He nodded. He knew that a glass was kept in a rack next to the bedroom window. Like any other merchant, Zeph wanted to know what was coming and going, likewise whether it was worth while to make for the counting house.
"He went to meet you. Later he sent a boy up, tell me you was coming here on business and for me to fix flip."
"Good," said Adam, who had noted that the poker was in the fire. "How 'bout some of that flip right now?"
"Wait'll he comes. Look better."
"Aye."
"That's him now. I know the step."
She went to the door, threw back the bolt. Here was an entrance different from Adam's. Zephary Evans didn't sing out any greeting to his spouse, or even so much as peck at her face, but addressed himself promptly and with unaccustomed geniality to his guest. He apologized for being late. He'd been listening to the story of the duel.
"Brawl," Adam said incisively.
"Tell me about it," begged Elnathan.
"Woman, brew us flip," said Zeph. "I told you to have some ready."
All the same, and while Elnathan fussed with mugs and rum and spices, Zeph did relate what had happened down on Queen's Wharf, and he embellished the tale with touches of an imagination you wouldn't have supposed him to have, making Adam out quite a hero. Elnathan
was goggle-eyed now; but she went on working. The poker hissed once, twice. The flip was ready.
Though the teUing of the tale embarrassed him, Adam Long was to remember that scene, different from any he had known. The fire, the candles—though Zeph had snuffed out three of these—the steaming mugs of flip, the platter of injun muflins Elnathan had fetched from the kitchen, the low ceiling, rain slashing the windows: these combined to make a deep impression upon him. The Evans house, if comfortable, could hardly have been a cheery place on an average evening; but it was a home, something to which Adam Long was not accustomed.
He stretched his legs, leaning back in the chair; and though he did for form's sake now and then mumble a protest against the overvividness of the narrative—second-hand from Zeph Evans, who had missed the fight itself—for the most part he thoroughly enjoyed himself. The flip was excellent, the injun, too. The story of the fight gave Elnathan an excuse for gazing at him with eyes held wide in admiration instead of holding to her more usual expressionlessness; and when she served him—for her husband had not told her to sit down—she leaned far over, so that he could peek down the neck of her dress. At other times Adam stared at the candle branch.
It was real silver, that branch, and in any Newport household in the year 1702 an article of silver was something mighty special, something to be set out only on extraordinary occasions. Adam wasn't thinking of this, or wondering whose idea it had been to lug the branch out. His mind was on another and far fancier branch, one made of gold adroitly etched. The man who called himself Carse had been wont to fill the seven holes of this bit of booty with candles originally intended no doubt for the altar of some Papist church, and light these, and then set for Adam the task of putting them out one by one, in quick succession, from a goodly distance. Lunging his full length, Adam could barely reach a candle with the tip of his rapier. The trick was to put out each flame without ripping the wick or spilling hot wax. It was not easy. He'd had to come back to full salute position after each lunge, too. Only once, sweating, panting, in that sun-drenched hollow back of the settlement, had Adam put out every candle: but he'd seldom got fewer than four.
Well, he was a long ways from Providence island now. He smiled a mite, listening to the rain, sometimes sneaking a look at Elnathan, only half hearing the story of his own prowess.
The change-over from sociability to business was barbarously abrupt. The flip was extremely strong, but as soon as Zeph Evans saw that Adam was minding it he ordered his wife out of the room, ordered her, too, to close the kitchen door after her, and then turned to Adam and went right to work. 170
"You'll be sailing again, Captain?"
"Soon's I can catch a cargo. Anything about?"
"Spars and staves for London. But they're not the best cargo for a boat like Goodwill. But there's heaps of coasting."
"England, that's it. Two men there I want to meet."
"Now about my share—"
"Aye."
It was clear at once that Zeph was eager to sell, though Adam couldn't guess why; but it was equally clear that he meant to get a good price. These two knew one another. There were no fancy phrases, yet neither was there any thumping of the table. They went at it harshly but in low voices, not looking at one another. It was a full hour before they settled. Adam was to pay rather more than he'd meant to; Zephary was not getting as much as he'd thought to. It was a sound bargain. The merchant got out writing materials and they wrote an agreement and then made a copy of this, and each man signed each document.
