Chapter XV: Part THREE: Chapter One (3)

"I did not hang him, Ben. His destiny hanged him. Nor I don't make much of poor Manuel trying to cut the body down, for 'tis Manuel's destiny to remain weak in the wits and no harm in him, except he may be used for harm by others. But--ah well, 'tis true enough what I told the men, I did find Barentsz so, and I'll have no such Devil's foulness under my command, now that's no lie. But"--he glanced about the sunny deck, where no one else was in earshot--"there was another reason, one I didn't wish the men to know. On second thought--on further instruction--it doesn't matter. You may even tell them if you see fit." He waited, the silence forcing Ben to look up at him at last. "It might be of especial importance to you, Ben Cory, to know that I know Barentsz's true reason for coming aboard my ketch."

"His reason! He was brought aboard a captive, that or be drowned."

"That was the seeming," said Shawn, rubbing his coin, looking gravely down with the sun behind him, his eyes all black. "Yet Barentsz could have gone with the others. They thought (not understanding the end I serve) that I would give them a boat. But no, this Barentsz chose to make a show of favoring my enterprise, so to deceive me and get himself aboard my ketch. Then soon enough, hearing what he muttered under his breath, I understood why."

"I could make nothing of what he tried to say in English."

"That's no matter."

"Do you speak Dutch?"

"Enough."

"Well?"

"You wouldn't care to say 'Well, sir?' or 'Well, Captain?'"

"Well, Shawn?"

"How you do play with your own life, the way it might be a thing of no value!"

"While I'm a slave it's of no value," said Ben, knowing that this was not at all true.

"Mother of God, it's your very impudence that saves you. If you were what I've sometimes feared you might be, your conversation would not be so. You'd be sly, I think. You'd try to please me, I think, and not spit back at me like a little wildcat.... Well--Cornelius Barentsz was an agent, and that in the service of Queen Anne of England."

"I don't believe it."

"It doesn't matter. You haven't my ways of discovering truth. But now that you know I know this, will there be any particular thing you wish to tell me, Ben Cory?"

"No, Shawn."

"If you be what I devoutly pray you are, you've nothing to fear even in your impudence. But those who betray me I do not forgive."

Ben knew--and had known for some time, he supposed--that he was in the presence of madness, whatever that is. It seemed not to be the simple, half-supernatural thing that the common speech heard in Ben's childhood had made of it. Shawn did not rave or babble or foam at the mouth; he never acted as one possessed of a devil ought to act, and besides, are there any devils? If so, what are they, and how was one who had lived three years with the calm skepticism of John Kenny to believe in them? One remembered Reuben snorting and gurgling and sometimes cursing over Cotton Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_, and then reading with greater joy the burlesque of it written by the merchant Robert Calef of Boston, whom Uncle John admired. Never mind about devils.

Ben knew his own life could end at any moment. At that time, however, he had already lived three months with the nearness of sudden death--his own defiance, he sometimes thought, the sheerest bluff. Like living in the same den with a tiger who, for his own reasons, has so far refrained from destroying you. You can cringe and shiver for only a limited time; then it becomes tiresome, and you must look after your own occasions of eating and sleeping and waking no matter what the tiger does. And doubtless a tiger is more likely to pounce on a creature that cringes than on one who spits back at him. And in spitting back, in turning his face directly toward the lightning and to hell with the consequences, Ben had found, no doubt of it, a hot pleasure as definite, almost as keen as in the surging moments when Clarissa had loved him.

Shawn played few chess games with Ben after that day, appearing to lose interest in them. He seemed to Ben to be changing in some gradual, obscure fashion--more aloof, more silent except for the occasional furious monologue after some ship had been sighted, and followed a while, and then allowed to slip away over the horizon because Shawn's voice told him the moment was not ripe and his forces not sufficient. Several times Shawn had robbed small interisland vessels--trivial occasions when Ben was not tied below but allowed to remain on deck with Manuel and Dummy and the monkey. The _Diana_ swooped down on these helpless chickens like the wrath of God, but having taken what little they held of provisions and valuables, and having learned that no man aboard them was willing or worthy to go with him, Shawn showed contemptuous mercy and let them depart unharmed. What they could tell, he said, was no threat to him--he had already satisfied himself, after the pursuit by the frigate _Dread_, that the _Diana_ could outrun anything afloat.

Vessels in the _Diana's_ class or larger were always too well manned or too well armed, or sighted too near the land or in the presence of other shipping, or simply rejected by the inner voice. Something--("I am compassed about," said Shawn--"compassed about")--something was always not quite right.

Shawn spent more and more time in the cabin, where Ben had not been allowed to go the whole year long.

There was an October afternoon of aching sunlight in the waters off Grenada, when Ben noticed a thick scattering of silver at Shawn's temples and wondered how long it could have been there....

No one entered that locked cabin except Shawn, who kept its key and one other key on a cord at his neck, and Judah Marsh, and Joey Mills. Mills entered it only long enough to carry in food and fetch out the pail of slops. Since no one was ever of a mind to question Shawn or Marsh, Ben and the others (even Tom Ball) relied on Joey Mills for news of Peter Jenks. Mills did not much enjoy talking on the subject.

