Peace, p.10
Peace, page 10
My aunt said, “You don’t drink to excess, Stewart; you know you don’t. In fact, come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drink anything stronger than port.”
“Yes, but you must admit that I’m forever demanding madder music and stronger wine. Bacchant Blaine, I was called in college.”
“You weren’t!”
“That’s right, I wasn’t, actually. The truth is that I was disgustingly studious and failed to make the soccer squad. I still remember the emotion I felt one fine spring day toward the end of my senior year when I realized that I knew more about Emerson than my professor did. My feelings were a mixture of horror and triumph, and that mixture has been the dominating emotion of my life since. You went to Radcliffe, didn’t you, Vi?”
My aunt shook her head. “Adelphi. What do you mean when you say horror and triumph, Stewart?”
“I suppose only the feeling that what I could do I cannot, and what I might do finds me unable. I cannot teach Emerson, which I should do very well, because I must oversee Mr. Ricepie’s bank, about which I know nothing. They say that money, though it represents the prose of life, and is hardly spoken of without apology in drawing rooms, is in its effects and laws as beautiful as roses—yet I find I much prefer the roses, particularly Marechal Niel, which I grow in the hothouse here.”
“It is scarcely my bank, sir,” Mr. Ricepie said.
“You see,” Blaine continued to my aunt Olivia, “there is always a certain meanness in the arguments of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its facts. Ricepie is correct, and though he is far better suited to managing the enterprise than I, and does manage it, yet I must take the responsibility. In a better-ordered world I should be able to shed the whole wretched affair by signing it over to him, but if I were to try that here I should be put away.”
“If you would look at the reports—” Mr. Ricepie said, and added, “I can get them in a moment. I left my briefcase in the hall.”
Blaine frowned. “Please, Ricepie, we are at table. Dinner lubricates business, or so it is said, though I own I have often wished it drowned it.”
We had fish and roast beef, and I think I remember green beans cooked with mushrooms. After the pie I was sent away again, but Doherty had unsaddled Lady, and he said it was too dark for me to ride anymore. I suppose I whined at that, as small boys will, because after showing me the puppies a second time he began to tell me a story he said he had from his grandmother, “the old Kate.”
“It was when there was kings in Ireland. There was a man then named Finn M’Cool that was the strongest man in Ireland; he worked for the High King at Tara, and he had a dog and a cat. The dog’s name was Strongheart and the cat’s was Pussy.”
I laughed at that, causing Doherty to shake his head over the unseemly merriment of the young generation. He was sitting cross-legged on top of an empty apple barrel. “Why and from where do you think the name come, for all of that?” he said. “Did you ever know a cat in your life that hadn’t a sister of the name?
“Well, upon a day it happened that Finn M’Cool was bringing in the cows, and the High King at Tara said to him, ‘Finn, there’s a job of work I have for you,’ and Finn answered him, ‘It’s done already, Your Majesty, and what is it?’ ‘It’s the king of the rats, that’s aboard St. Brandon’s boat gnawing at the hull of it and doing every kind of mischief.’ ‘I’ve heard of that boat and it’s stone,’ says Finn, ‘he’ll not get far gnawing that.’ ‘ ’Tis wicker,’ says the king, ’like any proper boat, and if you’ll not be moving those lazy feet of yours soon Brandon’ll never be reaching the Earthly Paradise at all.’ ‘Well, and why should he, now,’ says Finn, ‘and where is it, anyhow?’ ‘That’s not for you to ask,’ says the High King at Tara, ‘and it’s to the west of us, as you’d know if you weren’t a fool, for the other’s England.’
“So Finn walked every mile of it to Bantry Bay where Brandon’s boat was, and the boat was that large that he could see it for five days before he could smell the sea, for it was so long it looked like Ireland might be leavin’ it, and the mast so tall there was no top to it at all, it just went up forever, and they say while Brandon’s boat was docked there an albatross hit the top of it in a storm and broke her neck, though that was all right, for the fall would have killed her anyway, for she fell three days before she hit the deck, and the deck so high above the water she fell three more after Brandon kicked her overboard.