They did not shake hands afterward, for Zeph was not a demonstrative man. Nor did Adam get another glimpse of the lady of the house, or of the flip.
It was still raining. He turned up the collar of his fearnought. He heard the door closed and bolted behind him, and he glanced back to make sure that nobody was watching from a window. Then he crossed the plot of grass to the window of Deborah Selden's bedroom. He couldn't see much, there under the maples—nothing of the girl, scarcely even the sampler on the wall—but he could see the sill.
The lemons were gone.
PART SEVEN
Nobody Lives in London
O f The wide rolling river he had dreamed of so many times,
t-^ «—' the Thames, proved to be hardly a creek. The city itself
showed at first glance an overgrown, dirty Newport.
Ashore, though, he began to catch a notion of London's bigness. Tarnation, what crowds! And the place stank, a sewer.
"Nobody lives in London," a doleful innkeeper was to tell him. "Nobody, anyway, that can get out into the country."
It seemed to Adam that half the people in the world lived there, all scrounched together as though afraid of the surrounding landscape, wherever that was, the way sheep in a gale huddle with their heads toward the middle, pushing and being pushed. Yet sheep, when bufifeted, at least keep busy; whereas the Londoners stood or sat or sprawled to study with a sardonic eye the activities of others. In Newport this would have been unthinkable. Idleness was taken as a matter of course here; in Newport it would have been esteemed a sin.
There was no lack of laughter, but a lot of this was derisive. Newport folks, Adam reckoned, might well be thought solemn alongside these English; yet he didn't sense any large measure of happiness here, much less contentment. It must have been more than a frame of mind, it must have been a physical misalignment, that made Londoners look so sour. Even their smiles had acid in them. Even their grins canted. Two out of three persons you passed might have been suffering from some mild but persistent stomach trouble, a disorder encasing all their thoughts and impulses in a thin fibrous film of suffering.
And the noise! Men tramped on his feet, jogged his elbows, or pushed their faces into his, thrusting things at him, the while they shrieked "What d'ye lack?" Folks dropped things on him from windows, rolled things in front of him. Twice, jostled against a wall, he lost his footing and slipped to hands and knees; but nobody paid him any mind.
Here was the oddest part of it all: the attitude of these Londoners, who could loaf in the midst of turmoil and wouldn't trouble to turn head for anything less loud than a scream for help, if then. Had Adam been
caught up in a mob clamoring for the blood of some miscreant he might have caught from his fellows some touch of their hysteria. Yet no common cause united the members of this teeming world, no purpose inspired them. It took Adam a good while to accept the all-but-unbelievable truth that these folks weren't flying around in any frenzy, that this was the way they acted all the time.
You were given no chance to take offense. You were bumped from behind, or butted, or shoved, and before you could whirl around and demand an apology the offend
er had bared off, leaving you to confront some totally different person, who had no interest in you. But then, nobody had any interest in you. Adam had known lonesomeness most of his life; but he had never before been as lonesome as this.
He had seen kicked-over ant heaps; nor was he one to disremember what the Book says about going to the ant, thou sluggard; but ants knew what they were doing, and they worked for one another.
He issued from out of an alley narrow enough so that he might have touched the houses on either side, and emerged into a street comparatively broad; and he saw a coach approaching.
Now Adam Long had never before seen a coach, though he recognized it from descriptions. This street was spacious only in comparison with the alleys he'd recently roamed: in itself it was scarcely wide enough to accommodate the coach, a yellow monstrous lumbrous contraption drawn by four fat horses. Most of the folks near him flattened themselves against walls or squeezed into doorv'ays, but Adam stood staring, head cocked.