It was ever the same, Mills said. Jenks was there, and alive; but what the Captain wanted of him was beyond the imagination of an old man who'd been brought up Godfearing in Gloucester. Jenks' ankles were close together in irons; Ledyard had stapled the chain of the irons to the floor and nailed a plank over the staple so that nothing less than a crowbar would ever tear it loose. The chain was long enough to allow Jenks to lie in his bunk or sit at the stationary bench by the built-in table. When the ketch was careened for cleaning, Mills said, the Old Man must be obliged to lie braced against the side boards of his bunk--never speaking a word. Nothing movable was allowed within Jenks' reach except a light wooden food tray that Mills pushed to him by a long stick, and the slop bucket, managed with the same stick, and a leather flask of rum. Under Shawn's strictest orders, Mills observed all the precautions one might with a chained bear. Jenks laughed at that sometimes, Mills said--but spoke not a word. He had not once touched the rum; Mills was certain of it. The flask lay in a corner, some motion of the vessel having dislodged it from the table where Shawn had tossed it. It still lay within Jenks' reach: Mills doubted if he even looked at it. And the leather had turned green on the outside with tropic mold.

Shawn actually slept in that cabin, the door locked. Beside the bunk across the cabin from the one Jenks used, Ledyard had built a heavy wooden screen, and after that Ledyard also had been forbidden the place. The screen, Mills supposed, would keep the chained bear from hurling his bucket at Shawn while Shawn slept--if Shawn ever slept....

The May moon sank into a grayness of horizon cloud behind the island, then sank altogether, lost out of the night, and with its passing the shadow of the _Diana_ vanished into the black immensity of the sea. Under the blackness that spread above him like another sea bearing a foam of stars, Ben stood in a loneliness complete, feeling nothing for a time but the loyal secret motion of his own heart and the noise of ocean not concerned with him. He was waiting: waiting at least for the gradual fading of the dark that must soon begin in the lower sky, maybe for something more. That light would come in its time, over the open waters in the east, pouring upward, compelling the sea of blackness to a luminous change and then dissolving it away. But what is morning to a slave?

Why, nothing. Nothing unless in some way the light can grow within the slave as well as upon the world where he drags out his captivity.

I have been too passive, Ben thought, and that for much too long a time. Defiant, yes, and maybe brave enough, but in a child's way, to no real purpose. For that first month or so I may have had some excuse--I was dazed; I had never dreamed any such thing could happen, to me. But since then, no excuse for drifting, letting things happen. There must have been something I could have done.

Oh, and passive, too passive by far, a long time before that evening in the cabin of the sloop. Drifting, letting things happen instead of taking a hand in forcing them to happen. Maybe a child is compelled to that. But childhood ended--when? Did not Reuben at fifteen discover a purpose?

He will have turned sixteen a few days ago, and I not there; and doubtless he believes I am dead.

Faith surely imagines I am dead, she who said with her lips at my ear that she would wait for me a thousand years.

There must have been something I could do....

Dry logic of arithmetic asserted itself and Ben noted it. I don't _know_ how one youth steals a ketch from seven grown men. But....

By the contemptuous assent of Daniel Shawn himself, I still possess the knife my father gave me. He gave me also a word: _readiness...._

The stars weakened; some of them were gone. The sky, no sea of blackness now, became a paleness and then a glory. Shadows acquired weight and relief, substance and sharpness in the transfiguration of daylight--the rail under Ben's hand no pallid blur but familiar with every spot and imperfection of the polished wood. The headland out yonder at the southern arm of the cove, a looming dullness not long ago, became the gray hand of a giant, then green, then manifest jungle, a fragment of solid earth, and the lonely red flare of the sun burst free in silence over the rim of the world. Clouds hung high in the west; none lingered over there on the morning side to obscure the birth, and at the moment of completion a light sweet wind tranquilly arrived, a northeasterly breeze, cooling Ben's face, roving across the island, waking in the bare cordage a music of morning and perhaps of spring.

_There must be something I can do...._

"Mr. Hibbs, was Reuben uncertain what time he would come home?"

"Yes--late, I think, Charity. There was something--a cutting for the stone to be precise, and the patient living somewhere near Cambridge. You know he goes with Mr. Welland on nearly all the visits now. On this occasion, I understand, he's to aid with the surgery, holding instruments I suppose, or whatever--the which maketh me ill only to contemplate it, but when I saw Ru this morning he was cool as you please, and quite unmoved, and cracked a joke or two that I'm sure Mr. Kenny was able to hear and enjoy. I dare say the doctor is right, that to visit the sick in all their trials will provide a learning not to be won from the best of books. Yet I wish it did not mean that he must neglect his other studies."

"Perhaps he'll come back to them one day."

"Ay--'tis absurd of me, but I feel in a manner cheated. There was so much more I had hoped to teach him--nay, I dare say any teacher is a fool, seeing only his small island of knowledge, forgetting how wide is the world beyond it. Can you stay the night, my dear?"

"Yes. Kate's most kind, allowing me to share her bed. I fear I'm a plague to her, I'm that restless, but she says not."

"I believe there's another bed in the attic that we could bring down, if she wishes."

"Ben's?"

"Oh, no! That hath remained in Reuben's room--their room, I'd rather say. I don't know that Reuben ever said anything of it, but--you can imagine no one of us would suggest taking it out."

"Of course. I spoke something foolish. I do so often."

"Not at all. It is--may I say this, Charity?--a blessing, that you do come to us here. In this house we are, all but Reuben--oh, how shall I say it?--old, dusty, something discouraged perhaps. There was so much of youth and gaiety, the which we took for granted when we had it, when Ben was here, the two of them alway in some harmless commotion or other--why, merely to hear them talk together was--was.... What are you sewing, Charity? Something for the--for what I believe fair young maids do call a bride chest?"

