“Oh, I might be in the city after dark. I rather missed it that other night, coming home.”
“Well, tuck it under your britches, can’t you?—so to look less like a bloody cutthroat and more like my little brother?”
“Very well.… Ru, I don’t know how to say this—lately I’ve been some-way troubled about thee.”
“Oh, why, why? Have I two heads?—but don’t answer that.”
“As if we no longer understood each other—my fault, I think.”
“It is not. It is not even true.” Reuben still held the bridle, his face stiff and white and smiling. “No cause for trouble about me. I am one of the fortunate, didn’t you know?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I own a shield. I walk in the woods. I read the Anatomy of Vesalius, and the books you bought for me. And I told you, Ben—they do not fade.”
“Ay, there’s that. Still, if I live to be a thousand I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand you.”
“Must you, Ben?”
“I try.”
“I have never understood another, and yet I think about them as much as you do.”
“But—oh, I don’t know how to say it—I don’t think I meant that kind of understanding. There’s more than one kind.…”
“Ben, you’d best hurry a little if you’re to have any time with Uncle John at the office.”
“Yes,” said Ben unhappily, and was in the saddle looking down, more than ever reluctant to be going away. “I’ll tell you after supper, what he says. Ru, what was that?—you started to say that if I sail, then you also—?”
Ben had spoken softly, in his confusion. He supposed Reuben had not heard, for he did not answer, and that was a discourtesy Ben had never known him to employ. Ben saw him rub his hand along Molly’s fat neck. “Be a good horse,” said Reuben, and was gone, walking quickly around the stable, the shortest way to the back fields.
* * * *
The cottage with the green shutters sat comfortably under the dignity of twin elms—like its owner mild, and quiet, and rather old, carrying age as an elm does with rugged awkwardness, with many scars, without pomp and circumstance.
Reuben had learned the inside of the cottage—simple, on the same stark plan as the house in Deerfield, with two main downstairs rooms and a garret, but where the Deerfield house had owned a small lean-to off the kitchen, Mr. Welland had a larger annex, more solidly built, which he called the surgery. It was also his reception room for patients, his library, his study, his room of contemplation. The gray striped lady, Goody Snively, who kept the cottage rather constantly supplied with kittens (often yellow), lived here in a box of her own beside the wood-box at the fireplace. Very few patients ever came to Mr. Welland here at the cottage, so few that he did not try to keep precise hours for them, but it was understood that he would ordinarily be at home in the late hours of the afternoon. Most of his work was done in visits that often took him a considerable distance to outlying farms. A small stable stood separate from the cottage, home of the brown mare Meg, who carried Mr. Welland on his labors in all weathers, all times of day or night. He claimed that Meg was a better diagnostician of the purse than himself, being always restless outside the houses of wealthy patients, who were invariably the slowest to pay his charges. That puzzled Reuben. “You’ll learn,” said Mr. Welland. “Your great-uncle is one of perhaps five exceptions to the rule that I can remember.”
Mr. Welland kept no servant, and no one came in to clean or cook for him. He took most of his meals at the ordinary down the street; messages were left for him there more often than at the cottage. In the cottage he maintained a monastic neatness—no dust, no clutter, very few possessions and those necessary, functional and in good order. “It’s not difficult,” he had explained on Reuben’s first visit, “but a servant or woman-by-the-day would make it so, and by the way, Reuben, my house is never locked, this door from hall to surgery never closed except when I have a patient with me. I like simplicity, seeing it leaves one free to consider complexity—especially that of persons who a’n’t so smart as you and me. Don’t trouble to knock, I don’t like it. I hate knocking. If it’s loud I jump out of my skin, if it’s soft I blame it on the mice.” “Mice, with that cat?” “Mice is a general term, boy. Mice includes everything that bothers by day or goes thump in the night. If a door squeaks I blame it on the mice for a week before I oil it. Everyone needs a devil, Reuben, and mice have served me bravely in that capacity for lo, these many years. Pull up a chair and be at ease.”