“But when he could get sight of the water around her, Finn said, ‘That’s the good man’s boat as I breathe, and she’s about to sail, too, for there’s a rat as big as a cow gnawing the anchor cable, do you see.’ And the dog agreed with him, for dogs is always an agreeable sort of animal, and that one would have had this tale if you hadn’t laughed at the cat. Then the dog drew his sword (and a big one it was, too, and the blade as bright as the road home) and lit his pipe and pushed his hat back on his head and said, ‘And would you like that rat dead now, Finn?’ And Finn said, ‘I would,’ and they fought until the moon come up, and then the dog brought Finn the rat’s head on the end of a piece of stick about this long, and never told that it was because the cat had come up from behind and tripped him, for the dog’s the most honest animal there is or ever was except when it comes to sharing credit, but Finn had seen it. Finn winked at the cat then, but she was cleaning her knife and wouldn’t look. The next day they went out to be seeing the boat again, and sure there was two old men on the deck, each of them with a beard as white as a swan’s wing and leaning on a stick taller than he was, alike as two peas. Then Finn scratched his head and said to the cat, ‘As sure as it rains in Ireland, I’ve looked at one and the other until I’m that dizzy, and the devil take me if there’s a hair of difference between them; how can you tell which is Brandon?’ And the cat said, ‘Faith, I’ve never met him, but the other one is the king of the rats.’ ‘Which?’ says Finn, to make sure. ‘The one on the right,’ says the cat. ‘The ugly one.’ ‘Then that’s settled,’ says Finn, ‘and you’re the girl for me.’ And he picked up the cat and threw her aboard and went back to the High King at Tara and told him the thing was done.
“But the cat lit on deck on her feet as cats do, but when she stood up the king of the rats was gone. Then Brandon said, ‘Welcome aboard. Now we’ve captain, cat, and rat, all three, and can sail.’ So the cat signed the ship’s papers, and when she did she noticed the king of the rats was down for quartermaster. ‘What’s this,’ she said, ‘and is that one drawing rations?’ ‘And don’t you know,’ says Brandon, ‘that the wicked do His will as well as the just? Only they don’t like it. How do you think I could have weighed anchor, a sick man like me, without the rat gnawed the rope? But don’t worry, I’m putting you down for CAT, and the cat’s above everyone but the captain.’ ‘When do we sail?’ says the cat. ‘That we’ve done already,’ says Brandon, ‘for the cable parted yesterday and our boat’s so long the bow’s in Boston Bay already, but there’s an Irish wind ahead and astern of us—that blows every way at once, but mostly up and down—and whether our end will ever make it is more than I could say.’ ‘Then we’d best go for’rd,’ says the cat.
“And they did, and took a lantern (like this one) with them, and it was a good thing they did, for when they got to the Earthly Paradise it was as black as the inside of a cow. ‘What’s this?’ says the cat, holding up the lantern though she could see in the dark as well as any. ‘If this is the Earthly Paradise, where’s the cream? Devil a thing do I see but a big pine tree with a sign on it.’ The king of the rats, that had joined them on the way for’rd, says, ‘And what does it say?’ thinking the cat couldn’t read and wanting to embarrass her. ‘No hiring today,’ says the cat. ‘Well, no cream either,’ says the rat, and Brandon said, ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning in the Earthly Paradise. You don’t expect the cows milked at two o’clock, do you?’
“Then the cat jumped off the boat and sat on a stone and thought about what time the cows would be milked, and at last she said, ‘How long until five?’ and the rat laughed, but Brandon said, ‘Twenty thousand years.’ ‘Then I’m going back to Ireland where it’s light,’ says the cat. ‘You are that,’ says Brandon, ‘but not for some time,’ and he jumped off the boat and set up a cross on the beach. Then the boat sank and the king of the rats swam ashore. ‘ ’Twas stone all along,’ said he. ‘That it was,’ says Brandon, ‘in places.’ ‘Shall I kill the cat now?’ says the king of the rats, and the cat says, ‘Here, now, what’s this?’ ‘It’s death to you,’ says the rat, ‘for all you cats are fey heathen creatures, as all the world knows, and it’s the duty of a Christian rat to take you off the board as may be, particularly as it was for that purpose I was sent by the High King at Tara.’ Then the two began to fight, all up and down the beach, and just then an angel—or somebody—come out of the woods and asked Brandon what was going on. ’ ‘Tis a good brawl, isn’t it,’ says the saint. ‘Yes, but who are they?’ ‘Well, the one is wickedness,’ says Brandon, ‘and the other’a fairy cat; and I brought the both of them out from Ireland with me, and now I’m watchin’ to see which wins.’ Then the angel says, ‘Watch away, but it appears to me they’re tearin’ one another to pieces, and the pieces runnin’ off into the woods.’