"I am no-way fair, Mr. Hibbs. And--honestly now, doth this appear to you like an item of female apparel?"

"Oh! Marry it don't, now you hold it up--you had it bunched under your hand so I couldn't see."

"A nightshirt of Mr. Kenny's, and I only trust I may mend this hole so it won't chafe him. He wears them out in the back, you see, lying on them constantly, and--oh, the fidgeting that's all he's able to do. I pray you, Mr. Hibbs, would you sit the other side of the lamp? You're in peril of my elbow, besides shutting off the light."

"Of course--clumsy of me.... How deftly your little hands do work at whatever they find, Charity!... _Te spectem, suprema mihi cum venerit hora...._"

"I sew very badly, Mr. Hibbs, and I have no Latin."

"Forgive me. I think, though, you sew excellent well."

"Ha!"

"'Twas only a line of Tibullus that cometh now and then to my mind. _Et teneam moriens deficiente manu...._ I never read Tibullus with the boys. Not altogether suited, I felt, to their time of life. And yet sometimes, as in those particular lines, my dear, he is quite innocent, indeed expressing sentiments appropriate to a man of honorable feeling. 'May I'--(saith Tibullus, my dear)--'may I look on thee when cometh my last hour, and may I hold thy hand as I sink dying!'"

"I must tell Kate this one is nearly past mending, but if she'll make a pattern for me I believe I could follow it in my blundering fashion. He ought to have a change of them for every day. I know a place on Sudbury Street where they have better material than this, and cheap."

"I recall some other lines from the same poem--_me mea paupertas vita traducat inerti, dum meus adsiduo luceat igne focus...._ 'Let the humble fortune that is proper to me lead me through a quiet way of life, if only my hearth may glow with an unfailing fire!' You'd suppose that the sentiment of an aging man, wouldn't you? And yet they tell that Tibullus, he died young.... Charity...."

"Yes, Mr. Hibbs?"

"Charity, having spent, I must admit, very nearly twenty years--beginning, let us say, with the year I commenced study at Harvard, the which was the thirteenth year of my life--having spent so much time, I say, in what would seem, to some, a most arid employment, namely the cultivation of the abstract, the exploration (tentative, limited by the frailty of mine own poor powers) of the borders of philosophy--having spent thus much time in--shall I call it, perhaps, a sanctuary of loneliness?--not altogether unrewarding, you understand; not without the consolation of the poets; not without an occasional satisfaction, like unto discovery, within the region of the inquiry: nevertheless, out of such loneliness--out of----"

"Sir----"

"Nay, forgive me, Charity, I'm most clumsy with words, and could never speak bold and plain what's in my mind, the which plain speaking I do much admire to discover in others, but let me essay it. Having spent, I say, almost twenty years, yes, almost a full score in the--I must call it the dust of scholarship, save the mark--one may then, suddenly as it were, look out as through the window of a study, let us say, and observe that outside this not altogether despicable refuge there is--oh, spring perhaps, as it is even now, my dear--and one may presume to hope that one hath not remained so long out of the world, nor grown so old, but that--but that----"

"Mr. Hibbs, I pray you----"

"Not so old but that perhaps one who is truly at the very brightest beginning of the springtime might find--might find in one's maturer years--oh, nothing like the call of youth to youth, my God! but--but.... You have not known how I--how since you began coming here in so much kindness--I think you have not known----"

"Mr. Hibbs, I must speak too, and I pray you say no more till I have done. The sentiments you express, the which--oh _bother_! There goes my thread again and I wasn't even pulling at it, they needn't to make it so miserable weak, do they? The sentiments--look, Mr. Hibbs: when we moved to Dorchester last autumn, I found there a place on the shore, just beyond reach of the high tides, a pretty place, a kind of--what was it you said?--a sanctuary of loneliness, at any rate I made it one. The rocks hide it from the house, from the land; 'tis like a room overlooking the open waters, where all the ships from the south must pass when they come in for the harbor, and I go there--oh, whenever I may. My mother thinks I'm looking for seashells or other such employment suited to children, and so I do bring in any pretty ones I find--and then throw them away secret-like, la, to make room for more--why, I'm a deceiving small beast, Mr. Hibbs, learned deception young, marry did I, I often wonder that anyone can put up with me. Well--even last winter, if it wasn't outright storming, I'd bundle up in my coat and go out there. The rocks break the wind. You can look a long way out.... I told Reuben about this. He understood--well, of course he did. One expects understanding from Reuben, I don't quite know why."

"I am not certain that I myself understand you, Charity."

"I must say more then?... But perhaps you will tell me, as my mother would, that at my years I can know nothing of love, and yet I do.... Sometimes I'll see a sail that looks from a distance like the _Artemis_. But I watch any sail that appears, because--because who can say what manner of ship it will be that brings him home?--and now you are weeping, but Mr. Hibbs, I never intended----"

"Nay, I--am not. The fireplace a'n't drawing properly--I'll push these logs further back."

"I am a beast."

"Hush!... I think he will come home, Charity--older, as you are, but what you saw in him will not be greatly changed.... But I may be your gray-headed counselor, and--friend?"

"Of course. You aren't gray."

"Soon enough."

"What is it, Mr. Hibbs--what _is_ it that doth compel one to--eh, as they say, to give away the whole heart to another? I would be better, I would be happier, I suppose, if I...."