On this Tuesday afternoon Reuben entered without knocking, an action that still caused him some shy discomfort, and spoke Mr. Welland’s name unanswered. The door to the surgery stood open; also the stable door, as Reuben noticed through the window; the doctor was away, and this new loneliness an unexpected blow. “I am most unreasonable,” said Reuben to Goody Snively, who rubbed his leg, and purred, and exercised a cat’s privilege of trotting ahead and sitting down in front of his feet as he was about to go into the surgery. Reuben hooked her on his shoulder; she sang casually and damply in his ear as he went to the doctor’s bookshelves and took down the Vesalius.
“This is a man—” well, certainly, but also not a man. A man is motion and thought; a man is foolishness, courage, love, pain. Reuben turned the pages at the desk, rather blindly trying to force them into some clearness, and he wondered if there had been any truth at all in what he had said to Ben less than half an hour ago. Vesalius had not faded—that much was true. The mist is in the observer.
Not only now, he thought, but always, in every observation, whether made at a favorable time or not. If I were happy, that also could deceive, a rosy mist no easier to penetrate than a gray one. If I were calm, neither sad nor happy—still a mist, of accepted thoughts that may be false as fog over quicksand. “But don’t you see, Goody Snively?—we know one thing: we know the fog is there. And that, by the way, is my tender thigh and not a tree trunk. If you regard me as a tree, I may bark.” Goody Snively retired—shocked, maybe.
The drawing before his face was lost to him a while, the room also, in a trance not of thought but of stillness avoiding thought. Then, as the body itself will usually shatter such a refuge with its own cantankerous insistence, Reuben’s nose itched, his hands upholding his cheekbones grew sweaty and cramped. He gave it up and wandered about disconsolately. He knelt by the box to which Goody Snively had returned. Her latest kittens were quite new, their open eyes not focusing, their legs uncertain. He lifted the black-and-brindle one of the four and held it against his cheek, liking the harmlessly wild kitten smell; it mewed in small wrath, and Goody Snively began to look stern, so he replaced it at the consolation of the nipple and strolled away. He leaned in the open doorway of the front room, the room where Mr. Welland slept. Curious, but somehow not inappropriate, that this room like the rest of the house should be bare of ornament. Monastic was the word, but it held a sense of comfort too. A plain narrow bed, made up with sharp precision. One armchair, much worn in the seat; beside that an unpainted table, bearing a Betty lamp, a pitcher and a basin, nothing else. Two pairs of shoes—so the doctor owned three altogether—lined up at the side of the bed like little soldiers. Reuben thought of his own five expensive pairs, of the days in Deerfield when he had not always owned two pairs, of time and change and human virtue, of the froth of bright embroidery Kate had stitched at the buttonholes of the fine maroon waistcoat he now wore, and shut his eyes, wondering if that enameled snuffbox was the doctor’s only luxury.
Opening them—but still holding away thought, or letting his eyes alone think for him—Reuben observed that one pair of Mr. Welland’s shoes bore the marks of dried mud. The man must have changed in haste with no time to take care of them, or had forgotten. Reuben recalled noticing on a kitchen shelf a few cleaning rags and a jar of neatsfoot oil. He carried the yellowed shoes out there, refreshed the fading hearth-fire and sat by
it to polish them. The crackle of new wood and the noise of his cleaning covered the light sounds of Mr. Welland returning and putting up Meg in the stable. Reuben was aware of it as the doctor opened the door, but the task was not quite done; he did not want to abandon it, or even to rise respectfully: work started ought to be finished, and as for the trivia of politeness, Amadeus Welland wouldn’t care.
“What’s this, Reuben?”
“It was something to do, sir. I couldn’t bring my mind properly to the study, some-way. Besides, if this mud stays here too long it’ll spoil the leather.”
“Ay, but—thou, scrubbing my shoes? It’s kind, Reuben, but I don’t find it fitting.”
“Sir, I do.”