“And now here’s your aunt come for you.”
It was now quite dark, and my aunt was escorted by Mrs. Perkins, who carried a light. Doherty picked up his lantern and accompanied us back to the house, so that we made quite a party; but he and Mrs. Perkins left us at the kitchen.
Blaine and Mr. Ricepie were talking in the parlor when we came in, and we entered very quietly, like tardy scholars in school. I remember Mr. Blaine’s saying, “I’m not going to argue figures with you—I know what that bank has produced in the past and what it is producing now, and either I get it or we have the examiners in again. Your job is to make the bank yield what I think it ought to, and if you can’t do it you’re not doing your job and I’ll have to find someone who can.”
When Mr. Macafee came to take my aunt Olivia to Mrs. Lorn’s, I begged to go with them. This surprised him, and I remember that he said he would have thought I would enjoy playing baseball more than collecting china, and promised to bring me a fielder’s mitt from his store. I suppose he had been looking forward to putting his arm about my aunt’s shoulders on the drive out, and now feared that I might spy on them from my position in the rumble seat. My aunt interceded for me and I went anyway.
It was a lovely midsummer day, though the sky had a hard quality to its blue that made men say it was going to be a scorcher, waving their straw hats before their faces in a kind of agonized anticipation; while their wives, who had slept in more clothing and had lost, from the perspiration at their temples, the curl an iron had given their hair, sponged themselves from shoulder to hip with Paris Bon-Beau Cologne from Macafee’s and (when there were no males present) made sly little jokes about putting their underclothes in the Frigidaire. I rode rejoicing in the wind—twisting, sometimes, to kneel on the leather seat and look back at the twin lines of dust we raised after the asphalt ended. We had passed the run-down old farm that still offered to board horses for the townspeople, and the sign that announced that ours was the thirty-fifth largest town in the state, and rolled now on the powdery grayness that spelled country roads, with columns of fence posts whizzing along to either side.
I wanted to ask my aunt how much farther it would be, but in the closed cabin of the roadster she was as isolated as if I were left behind at home. I tapped (I suppose somewhat timidly) at the small rear window, but neither head turned. I tried to lean forward far enough to look into one of the side windows, without success. As I slumped back into my seat, I noticed that directly ahead of us—rising over the cabin, which otherwise blocked my view—was a lone pillar of white cloud that seemed as summitless as the mast of Brandon’s ship. I thought it was singularly beautiful, and for a time it distracted me from my formerly urgent concern with distance, and I stared at it with the contemplation a saint might have lavished on some object in which he saw, or felt he saw, a clear manifestation of God. To me it was Brandon’s mast and at the same time the princess’s tower rising from the sea, so that the Irish holy man captained a wicker vessel with sails the size of continents bent to that enchanted edifice of stone.
There is no wonder, no amazement, quite like that felt when something supposed for amusement’s sake to be magical and mysterious actually manifests the properties imagination has assigned it in jest—when the toy pistol shoots real bullets, the wishing well grants actual wishes, lovers from down the street fling themselves into Death’s bright arms from Lovers’ Leap. I was deep in my reverie, as serene and enchanted of mind as any little swan-prince despite the jolting of the Studebaker, when I observed that my tower of cloud was no longer of the pearly-pink white whose lustrousness had originally suggested to my mind the princess of my beloved green-jacketed book; it was now touched everywhere with a dusky black shot with purple that, even while I looked, deepened and deepened until the entire insubstantial spire might have been carved of night.
