The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  On cool mornings after fog, Ben Cory liked to search out the green of poplar bark still damp, a green softer and stranger than any other on earth, seeming translucent, leading the mind to green oceans.

  Ben Cory knew as well as anyone that the country beyond the magic of poplar bark is not to be entered, and may be declared what you will.

  There as here, like the reed of the horned god demanding and perilous, the west winds move beyond the green land and over blue-green waves remote from land.

  * * * *

  The days crawled with inky toil into another Saturday afternoon, and Ben Cory was once more free to invade Boston. This time he could ride his mare to the Jenks house—ride like a gentleman, with a solid determination not to fall from grace, no, not in the lightest particular.

  In the morning, Uncle John also had gone to Boston, as he seldom did on a Saturday. Since that evening a week ago when Ben had presumed to speak out, Uncle John had appeared withdrawn in a puzzling way—even more since the gray hours of the funeral—almost as though he regretted having allowed young Benjamin to talk up like a man. It created a background trouble for Ben’s thought: maybe he had made a fool of himself after all; maybe on second thought Uncle John had found it downright insulting, the idea that his Artemis should abandon the rich journey to the Indies and operate like a cheap ferry tub in the coastal trade. Only background: even the fear he had managed to discuss with Reuben, that John Kenny’s fortune might tumble suddenly at the assault of creditors, could not dominate such an afternoon as this, when the warmth of June had arrived to blend with the crystal freshness of the end of April, and the girl Faith was in the garden by the house, alone, kneeling to lift with a pink finger tip the golden face of a jonquil.

  Ben jumped down, not able to look again and pretend to discover her until he had made a careful business of hitching his mare to the post in the street, rubbing the hairy foolish nose and murmuring the words old Molly usually required before she would stand quiet and go to dreaming in the sun. He could turn then, but (such is the bewildering skill of women) Faith was still engaged with the daffodil. Only at that moment did she rise, glance toward the house, lift a hand in the light to push back a strand of hair under her little cap, brush away a clinging leaf from the softness of her brown skirt, and then at long last step away from the bed of flowers to find Ben Cory at the gate, with a wondrous flush of surprise. “Oh, Benjamin, you startled me!” Her right hand jumped to her mouth, blue eyes laughing over it in mirthful self-reproach at having used his first name when of course she ought to have spoken with proper reserve in spite of the violets swaying at her feet, and called him Mr. Cory.

  “I didn’t mean to. I’m not dangerous, now that’s no lie.”

  “That, sir, remains to be seen. You did cause me to forget myself.” She was still silently laughing—from natural good spirits, or from kindness, or because Ben Cory was the most comical savage under the sun. “Surprising me so, Mr. Cory!” That in drawling mimic reproach, as her hands held down the latch of the picket gate, in mimic warfare declining to open it.

  “May I come in then?”

  “Oh-h—mmm,” she said, her tone a singing. “I’ll consider it, I suppose. I suppose it would be cold and unkind if I obliged you to stand out there in the street. Though perhaps you ought to, as a punishment for surpri-ising me so.”

  “I’m most sorry for that.”

  “Are you now? Why, Mr. Cory, if I thought so I might decide you were a poor thing of no enterprise, and so away into the house closing the door, and you might sit out here lorn and lonely enough until the lamplighter cometh in the evening.” She blinked both eyes. “Or I could send Charity to you, sir? With another picture maybe, so to keep you company?” She glanced down at her hands.

  Out of breath in an April gust of wisdom, Ben lifted their unresisting warmth from the latch, opened it, found himself inside the garden and closing the gate without commotion. She had drawn away from him, laughter fallen from her like a ravished shield. Not too far away, grave, with veiled downward-looking eyes, the hands he had briefly touched holding each other as if for safety between her breasts. Ben could neither move nor speak unless she did so. “Would you like to come look at the daffodils? They were timid, Mr. Cory. They would not bloom in March, but now I think the sun’s a little kinder.”

  The daffodils, yes, but not yet. Ben stooped to the purple glow and wind-stirred motion at his feet, plucked a single violet perfect in fragility and held it near her eyes, so that she must lift them presently to look at him, frightened with discovery, as young in all ways as himself and unsure. He recaptured the memory of a breath of music from the dingy library of John Kenny, and found a glory of pride that he could bring these words to himself out of some dusty hour that must have passed without love, and speak them for her pleasure, and not sound in the least like a fool.

  “You violets that first appear,

  By your pure purple mantles known,

  Like the proud virgins of the year,

  As if the spring were all your own;

  What are you when the rose is blown?”

  “Ah! What’s that?”

  “The verse is—oh, if I remember, by Sir Henry Wotton, to his mistress the Queen of Bohemia. But I did make it mine,” said Ben. “I made it mine, to give you today.”

  “Why—why, Ben!” He saw the tears start to her eyes. A few appeared on her cheeks. He could not touch them; understood how she must turn her face away quickly, for the tears were no pretense at all, and she as much startled by them as the boy who loved her—no part assigned to that sort of tears in the undertakings of mimic reproach and mimic warfare. “Is that why you came? To—to say something beautiful I couldn’t forget, even though.…”

  “Even though—?”