“Eh?” Reuben could not answer, nor look up when after a silence the doctor drew a chair to the hearth and sat there spreading his hands to the warmth. Yet he was not disturbed, nor worried—if Mr. Welland was annoyed, that would pass. It occurred to Reuben as his fingers (remembering Deerfield) worked the oil into the leather, that he had in fact never felt less troubled about his own behavior and how it might appear to another. It was simple, satisfying and natural that you should scrub mud from the shoes of someone you loved, taking it for granted that if the occasion ever happened to suggest it he would do the same for you. “Each time you have come here,” said Mr. Welland at last, “you have been in some degree different, and also the same. Each time I must become acquainted with you again, and each time, I suppose, a little better, since I change too if only by learning.”
“You remarked that living is a journey.”
“Oh,” said Welland, and sighed, “I fear that was little better than a simile after all, for what is the thing that travels and cannot itself remain wholly constant? All is change; all things flow; and what’s more, I’d no idea those dem’d shoes had so much virtue left in ’em.” Reuben could look up then and smile. “Well, Reuben, being in Boston yesterday, I called at thy great-uncle’s office and spoke to him concerning thine apprenticeship. He is not averse to it, not at all, but would have thee continue for Harvard, and perhaps not be formally bound immediate, but later, if it is still thy wish in a year or so.… Pleased, my dear?”
“I—am. I would—I would.…”
“What, Reuben?”
“I would study, and—serve, if I may, whether formally bound or not. I think that is what I was trying to say. It won’t fade, Mr. Welland. I was never so certain of any other thing.… I ought to have spoken of it to Uncle John, but rather feared to because he hath had so much to distress him lately, the death of Mr. Dyckman, the loss of the Iris.”
“The Iris? I heard about Mr. Dyckman of course, everyone has.”
“A ship, that should have brought him a great return, taken by pirates off Virginia. Ben is worried about his affairs, knowing more of them than I do. That’s one reason why he hath so set his heart on sailing and earning his own way.”
“So?”
“Yes. Mr. Welland, you and Uncle John—you are both very kind. I will not disappoint you. I can work.”
“Not exactly kindness. On my part at least, let us call it—mm-yas—recognition, and no more of it for the present, because—well, because the subject is complex and I must presently be off again, almost to Dorchester, damn the luck. There was a message for me at the ordinary. I’ve only time to snatch a bit of rest for me and Meg, and a quick meal, and a—I think, a change of shoes.… He never spoke of the Iris—well, he and I are not well acquainted. Certainly he hath a marvel in that ketch Artemis. He was good enough to take me aboard for a few minutes. I’m no sailor, but even I can see she’s no common sort.”
“Was Shawn there? A black-haired Irishman with a green coat?”
“Why, no, I noticed no such man, but there were many about.”
“You would have noticed and remembered him.”
“Mm? Mr. Kenny introduced me to two or three there at the wharf—Captain Jenks, and the mate, who was here, there and everywhere with scant time for landsmen.”
“The mate? What was his name?”
“Why, Hanson, I think—don’t you know him? We exchanged some little talk about New Haven, where he comes from, seeing I lived a year there once. Everyone was in a whirl of last-minute business. I felt in the way. Never knew there were so many different ropes to trip over.”
Reuben set the shoes aside. “Last-minute business?”
“Why, yes.” The doctor glanced down, puzzled. “What’s the matter, Reuben? What did I say to disturb thee?”
“Did Uncle John say when Artemis was to sail?”
“Why, today. You didn’t know?”
“No, I—pray tell me about it.”
“Well—he said she ought to have sailed that day, yesterday, but they were waiting on some cargo from Gloucester, salt fish I believe, that hadn’t come, and Captain Jenks all of a growl about it. They left it that they would wait till today, and if it still had not come she’d sail and—let me think—put in at Sherburne on Nantucket, and find what the islanders might offer to fill her hold. To my ignorant eye she already looked low in the water, but Captain Jenks was swearing she’d ride sweeter for another twenty ton, and a dirty shame—not his exact words—she should sail light.”
“And then New York, from Sherburne?”
“Why, no, Reuben—Barbados, thy great-uncle said.”
