that as a whole their Society condemned the practise, and that many would not touch it, but that the current was not yet strong enough to check and turn Old Custom.

I went up and down and my week was wearing away. Between the High Street and the river stood a certain substantial place of business, a merchant house of warm, red brick with trees spaced before it. This place drew me; I would go out of my way to go by it. Through open windows I saw decent, quiet clerks; responsible looking persons went in and out of its broad door. One of these told me that it was an old house and furnished goods to villages and yet smaller settlements afar in the wilderness.

At last, when I had been by this house half a dozen times, when I had but three days and nights before the _Bright Nancy_ should sail, I came on a golden, late afternoon even with the door at the moment when there issued a clerk, a man something younger than myself, slender of frame, with a pale, lined face. He asked, “Do you want anything, sir?”

“No,” I said; then, “You have a pleasant place here in which to work.”

“Aye,” he answered. “These are forest trees still, and straight as masts.”

I wondered. “Perhaps that is why I come and come this way.” Aloud I said, “I am a seaman. This fine city comes freshly upon me.”

“Aye, aye,” he said. “What is your ship?”

“The _Bright Nancy_.”

We were moving together under the trees. The house was a corner one, the street we now moved upon quite quiet, with a great summer sky above. “The _Bright Nancy_? That’s sugar from Havana.”

“I have made but one voyage with her. She sails the end of the week.”

He said, “I was upon a ship once--as clerk. It’s been long ago, but the sea comes round me at times.”

“Why did you give it up?”

“That,” he said, “is a long story. It was the slave ship _Janet_.”

“Then I know your name,” I answered. “It is Philip Smith, and I took your place and slept in your cabin.”

David Scott went home with Philip Smith. He lived with a sister much his elder--just the two of them--in a small house by one of the creeks that fed the river, a mile from the house where he was clerk. By the time we had reached it he knew the fortunes of the _Janet_, and of Bartram, McNaughton, Colley and many another, and I knew why he had left the ship. It was as I thought--not the _Janet_ in herself but the trade.

It came up in my mind again. I was talking to McNaughton.

“Why did he leave?”

“Ah, he was a brittle child! He developed scruples.”

“You call that being brittle?”

“If you have your wark and your living, Mr. Scott, I do! Aweel, he’s doubtless howked himself to death in an almshouse. He wasna fit for much when he left us.”

I looked at him walking beside me. He had not howked himself to death in an almshouse, but bodily frailty did mark him. He spoke as if he answered my thought, “I’ve never been strong enough to do much.”

His house was neat as a pin, with flowers and a great walnut tree in the dooryard; his sister a quiet, strong person, like him in many ways. We had a frugal, well-cooked supper in a room with a sanded floor, and afterwards sat together in a great sunset glow upon the bench built around the walnut tree. When I said at last that I must go back to The Good Merchant Seaman, they would have me spend the night. I slept in a small room under the steeply sloping roof, all clean and fragrant of lavender. In the morning, breakfast eaten, I walked with Philip Smith into the heart of town, parting with him at the red brick house behind the forest trees, straight as masts.

That day I found Olafson and told him where I should be until Friday when we must go aboard the _Bright Nancy_, then paid my score at The Good Merchant Seaman and took my small chest of belongings to the small house under the walnut tree. In the afternoon, when the sun’s rays were all slanting, I again met Philip Smith and we walked out together.

Upon the _Janet_ he had never been completely out of my mind. It seemed that although he made no outward move to learn her fortunes, within himself he had always followed her. He knew Bartram, McNaughton, Colley, Llewellyn, Michaelson, Geordie, Tom and Don and most of the others whom I had found at the mouth of the River James, twelve years ago. We had common ground.

But there was something more than this. In a way he was like that Quaker who had come to My Fancy. Like and not like. He was not so conscious and advanced a man; much younger, not so given hand and foot to what he saw, not so centered there that he must act, act definitely from that place. He had in him the making of a man even with that man. But again in another way, for the power of variation here is great. He was not a Quaker. After his day’s work, which he performed conscientiously and well, he read and dreamed and worked his garden and sat in silent content with his elderly sister. From his boyhood his health had been slight. He was a listener and observer, a taker apart in the mind and a putter together again, still in the mind. But he had light, he said, that at times seemed to go beyond the mind, into a bigger life.

We talked, walking forth from the heart of town and into it again, or seated on the bench under the walnut tree, or after candle light in the room with the sanded floor, Mrs. Dorothy sitting with us, her strong hands never idle.

We talked of slavery. It was widespread, he said; we were slaves within and without, to one another and to our own old Adam. When you began to free yourself you began within. Think it out and use the imagination and cry for a stronger, cleaner, kinder heart!

“Little by little there will be result in the outer world.”

“Aye, little by little.”

We talked of Negro slavery. “They are slaves to themselves, you know, too. Just like us.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that. I know it abundantly. They’ll break that slavery, little by little. Just as we do. In all that, they and we are one.”

“I like,” he said, “to look at the future of this country and the world--just as far as I can, which of course isn’t very far. There are certain things that are plain to me. They--or their descendants--won’t be in slavery to us--or our descendants--forever. I see the slave trade with Africa stopping first, then long afterwards, it may be, the host that will be here by then freed and become as hired laborers anywhere.--Long after that perhaps we may be all Christians in a Christian world.”

“As Christ sees it.”

“Yes. I am very certain that he does not see it as the world sees it now.”

Mrs. Dorothy folded her work. “May his Kingdom come!”

I had but these few days with them, and sweet was the taste of that small, true home! Friday dawned; I said good-by and went to The Good Merchant Seaman, where I found Olafson, and together we rowed to the _Bright Nancy_. But it was settled. Only this voyage to Havana and back, and then I should part with the sea. I should come to Philip Smith and his sister and stay with them while I looked about. I should find work, and when it was found I might still make my home with them. There was the room under the roof; there were plate and knife and fork at the table in the cool, sanded room where the walnut leaves made patterns on the floor and wall. Here, too, ran a shelf of books. I said good-by, expecting to see them again in three months’ time.

I was going alone toward The Good Merchant Seaman. It was early morning--the water gleamed and glistened brightly before me--there was a tree and a bench. I sat down. I leaned forward and clasped my hands. Light came around me and a determination to do what I could.

When a man sees MAN then he becomes that ONE’S servant.

Moments passed.--The fledgling bird cannot long hold aloft.--I came down to thought that uses words.

So I thought, “I will go to England and find that Quaker and set myself to work with him and his circle.” I knew that it was Great Britain who fostered the Slave Trade. I would go to England. There were men there, Friends and others, whom I would find.

When would I go?

I stood pledged for this voyage to the _Bright Nancy_. But when I came again to Philadelphia, I should stay but the shortest while in the house under the walnut tree. Some ship would be going to England, and I would go in her forecastle.

So my brain planned, not truly, I suppose, knowing the Great Mind. The light had lessened, and though with the sense of it set like a star before him a man assuredly goes forward in the general direction, just the path that is meant may not be seen or foreseen.