In the name of Allah, the Compassionating, the Compassionate! There is no god but God. . . . And when he drew forth the stopper there appeared a great son of the jinn with teeth like to the trunks of palms and with five eyes, each like to a pool. Then said he to the jinni: “Dost honor thy covenant with me, and art thou my slave?” And the jinni replied (as the poet hath it):
“He that lord it with little ruth,
Never he be lord in truth.
“But for the time I am bound and thine.”
“Then tell me some tale, for the care of men weighs upon me and I would broaden my breast.”
Then the jinni sat beside him on the sand, and the sweat that streamed from him fought the tide and poisoned the sea. And he said: “Prince of fishermen, it hath come to my ears that there was once a marid, Naranj hight, who had a man to serve him. This man’s name was ben Yahya, and the marid kept him to his toil by day and by night, with never a moment without its task.
“Now, it chanced upon a certain day that ben Yahya carried a burden for the marid down a certain alley in Damascus. Often had he walked there, for it was the marid’s custom to turn stones to kine, and then to have his slave butcher the kine and sell the carcasses, which were of such a weight as to bring him to his knees, and also to make his slave grub from the fields such roots as beasts eat, and by his magic make sherbet of these, which ben Yahya was then forced to sell from a great jar slung upon his back. On this day he carried this jar, and it chanced that as he plodded beneath the load a scorpion stung his foot. He killed the creature and for a moment set down the jar to rub his wound. Thus he saw what he had been too bowed beneath his burden to see previously, a branch that overhung the wall that walled the alley, and upon that branch a fine pear. Being hungry, he thought to pluck it, and to that end placed his jar against the wall and climbed upon it, standing on the cover. No sooner had his hand closed upon the pear than he beheld a beautiful maiden, with tresses like night and richly bedight, with eyes large as sloes and crimson-pink toes, seated in a garden on the other side of the wall, playing a lyre.
“No sooner had he clapped eyes upon her than he fell from the jar and violently in love; but as he fell, his heel struck the jar, knocking it over, and it dashed against a stone and burst to pieces. Then he was awash in the sherbet it had contained, and had no more means of beholding the maiden, and had lost the sherbet he was to sell, and the pear to the bargain.
“When he returned to the marid’s cave, he was beaten for having lost the sherbet as he had often been beaten before, but he remained afterward so desolate that at last the marid asked him whyfor he was ever so downcast and weighed with cark and care. Then ben Yahya replied: ‘Know that when I burst thy jar, Master, and lost thy sherbet, I saw at that same time also a maiden exceeding fair; and the sight of her drew my heart out through my eyes, and it will not come back to me.’ So ben Yahya.
“And then the marid: ‘It comes to me that this was when thou wouldst have stolen the pear.’
“Then was ben Yahya struck dumb with amaze; but after a time he said: ‘And how comes it that thou knowest even that, Master? For I know you to be wise, but none but Allah knowest all things.’
“Then said the marid: ‘Understand that the wall over which you peered is mine, and the garden into which you peeped mine also. And the maid you saw belongs to me, and that even as you looked upon her I watched you from the upper window of my house. Now, thou sayest that thou art sick for love of her; so be it, but I make a condition. Hear it: serve me thirty years more and she shall be thine, and both free.’
“Then ben Yahya fell to his knees and praised the marid, but when he had emptied the cup of his heart he said: ‘O best of masters, why art thou so generous to me? For you know I am thy slave, and must serve thee rewarded or no, and for as long as thou sayest, though it be until I die.’
“And the marid: ‘As thou sayest, but slaves sometimes flee their masters, and did thou not stop thy task, but a few days gone, to rub the place where the scorpion stung thee? Not so do I desire to be served. For all the days until thy time be done, I will have thee serve me as the windlass serves the well or the oar the ship; for the windlass looks not up or down but does its task only and that with a whole heart, though it drinks not of the water; and the oar ne’er stops nor slacks, but stirs the sea to the beat of the drum, though it be all the day and all the night —yet when the ship makes port it has no profit in the voyage. So wilt thou labor for me for thy thirty years—nor wilt thou see thy love until that time be gone.’