“Ah!… Thunder!—she may be gone before he’s at the office. Ben hoped to sail, Mr. Welland. His heart was set on it. He was all one ache for it. He left for Boston only an hour ago, with no notion that Artemis was to sail today, only hoping to persuade Uncle John to let him sign on. I felt, sir, as if I was saying good-bye. He felt it too.”
“I’m confused. Isn’t he for Harvard in the autumn, with thee?”
“Yes, but he hoped to make a quick voyage to New York and return. It was his idea she should go there, and damn it, the proposal was most sensible. Uncle John might at least have considered it. Now he’ll be heartbroken. Maybe I was saying good-bye to him, and not in the way I thought. He won’t be the same when he comes home, not after this.”
“Surely, Reuben, you’re making too much of it.”
“I know him, Mr. Welland. Certainly Uncle John meant it for the best, but it won’t do. You can cross Ben, disappoint him, be harsh with him, but damnation, you can’t deceive him, never mind if it may be for his own good—he won’t bear it.” And yet even as he spoke Reuben knew that his own strongest feeling was unwelcome, unreasonable relief: Ben would not sail, not yet.
“Mm-yas, I begin to see.… Reuben, why do you speak as if he were somehow your charge? He’s the older. He must find his own way.”
“That’s true, sir. I even tried to tell him so this afternoon. To tell him that I had been—oh, too much my brother’s keeper, and was sorry for it. I think he understood.”
“Then let it be. If he’s hurt and angry about this, it will pass. You’ve only to stand by and be a friend to him until it does. Don’t make it more important than it is. I’m sure that after the first day or so, Ben will not.”
“I hope so.” Reuben hugged his knees, watching the fire. “I hope so, and I’ll do as you say. And still I feel as if I had said good-bye to him.”
“I suggest that much of living consists of saying good-bye. I suggest that a man says good-bye to his wife when they fall asleep in the same bed, the morrow’s morn being a new region in the journey that can’t be known till they meet there together. If they do. At certain times we are more aware of saying good-bye, that’s all. As presently I must h’ist my creaky bones out of this comfort, change to those good shoes, and say good-bye to thee for a while. By the way, if study should come hard this evening, let it go. Thou dost look, as a matter of fact, very tired.”
“Nay, I—maybe I am.… Dorchester, you said? Might I not go with you? You said a while ago that s
oon I could go with you on your rounds.”
Reuben heard Mr. Welland catch his breath. “Not this one!” As often in bothered moments, Mr. Welland took snuff. “The message at the ordinary was—fi-choo-shoo!—garbled as usual, but having dissected out the fleck or two of not-so-golden truth from the rubbish, I have some reason to fear smallpox. That’s in confidence, Doctor.” He poked Reuben’s shoulder, smiling a little but also stern. “Not a word to anyone. If it’s true we’ll all know it shortly, but if not there’s no reason to set people’s hearts a-squirming. Lord God, it comes, and comes again, and again, and we live like sheep on the side of Vesuvius, never knowing. Reuben, I sometimes think—and you’ll have bad moments of thinking it too—that all we doctors do is no whit better than what the Inj’ans do, howling and screaming and beating drums around a sick man’s hut to scare away the demons. Do you know that in all history no epidemic hath ever been overcome, nor even much lightened? It strikes, runs its course, and we stand helpless, making motions in the air. And yet one would think that if contagion could somehow be prevented—but where doth it breed? We don’t know. What is contagion? We don’t know. Why should a thing like the black plague have struck at England as it did some thirty years ago, and then after blazing and slaying for a time, simply fade away, for no reason men can see? Don’t know, don’t know. Sir Thomas Sydenham, a great venerator of Hippocrates by the way, was much concerned with epidemiology; I remain skeptical as to his conclusions. Galen, the great Galen to whom they say we must all bow down—Galen evades; I would have thee most cautious, Reuben, with regard to all the doctrines of Galen. If at Harvard they give you Galen as a final authority, be polite, but read in private the works of Sydenham—and even Paracelsus for that matter.… I’ll tell thee an almost comical thing: I have lived fifty-three years, have read much and pondered, have spoke with a goodly number of learned and thoughtful men, and I have never, never satisfied myself as to a proper definition of good health.”
The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 91