"I could wish for mine own sake that I knew the answer to that. Why, Charity, it seems we love where we must and no help for it."

"I remember I was not happy, very far from it, a year and more ago, when I was a silly child, had not even met him, indeed had none to love but--oh, poor Sultan. Clarissa of course, but it seems to me I never knew I loved her until I lost her, only took her for granted like sunlight until the day she was no longer there."

"Sultan?"

"Don't you remember Sultan, Mr. Hibbs? Why, the child I was would never forgive your forgetting Sultan. He died, very fat and ancient, soon after we moved to Dorchester. It was the sea air, my mother said. I wept like a fountain. But I think it was some while before then that I had ceased to feel like a child."

_Chapter Three_

The island fell away in the west. All day long, and for three days more, the ketch _Diana_ held the northeast trade off her larboard bow, close-hauled. Ben supposed that presently Shawn would turn south and prepare for another chicken-thief raid somewhere in the Leeward Islands. On the fifth day he did shift course, but not much, the unchanging wind now on the larboard beam, the _Diana's_ direction southeast.

A withdrawn, taciturn mood had come over Captain Shawn. The members of his ragamuffin crew, including Ben, felt it as schoolboys feel a teacher's cold in the head. For Ben there was the growing urgency of that secret whisper: _Something I can do...._

Ben was forced to admit that, whatever else might have happened to the year, he had learned a little seamanship. He had acquired sea-legs even before the capture of _Artemis_. He was never seasick--Shawn himself knew green moments from time to time. Ben had learned the ropes--no mystery after all but quite simple once you agreed to use your head and accept the buckle end of Marsh's belt as a parallel to the sarcasm of Gideon Hibbs. Marsh was acidly fair about that: as soon as Ben's hand had learned to jump for the right rope at the right instant, the belt was no longer used.

Shawn's instruction had followed a different idiom--articulate explanation, with continuing patience (not displayed toward anyone but Ben). Somehow the Irishman conveyed: Let's forget that we seem to be enemies; let's consider this logic of navigation, the sextant, the tiller, the handling of sail, powers of wind and current and the pattern of the clear stars; let's do this as though we were not afraid to turn our backs to each other, you with the knife I let you keep, and I with mine. Ben could respond to this; could not help responding.

The secret whisper continued in the dark.

Ben's body was learning too, his hands calloused and enlarged, his shoulders thickened. Already wiry and tough, he was aware of a burgeoning strength that never reached exhaustion even in the occasional days of bad weather when the mainsail could stiffen and fight back like a living beast. When Ben stripped for swimming, as he had done back there at the island to the amused horror of all aboard, he had noticed a whiplash hardness in leg and thigh, surely much greater than he had possessed a year ago. Ben had been startled to learn--last July, when the _Diana_ put in for careening at another lonely island--that not one other man aboard could swim. So Ben, who had learned it fishlike in the waters of the Pocumtuck River with Reuben darting around him, a little demon of gold and ivory, frolicked alone in the surf and beyond it, amazed and delighted at the buoyancy of salt water and the untiring almightiness of the waves. Even to Shawn it was a mystery. Manuel giggled helplessly. Tom Ball appeared to regard it as a black art.

Once in November, during a lesson on the sextant, Shawn had happened to stretch and flex his shoulders, and Ben discovered that he was fully as tall as Captain Shawn. Another time, Ben spoke with careless sharpness to Joey Mills--the old man's garrulity could be a nuisance--and Joey had drawn back in manifest physical fright, astonishing to Ben until he understood: Well, I could break him in two, couldn't I?

Manuel? One fist, and Manuel would cringe and run.

Ledyard? Maybe, just maybe. That would be a near thing.

Ball? French Jack? Well, hardly. And still, either of them might think twice before starting anything unarmed, or alone.

Dummy? Never, if he got a grip.

Judah Marsh? Why, knives put aside, by God, I could flatten him like a bug, and wash my hands.

Shawn?...

The whisper continued in the dark.

Since leaving the island under the northeast trade, Captain Shawn had spent most of his time in the locked cabin, or on deck in a black and scowling silence. He ordered the log cast unreasonably often; it was plain the _Diana_ was maintaining an even speed, better than nine knots. Ben was present whenever Shawn checked his bearings, and could make his own calculations. When his trick at the helm began at midnight on the seventh night out from the island, the _Diana_ had crossed the 18th parallel and was surely far east of the Leewards, too far if Shawn intended any business with them, and was still running blandly southeast. Why?...

In these wartime years, with no pressure of maritime unemployment to drive hungry men into piracy, some furtive harbors throughout the Caribbean still nourished the old trade, and at some outwardly respectable ports a vessel of dubious virtue could still put in to dispose of this and that with few questions asked. So much had been common talk at Boston; Ben heard it again from the half-timid chatter of Joey Mills. Captain Shawn might have found men in those ports to make up his complement; he never went near one of them, all year long. Joey Mills dared to ask why, and shook his head and spat over the rail. "Tell you why," said Joey Mills, watching Ben with squirrely courage and making sure no one else could hear. "He'll get more men, _he_ says, from the fine prize we a'n't seen yet--or if we seen it we been evermore tacking somewheres else, God almighty damn. But this here ketch, Ben Cory, let alone it seems she a'n't bound for nowhere, she a'n't got nothing. Salt cod, God almighty damn. Put in at one of them places, nothing to trade, he'd be laughed at. _They'd_ give him salt cod, yah. I allow _he_ can't bear no laughing at--now don't betray me, don't never let it out I said no such of a thing--you wouldn't, boy?" Before Ben could even promise, he chuckled in apology and fled, and avoided Ben for days....