  She smiled down at dainty shoes that were somehow not very muddy in spite of the spring ground, trying again to be distant and a lady. “My mother and father, ’deed they’d be much put out to know I was speaking thus alone with you, Mr. Cory.… I meant to say: even though the words cannot be for me.”

  “Cannot—why, for you and no other, ever.”

  “Well, we might—” she glanced at the house, and at him, and at the house again, so that Ben grasped what she would never be so brazen as to put in words, namely that the stone seat on the other side of the bed of daffodils stood very near the house wall, and that this part of the wall was blind, without any windows to overlook the seat; that the jonquils would not tell and the stone would be warm in the sun so much like a sun of June. She sat there with a woman’s grace; without a smile, shyly touched the stone beside her. The seat was small, yet she could only mean that he was to be there, that near to her, breathing her fragrance even as fantasies of twelve troubled nights had dwelt upon it. “Now tell me, Benjamin, tell me truly the reason that brought you here?”

  “Oh, to—to pluck this violet, and look on it, whether it be, as they tell, the flower of modesty.”

  “Now you laugh at me.”

  “Never.”

  “Any scholar may laugh at me, Benjamin. I’m not learned.”

  “Nor I. But as I remember—well, not the books but what my mother used to say, maybe I ought to take from this garden a sprig of rosemary, but there’ll be none in the bloom this time of year. Oh, Faith, I’m no scholar at all. My brother is the wise one.”

  “Ay, faraway Reuben. Monday, you know, was the first and only time I’ve laid eyes on him. I thought only his body was there, and he the other side of the moon—but of course a funeral is a poor time to meet anyone.… Rosemary? Why rosemary? Rosemary’s for remembrance.”

  “That’s what my mother used to tell. You see, I may be going away,” said Ben, and at the moment quite believed it.

  “Going away?” Her face was a new miracle because of nearness.

  “You heard what happened to the Ir
is?”

  “Oh!” She caught his hand in both her own. “Yes, I heard of course. You mean—what do you mean, Ben?”

  “I ought to be out and earning my way. I spoke of it to Uncle John the other evening. You see”—and he found that he was speaking to her very much as he had done in certain dreams before the onset of sleep: reasonably, bravely, easily, finding words without stammering. This realization of a dream was in itself so great a wonder that he could take other marvels almost lightly, even the marvel of her thigh against his own, her two hands holding his one as if they desired never to let it go. He would sail, he said. He would learn all there was for him to know of the sea, for it was the mightiest of highways for human enterprise—and the world, said Ben, is scarce explored. Faith seemed astonished to learn how few were the names of great explorers.… If, said Ben, a shipowner of Boston could build his fortune soundly on the colonial trade until his resources were great enough so that no minor disaster need shake him, there was no reason why such a man—he was not completely sure at this point whether he meant himself or Uncle John Kenny—why such a man, later on, say when the present war was over, should not fit out a fleet, maybe five or six vessels as fast and good as Artemis but probably larger, and strike out for those parts of the incredible Pacific where anything might be found. Islands—continents.… Why should Spain and France sit a-straddle of half the known earth? For that matter, what did England herself really understand of the New World? “Oh,” said Faith. “Why, this land of our own,” said Ben—“I say this ought to be the heart and center for the exploration that’s still to be done.” And Faith watched him, shining, but presently let go his hand and turned her face away.

  It dawned on Ben that this vision had been newborn of this moment. It was in the blue intensity of her eyes that those five or six vessels as fast and good as Artemis were setting out, breaking out the full splendor of white canvas and turning south—across the Line, and then the Horn? Or should they rather beat across the South Atlantic and round da Gama’s Cape and so on through the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean toward their goal? Well, Shawn—Daniel Shawn would know what way they ought to go, and would go with them of course. But not just yet; not for a few years; not until.… Born of this moment, and so perhaps all his earlier imaginings of the sea had been no more than prelude—including those of a great while past, when he had never seen so much as the tame waters of Boston harbor, but his brother (at some moment of that past so far away that Ben could not now locate it in time or place) had said: “I’ll go with thee to the Spice Islands.”

  Faith was saying: “I see those things for you. It’s very fair and brave.” She was not happy. “I see you will go away.”

  “Why, I’ll come back.”

  “I don’t know,” said Faith to the faces of the jonquils. “I don’t know, whether they ever do. I am not sure my father ever cometh back, Ben. He is here and not here.”

  For that Ben found no answer, but a new wave of courage allowed him to recapture her hand. “I suppose, Faith, it sounds as if I were talking the stuff of dreams.”

  “Brave dreams, but—why to me?”

  “I think you made them.”

  “Oh, Ben, you’ll break my heart. I am not—I—never mind, I don’t wish to speak of it. But you should not be telling these things to me. I should not allow it. When we first met I thought you were only a green boy. Now I see you’re—not, quite, and I.…”

  His own courage amazing him, Ben said: “And thou, Faith? How old art thou?”

  “I am seventeen. But women are much older.”

  “I have heard that, and don’t believe it.”