The coach was all over small wooden steeples and tassels, some red, some silver. Out of its center, high, wobbling precariously at every lurch of the coach as though it were going to break off, rose a flat wooden triangle on one side of which—Adam couldn't see the other side—were painted two diagonal white stripes, their edges clipped like the edge of a pie, against a background of red.
There were two men sitting up in the driver's seat, which didn't seem necessary. Only one held the reins. They wore red coats with silver froggery, the same sort of coats the two men who rode the left-hand horses wore. Adam couldn't for the life of him see a kernel of reason in those two men. They didn't do anything, just sat there.
Before the coach and on either side, behind, too, marched soldiers. There must have been twenty of these. They carried muskets, holding them out, away from their bodies, in readiness to use the butts as clubs. Folks faded before them. But Adam Long loitered a moment out from the line against the wall, rubbering for a peek at the person or persons within the coach. A soldier struck him in the chest.
"Out of the way, bumpkin!"
This was not a push but a substantial blow. Adam was slammed against the wall. He bellowed, reaching for his sword.
Instantly another soldier stooped low to slap his musket butt sideways across Adam's shins.
The pain was an explosion. The first blow had dizzied him but at the same time enraged him. Now all he could do was double up. He might have toppled into the path of the coach itself had not a third soldier kicked him in the mouth. That held him straight until the coach had passed. It also caused his mouth to bleed.
The coach gone, then, a final quartet of soldiers marching backward behind it, the street resumed its clangor, men tumbling about like water in a wake. Only one man, a pursy fellow of merchantlike mien, took the trouble to help Adam to his feet.
"Tut, tut! Lucky it isn't raining today. Might have ruined this." He was feeling the material of the coat as he brushed it. "Where, uh, did you buy this, if I may be so bold as to ask, sir?"
Adam had started to lug out his blade.
"No, no!" The pursy one grabbed his arms. "They're down to the river by now. You'd never even get near his lordship. They'd beat you to a pulp-"
Adam licked his lips, tasting the salty blood. He shook his head, clacked his sword back.
"Thank you, sir," he said as quiedy as he could.
"You're an American colonial, sir, I take it? "
Adam looked at him in amazement.
"Now how'd you ever know that?"
The pursy one summoned a water-seller, gave her a farthing for a can, proffered his own kerchief, and wiped Adam's mouth.
"Tut, tut! But you're lucky. I've seen men get all their front teeth smashed in, they didn't jump back fast enough."
"I was never taught to jump out of the way."
" 'Tis a good thing to know. There. Take care of that coat. You didn't buy it in Boston, I'll wager. Philadelphia perhaps?"
"Kingston, Jamaica."
"Ah," slowly raising and lowering his head. "Ah, yes. I see. Well, goodbye, sir. Your servant."
"Your servant, sir. And—thank you a bushel of times."
Still stunned, unsure of himself, struggling to hold his rage in, Adam must have walked half a mile after this before he as much as looked up —to see a sight so strange that in a wild moment he wondered whether he had been knocked unconscious and was dreaming this.
A f It was an open space, large for London, roughly round, the j^yj sort of place, as Adam later learned, though he was never to learn why, that was called a circus. There was a considerable crowd, in the center of which stood one of the largest persons Adam ever had seen, a man with immense shoulders, an ape's arms, black lank hair, a mouth continually atwist, hands that might have been hams, bare feet. This creature wore only a shaggy tuniclike affair seemingly made of the pelts of small animals, tasseled in unexpected places, and more than a little motheaten. He rumbled and growled pauselessly.
Prancing and capering around, and waving a branch of spruce, was a thin short man with the eyes of a malicious old monkey. He wore an extremely tall conical hat made of some sort of paper, on which had been crayoned pictures intended to represent (as near as Adam could make out) bears, birds, and bushes. He talked all the time.
". . . and the soil's rich and black, thousands of acres for any man wants to take 'em . . . and he don't have to work!" Grimacing, he pointed to the pictures on his hat. "The fruits of the orchards and the vegetables of the field, they're hisn for the picking!"
"Speakin' of vegetables," cried somebody, and threw a rotten turnip. It missed the talker by inches.