Far away ahead this midnight, over the curve of the world, stood the shoulder of Africa. Somewhere in the south--Ben gazed off idly to his right in the murmurous dark--down there beyond the Line, the Spanish and Portuguese settlements of the southern continent. Down there too--so far that one's thought hardly dared trouble with it--the wild cold legendary region of the Horn, Magellan's gateway, the path to the western sea.

Here in the undemanding night Ben found it possible to command the earth to be not vast but small. Merely to point with the right arm toward the Horn--did not that reduce the world to a modest map that might be held in fancy, handled, contemplated?--never mind the thousands of leagues of open sea where that right arm was no greater than one splash of foam. The paradox was familiar. Mr. Gideon Hibbs had touched on it at the borders of philosophy: how, if the container be greater than the thing contained, that organ in the skull must be somehow wider than a galaxy....

The shadow coming slowly aft might be Manuel, ready to relieve Ben at the tiller. No--too soon, and Manuel was aloft. Moonrise had begun some while ago at Ben's left shoulder, magnificent and calm. The shadow was not Manuel but Daniel Shawn, prowling the dark as he often did when, as Ben supposed, he could not sleep. Ben suppressed a word of greeting. His arm over the tiller held firm with elastic readiness for all of the _Diana's_ whims, as Shawn himself had patiently taught him it must do. Captain Shawn stood a long time at the after rail gazing northwestward.

It could happen some night, Ben knew, out of a silence like this. The unknowable driven brain could abruptly decide that Ben Cory must no longer live. What is madness?... After the decision, execution--but not immediate, perhaps. It did not seem to be Shawn's way to kill with his own hand.

He was capable of it. Joey Mills had told Ben how, in the battle with the _Schouven_, Shawn had boarded the sloop with the rest, two pistols in his belt. Disdaining a cutlass after the pistols were empty, Shawn went in howling with his short knife, and that on a tall Dutchman with long arms--as if, Mills muttered, death was a nothing to Captain Shawn, or welcome. But Shawn wasn't for dying that day.

Quite gently Shawn asked; "All quiet, Ben?"

"Yea, quiet." Not "Yea, sir." Not "Yea, Captain." The self clinging to integrity will snatch at trivia. But for Ben there was a kind of upside-down shame in reflecting that anyone else aboard who omitted the formula of humility would very quickly be instructed with a rope's end. And so, Ben Cory thought, it seems Ben Cory doth care about the opinion of others, be they only the rats aboard a pirate ketch, the which would be dem'd good and comical--could I be telling it to Ru before the fire in Uncle John's library, and sweet Kate maybe bringing us a plate of----

"Ben, who's aloft?"

"Manuel."

"Have you chanced to look aft, the last half-hour, boy?"

"No. Watching the bow, so to keep the bearing you ordered."

"Then give me the helm, and take this glass"--Shawn's voice was rising curiously--"and look well abaft, and tell me what you see at all."

"Where away?"

"God damn it," said Shawn, still rather softly, "find it yourself!" He thrust the spyglass into Ben's hand and snatched the tiller, humming in his teeth and not pleasantly.

Ben searched the northwestern arc, and found nothing but empty sea. Something to throw him off his guard?--he lowered the glass quickly, but Shawn was not even watching him. Shawn was staring forward, head high, the moon's whiteness displaying his face, cold and suffering and proud.

"I don't find anything."

"Look again."

"I see the stars, a quiet sea, and not another thing."

"Judah!" Marsh hurried aft. "Take the glass, Mr. Marsh. See what you can find to the northwest."

Ben stood away from them. He saw Marsh stiffen with uneasiness or bewilderment; fidget, and mutter, and rub the glass with an end of his shirt. "Mr. Shawn, sir, my one glim a'n't too sharp."

Shawn immensely filled his lungs and slowly let the breath go. "You too maybe?... Well--it may be gone." It might be easier, Ben thought, to endure the ache of waiting if Shawn himself would look aft again, but he would not.

"Was it a sail, Captain?"

"It wasn't the Lamb of God walking upon the waters, Mr. Marsh. I am changing course two points. Sou'-sou'east, d'you hear? Call that fool Manuel from aloft, who wouldn't be seeing the entire Royal Navy and it half a mile to wind'ard. He and Dummy will make ready to haul me the tack--will you move, man?" Marsh vanished forward; Ben heard his thin snarl crying Manuel down from the masthead. "Well, Cory?--get to the mizzen, damn you!" Ready in his place--what else?--Ben presently heard Marsh's advisory shout. "Cory, Mother of God, can't _you_ speak up like a seaman?"

"Ready!"

"_Lee-oh!_" The _Diana_ answered calmly, undismayed. "Trim her!" Ben had already done so, handily. "Will you sheet her in, you bloody farmer? Oh, dear Mother of God, for _men_ to sail with me!..." Undismayed, the _Diana_ settled to her new course under the friendly wind. A small maneuver--a crew of boys could have done it in this soft landsman's weather. Ben knew that Shawn had no cause to rave at his part in it; knew also in a moment that the crying voice climbing from the region of the helm was no longer concerned with him. "Speak plainer! I cannot hear you.... Oh, but I will go alone if I must. Have I not alway gone alone? Have I not alway made mine own law--as I am directed, as I am directed--but thou knowest I am compassed about.... Plainer! Speak _plain_!--or send me a wind and not this damned crawling breeze! Am I to meet them in a bloody calm?... Then, most soberly and quietly: "Ben--aft with you!"