  “Oh! Oh! Must I now be angered with you?”

  “No,” said Ben, still dizzily courageous—“no, you must not. But you must tell me why you should be suddenly distressed, and—and why I shouldn’t tell you what’s in my heart. What is it, Faith?” The courage, he supposed, could hardly last much longer, but he could take some pride in it, this courage faintly like cruelty, that seemed to have swept away her needless defenses.

  “We should not be speaking thus together.” As though the dutiful assertion itself had given her confidence, she went on more tranquilly: “Have you ever thought, Benjamin—but, la, why should you?—that the lot of women is none so easy? We must stay at home. In many concerns we may not even speak. We marry, d’you see, and bear children, and must mind the house—no matter if those we love are on the far side of the earth, yet we must do that, and keep our own counsel too.… One day, Benjamin, I shall marry a rich man, and I hope”—but as she said it she clutched his hand and her eyes filled—“I hope and pray he’ll have nothing whatsoever to do with the old gray sea. Oh, I will not marry a sailor, never! Only think,” she said, warming to it and laughing now with some mischief—“he my husband shall be a pillar of the colony, like Judge Sewall, ha?—or even a royal governor, Benjamin, with such a wig!—oh, Ben, Ben, have I hurt thee?”

  Helplessly Ben said: “I love thee.”

  She rose quickly and moved away. He dared not look up until she spoke again. “I am—sorry.… Marry, yes, and bear children and mind the house, and grow old little by little—why, that Magellan of yours, tell me, how long was he gone when he made the circuit of the world? I shall be old and gray when you—come back. Oh yes yes, an old gray dame with wrinkled cheeks and shaking hands, and belike I’ll say, ‘Why, grandchildren, I knew him, the great Benjamin Cory—’”

  “Don’t!” said Ben, and knew her hands were on his shoulders.

  One of them curled under his chin to lift his face. “There!” she said—“do you see? You see what a naughty heartless old woman I am already? But promise me, Ben—promise me you will come back.”

  Ben knew he could have stood up then and kissed her—if someone had not passed by in the street. Faith herself seemed not displeased by that intrusion of alien noise, only took her hands away and stood back smiling at him, the moment irretrievable. “I will come back.”

  “Ben, I wish I had known you’d be here today. We have a guest arriving soon—I must dress, and aid Mama with a few things, and I cannot invite you to stay. I wish I might, but you understand—not my place to do so, and I dare say Mama would be upset.”

  “Of course.”

  “But you will come again—that is, if you wish to,” she said, and laughed herself at the high absurdity of the notion that a time could ever come when he would not wish to see her.

  “Of course—whenever I may, Faith.”

  “I do wish you might stay this evening, but—well, ’tis a—” she sighed in some private trouble or exasperation, moving her hands vaguely—“one of those occasions.”

  Dimly frightened and not intending his own words, Ben asked: “Someone important?”

  Faith made a wry face. “He would think so.” Her hands sketched a wig on her head, and she strutted a little in mimicry of self-importance. “A man of substance, la. A little wintry in years to be sure. A merchant, a pillar of the church, and a—widower.”

  “I see.…”

  “Take care,” she said with what might be a show of real anger, “that you do not see too much. He is a good man—I am sorry I was so naughty and forward as to make light of him. Good day, Mr. Cory!” Then in a lightning change at sight of his stricken face, Faith hurried to him and framed his face in her hands and whispered: “Did I not make you promise to come back? Oh, make your voyages—if you must. Make them for me, Ben, and forgive my cruelty!”

  “You—”

  Lightly and quickly, Faith kissed his lips. “Queer little scar,” she said, and touched it with a finger tip, breathing hard. “Tell me of it some time. Why, I—Benjamin Cory, I would wait for you a thousand years.” And she ran away across the garden, vanished utterly, in some place where Ben supposed there would be a door to safety.

  He passed through the gate in a gol
den haze. Molly was restless. She meant no disrespect, but sometimes found it humorous to fidget and dance ponderously at the moment he was lifting his foot for the stirrup. She did so now, perhaps in comment at the obvious remoteness of Ben’s mortal mind. It had the effect of drawing him back to the present world, a few mild expletives quivering on the edge of utterance, when the brown girl Clarissa, returning from some bit of marketing with a parcel under her arm, observed his difficulty, set the parcel on the steps and came to him. “May I hold her for you, sir?”

  “Oh, thanks!” Ben smiled without knowing it, and mounted easily as she competently held the bridle and stroked Molly’s friendly repentant nose. He was in the saddle, but her hand remained there a moment longer, and her look held him, a look profounder than a touch, demanding nothing, declaring nothing except some kind of understanding which (until he thought about it later) seemed to Ben quite natural. As if they, the two of them alone, understood and recognized certain things that concerned no one else, that no one else had ever guessed.

  Clarissa spoke also, quietly, looking up at him in the sun with no smile: “Good fortune, wherever you go.”

  “And to you,” said Ben—involuntarily, in a way, or because no other words could possibly have been spoken. She turned aside to take up her parcel, and Ben rode home—across Boston Neck, past the waters of Gallows Bay, the marshes and the quicksands.