"Out to 'eave a paving stone at 'im, that's what," the man next to Adam muttered.
"What in Tophet's he talking about?" Adam asked.
"The American plantations. 'E's a bleedin' spirit."
"A what?"
"A spirit. Recruiter. We calls 'em spirits because they spirit men aw^6. They'll tike anybody—out of prisons, poor'ouses, anywhere."
The crowd itched to learn what that Samson in the patched pelts was supposed to be, and it was permitting itself to be entertained, and conceivably edified, but it was by no means co-operative.
"Four years of bloody slavery they gives you," somebody shouted. "Then they adds a couple more every time you let go a belch."
"Not so, my friends," cried the man in the dunce's cap. "A few years of easy, restful study, just so's you can look around and get used to being in that wonderful land—that's all. You wants time to pick your own plantation, don't you? Well, that's all it is. The contract don't mean nothing. Mere matter of form, my friends."
"He's a liar," Adam said, low.
"For sure. They all are. But there's a few as'll follow 'im, and ell turn 'em over to the top uns of the gang and they'll really pour the lies on like clabbered cream on berries."
The bleedin' spirit was thrusting the spruce first into this face, then into that, all the time dancing around.
"Ever sniff anything so delicious in your life, my friends? The true sequitur fugientum, straight from America."
"Don't smell like nothing to me," one man said.
"Didn't leave it under my nose long enough," another said.
"If the talk-talk-talk don't do it," said the man standing next to Adam, "then they buys 'em ale—spiked with gin."
"And if that doesn't work?"
The man shrugged.
"They 'its 'em on the 'ead."
The recruiter was losing his crowd. He whipped from a pocket three glass balls, which he began to juggle. He wasn't a very good juggler.
"You just lie there and watch the corn grow. And in the daytime you listen to the mooing of the kine, and at night to the—well, the nightingales."
"The roarin' of the tigers, I reckon," somebody shot out.
The recruiter shook a vigorous head.
"No tigers or lions left there any more. The first settlers killed 'em all off when they cleared the land."
"Bad eno
ugh they net nitwits, the only kind'd want to go to the plantations anyway," the man next to Adam said, "but when they grabs children it's a caution."
"They take children? Kids?"
"Aye. They're napping kids all over town. Offer 'em sweets, anything. Or just plain break into your 'ouse and steal 'em. Kidnappers—ain't you never heard of the kidnappers, sir?"
Adam slowly shook his head. The very word, he reflected, had an evil sound. Kidnappers. He shuddered.
"You never even heard of them? Say, where'n 'ell do you 'ail from, if a man might ask?"
"The American colonies," replied Adam.
Next time he looked the man was not there.
The man in the center of the circus remained, however, and he was working harder than ever. His glass balls were not getting much attention; his audience was walking out on him; so he played his trump card —the dark-haired monstrosity they were wondering about.
"Where else in the world except a place where the air's so pure and the climate's so balmy, where else would you find a specimen of the human race like my friend Cyossetta here?" 176
He thumped the big man's chest.
"It's the wonderful air, my friends!"
"This one of them red savages?"
"'E don't look red."
" 'Ard to tell what color 'e might turn out, somebody worked him over with soap and water awhile."
A pitchman doesn't dare to permit his audience to participate too freely, lest they take the show away from him.
"Cyossetta here, gents, happens to be a full-blooded Narragansett."
"That's a lie," Adam said loudly.
"Eh?" The recruiter peered at him, squinting, as though through smoke. He saw the sword. "Ah well, your lordship's right. I spoke too hasty. What I meant to say is, 'e's a full-blooded Indian. Matter of fact, 'is mother was a Massachusetts. So 'e's only half Narragansett."
"He's no more an American Indian than he is the man in the moon," declared Adam.
He couldn't have said why he broke in. He had nothing against the redskins, though he was no notable admirer of that race either. All the same, he didn't like to see the Narragansetts maligned.
Captain Adam Page 22