Ben returned aft, being on duty and having perhaps no choice. "Am I to take the helm again?"

"First look, only once more. Man dear, don't you see?--it could be I'm growing old and foolish, but--but for all you hate me, you can't call me fool, Beneen, you can't do that."

"I never have."

"Then look once more--the way I might've been deceived--the way the Devil's minions are in the thing tonight, now that's no lie. I waited too long, so I did. I cast about, while time wasted, praying for the easier course--a fleet--men enough--seeing I could not have the support of those who should have understood me. I prayed for the easier course, so I did, but I tell you now, Beneen, a man must never do that."

And Ben looked again, and found nothing. "It was a sail?"

"I thought so. I thought so, Ben."

"If you'll call Manuel aft, whose eyes are good as mine----"

"Manuel is it? Have I time for the witless, when--but I may have been deceived. Not there, you say, and I'm believing you. Nothing?"

"Nothing. Sometimes, Mr. Shawn, I've been fooled at night by a whale's spouting. The spray of him seems to hang in the air a while, and I suppose moonlight may lend it the look of a sail." Shawn laughed a little, his breathing slower. He seemed not annoyed that an untamed pup should be instructing him concerning sea-born illusions. "Well, do you take the helm again, and this'll be your bearing, steady as she goes."

"May I ask, Mr. Shawn, is this course for Martinique?"

"It seems to be gone and that's the truth, and yet I could have sworn--what? Martinique? Why, if my reckoning is right, her present course maintained will bear her a very far way to the east of Martinique."

"Nothing before us then but the South Atlantic."

"The Line, the South Atlantic, and the Horn. No more waiting. No more of this petty cruising about. No more--piracy. Do you hear me?"

"Less than a year ago I might have jumped at the sound of that."

"Not now?"

"You're not speaking to a boy now, Mr. Shawn."

"'Deed so, friend? When did that happen?"

"Who can ever say? It happened.... Mr. Shawn, I've asked you a dozen times, and have been refused, and now I say again: I wish to go in that cabin and speak with Captain Jenks."

"And I'll be telling you for maybe the hundredth time, Ben, he is not captain of this or any other vessel.... Ben, with all the charity I've seen in you, can you not hear a man acknowledge his error? I said, no more piracy. I have done wrong, almost betraying my purpose. I say now--and this is like something you once said to me yourself--henceforth I will not lift my hand against any man except to defend my life and my purpose. Jenks?--why, I think he can be released, and you too if it must be so. I shall be forced to put in at some Brazilian port for water and provisions, and there, I think--well, we shall see. Can I say more?"

"Yes, you could, Mr. Shawn, because I'm asking you again: Why do you hold him at all? Mills says you question him continually, and he answers nothing."

"That's true." Shawn gazed steadily northward, at the open sea. "Answers nothing, and will any man hold such a silence with nothing to hide?"

"_Hide_, Mr. Shawn? Captain Jenks, hide?"

"Must I say again, he is not captain now?... Ben, did you know I spent more than a year in that sorry city of Boston?"

"No, how should I?"

"Oh, you might've.... More than a year, seeking support for the greatest venture a man's spirit ever conceived. I was ignored, laughed at, brushed aside. I sought out the merchants, for behind all the pious canting they've become the rulers of your Boston and I suppose you know it. Sought 'em out one after another, and spilled my heart, the while they looked at my poor clothes and shuffled their feet and remembered important business. I sought audience with your Governor Dudley himself--Mother of God, would he even admit me to the bloody presence? Queen Anne's man, body and soul.... Somehow, Ben--and mark this, I pray you--at some time that miserable year, the story was passed about that I had been with John Quelch. And--why, damn their souls, so I was, for a while. I did ship with him, being penniless and starving, and escaped him as soon as I might. He was evil, Ben, a common pirate, it was right he should hang. I served him briefly, I did that, having no choice, and the rumor of it was made a cause why I should be persecuted, ignored, laughed at, brushed aside. Compassed about.... And still, didn't I ask far less than was asked by Cabot, Drake, Magellan? A trifle of support, mind you, a tiny fleet, a sound crew, a charter to explore--don't you see any man of them might have compounded his fortune a hundred times and written his name in history beside my own? But would they? You know the answer, and they shall know the whole of it too, in time.... And somehow, Ben--while I went from one to another wearing my heart out--somehow a few of them did finally understand a little of what I so recklessly told concerning this venture. Certain of them began to think: Why not the venture without the man? You see? Have you ever heard of such a thing as stealing a man's dreams?"

"What has this to do with Captain Jenks?"

"Surely it's plain? The man you childishly call Captain was one of those who began to ask themselves: What if this wild, shabby, tedious Irishman hath glimpsed something of value after all? What if there _are_ new lands for the taking in the western sea, and why should this miserable noisy Sligo man, this old Shawn, why should _he_ have any part of it?... Why, I couldn't believe this of Peter Jenks myself for a long time--never came to me that he was one of 'em, till he hired that man Hanson in the room of me--and that in despite of your great-uncle."

"But----"

"Whisht, Ben! You'll be telling me your great-uncle gave me no promise hard and fast, but I know men's hearts. But for Jenks, I'd've had my way, and glory in it for Mr. Kenny as well as me, don't you doubt it. It wasn't to be. When he took on that agent Hanson, sure my voice was plain enough, I could see how they'd been planning it all the while. You see now, don't you? Had I not taken _Artemis_ from him, Jenks would have her now the other side of the Horn, and Boston would never see her again. But I, Ben--why, I shall give her back the name of _Artemis_, and I'll send her home, when she's taken us to the new country...." In the silence Ben caught the glint of something--merely the copper farthing; at length Shawn spoke again, quietly: "True, Ben--nothing before you now but the Line, and the South Atlantic, and the Horn. Nothing below you but the Atlantic. And once on a time wasn't I a boy of your age who believed that God was over me?" He was moving away. Ben thought he might be weeping, but his voice often sounded so when his eyes were dry. "And over you, over all that breathe. Oh, but in those days I was that young and foolish you wouldn't know the misguided thoughts that would seize hold of me and deceive, for the voices I heard then were not God's voice, they were far other. Maybe even now I'm not certain of anything, except that I cannot die until I've looked again on the color of the western sea." He returned swift and silent out of the shadow and stood close to the helm, eyes level with Ben's; no taller than Ben. Not even as tall, perhaps. "What now? Why did I say that, Ben? Why did I say, the _color_ of the western sea?"

Ben supposed his right hand could flash away from the tiller to his belt, if it must. "How could I know why you say any of the things you do?"

"Ah? But you must sail with me, all the way. Will you not say it? Will you be forcing me to destroy you? Then I'll be alone, Ben. These men with us--what are they but phantoms, all of 'em? Knife 'em, they'd bleed smoke--not blood, Ben--smoke, and drift away downwind. None aboard but you and me, now that's no lie...."

But Ben, for sheer pity and disgust, terror and bewilderment, self-blame and homesickness and again pity, could not speak at all, and Shawn moved away, himself like smoke, past another black shadow by the mizzen that must have heard all he said; at this Shawn snarled: "If the wind changes, Mr. Marsh, you needn't be calling me--I shall know it."

Under Ben's hand beautiful _Diana_ ran southward, cutting away the miles with a timeless whisper at her bow; but during the night the wind fell off, the air growing dull, silent, and in the morning dead. The sun rose on sails become slack, bemused in idleness on a mirror sea.

* * * * *

"I wondered, in fact, that she had not long ago destroyed herself in one of those seizures."

"They seldom do, Reuben, though often they injure themselves. She is nearly forty, that woman we saw today--I've known her bite her tongue and bruise herself, but nothing worse. As a rule they die somewhat young. It's as well you saw her so--the condition is not too rare and you'll encounter it again."

"And the books?"

"Have nothing to offer but speculation and bad advice. Nothing I've tried ever had the slightest effect.... What's that?--I mean the one that called from back there in the pasture."

"Red-winged blackbird."

"I wish I knew 'em all, the way you do."

"Brought up with 'em in the wilderness, Amadeus. But nobody could know them all.... Do the books tell anything of the cause?"

"Nothing worth your notice. Speculation, most of it not based on clinical observation. And (as you suggest) without at least some knowledge of immediate causes, treatment's only a blind groping. We must try it of course, because sometimes a guess is correct. But somehow we must also push back along the chain of causes--widen the area of light--somehow.... As you may or may not know, there are many going about in the world far madder than that poor epileptic, who is not really mad at all but merely drops into her fit from time to time, and usually comes out of it unharmed. A fearful thing to watch, Ru--I dare say you still feel it in your stomach. But some of the forms of madness that don't so loudly announce themselves are much worse."

"The world may be a mad place, Amadeus, but there go the peeper frogs. I told you they might, on such an afternoon."

"So they do. You don't suppose----?"

"If we continue to the pond, they'll stop. However, should we then squat patient in our boots, the thing might be done--imitating boulders, you know. We might, as it were, rock ourselves into the semblance of a natural outgrowth."

"Who now hath plumbed the depths of a contumelious paronomasia?"

"Ha!"

"That log looks more comfortable."

"If the ants on it are black, yes. If red, no."

"They look black, the few I see. Is there a difference?"

"Oh, my friend! How did you survive till I came to you?"

"Don't know."

"Yes, they're black.... By the madder ones, you mean the raving kind? Those with wild delusions?"

"Those, and others. I was thinking of the quieter sort, who are seldom called mad. Men and women eaten up with suspicion. So that--I think you've never encountered this, but beware of it if you do--so that everything happening within their purview must be bent to the shape of that suspicion; and to hear them talk you'd suppose the whole world was allied in conspiracy against them. I'd guess that such a state of mind is begotten of a most fearful vanity. And what evil is commoner than vanity? Of course that particular sickness of the mind is only one of its fruits. How seldom do you find anyone who hath ever attempted to look on his own life with something like the eye of eternity! But without at least some detachment, vanity is bound to grow."

"As for example the seeming humility of proper Christians?"

"Oh, that, yes--but don't trouble thyself too much about that. It would seem they need it. Well, and there are those madder ones devoured by jealousy, spite, greed, and fears of a hundred kinds, mostly groundless. It's no-way true that all is vanity, but I think you may say that vanity is the source of nearly all the saddest things in human nature. Nay, I think our poor wench with the fits, by comparison with many respectable souls, is quite sane."

"And so what is madness?"

"Do thou tell me, thou who gavest me once a definition of health that serves me still."

"A--a gross exaggeration of some natural activity of the mind? 'Lilies that fester....'"

"I'm pleased I made thee discover the Sonnets. Yes, that might serve.... But the hunger for verifiable knowledge--now there's an activity of the mind, natural I think, but sluggish or nonexistent in most men, and in a few like thee and me, very intense: are we then mad?"

"If such hunger for knowledge became painful or annoying to others, Amadeus, I am sure we would be called mad."

"Mm-yas--thought I'd caught thee, but (as usual) I'm caught instead. So consider--would you say there are _any_ activities of the mind that would not deserve the name of madness if sorely exaggerated?"

"Maybe none. That hunger for knowledge could become a thing _I'd_ call madness, if the pursuit of it caused a man to neglect too many other matters--such as sunlight and peeper frogs and Charity's pictures and the brightness of a swallow flying."

"I'll agree. I dare say anything out of proportion may become a madness. Even generosity. Even love."

"But Amadeus, I do ever think that love is not a thing, but more like a region where we travel. Something of that I said once to Ben. I can't remember when it was, and he may not have understood it--I'm sure I said it badly. Like a region, where we travel with--oh, some vision, some of the time. As sleep is like a region, and waking. Do I still say it badly, Amadeus? I mean that no one can give his friend a handful of sunlight, but may walk in it with him, and so love him."

* * * * *

After scant and haunted sleep, Ben woke to stillness where motion should have been. Stumbling up on deck long before the beginning of the forenoon watch, he saw Shawn on the quarterdeck deep in a stillness of his own, ignoring Tom Ball who muttered at him, and Joey Mills who stood by the helm but had nothing to do there, for the _Diana_ had lost all way, the sails were dead rags, and if some profound current still moved her there was nothing to tell of it in this deathlike air under a brazen sun.

Ben remained forward, to avoid Shawn. Matthew Ledyard was lounging near the bow with nothing to do. His stare was not unfriendly; he even wished Ben a laconic good morning. Maybe he wanted to break his custom and share a word or two out of his permanent gloom. Like Ben, in these tropic days Ledyard had discarded shirt and jacket, wearing nothing above his belt but a kerchief around his head to moderate the sun and hold sweat out of his eyes. His gaunt chest was darkly tanned; it had never seemed to Ben that the purple splash on Ledyard's face was particularly ugly--once you grew used to it, it was a nothing, no more than another man's scar or mole. Unnecessarily Ledyard said: "We're in for a calm."

For several days a carrion reek had corrupted the air of the forecastle, and the murky hell-hole of the galley where French Jack prepared his strange offerings. Likely more barrels of the salt cod had gone bad and ought to be hunted out. Mr. Ball claimed the whole dirty cargo was spoiled and should be heaved overside, but French Jack explained that cod smelt that way anyhow; in spite of the pride of a Boston man, Ben was inclined to agree. With no breeze to sweep the nastiness away, the stench overhung the deck also, as though the _Diana_ herself were exhaling corruption in a mortal sickness. To come up into this from the fetid forecastle was for Ben like waking to a continuation of nightmare. He was in a mood to fume and curse at anyone--particularly at Shawn, and that not for the large and just reasons, but simply for a certain standing order that forbade any of the hands to sleep on deck. For Ledyard, however, Ben managed a smile and a grunt of agreement. "Hope I may spend some of my trick aloft."

"Ay--stinks, don't it?" And Ledyard startled Ben exceedingly by adding: "Like a dead man's dream it is. A fair hope gone rotten."

Ben grew alert. Ledyard had never said anything like that to him before. "Maybe it'll be as bad at the masthead. This morning I believe we could stink out Father Neptune himself. Is no one aloft?"

"I was. Captain called me down. Seems dem'd foolish even to him to keep a lookout now--if we're becalmed so's everything else that might be about." He glanced aft and continued, a murmur in his smallest voice: "Cory, him and Mr. Ball was just now speaking of breaking out the boat and towing her. Understand that? Take at least six men at the oars to move her. Six men in a boat, in this sun, nothing to their bellies but p'ison stew or salt cod.... Step further away from the hatch, will you?" He lounged away to the bow, and Ben followed him as casually as he might, noticing how, with no way on her at all, the Diana had at some time since the wind died turned completely about, her lifeless bow pointing homeward to the north. Ben stood with the blaze of the morning sun behind him and watched the fire of it on the battlefield of Ledyard's face. "You might say, Cory, if so be he wants to kill all us mis'able scrannel hands, us buggerly rascals, that's what he'll do. Just get us out there at the oars in the sun, to tow the old bitch, that's all it needs." His browned sturdy arms spread out along the rail, Matthew Ledyard looked much like a man crucified, his dark face unflinching in the sun. "And I wonder would you be out there too--Mister Cory? Pulling an oar? With your charmed young life, so even the tropic sun won't strike you down? Or back here on the deck belike, so to sail with Captain Shawn when the rest of us is maybe dried up and burnt too black to stink? Or will you now be trundling aft to tell the Captain what old Ledyard said to you?"

Ben dropped his hand on the man's iron wrist. It did not move away. Ledyard's intense stare did not seem to be one of wrath, for all his words. "I have never carried tales to Shawn and you know it."

"Ya-ah--maybe I do know it. Maybe I wished to learn if you could ever be angered any way at all."