自由战士 英文原著｜第5章B

This was Johnny’s new life. He liked it, but was at first a little homesick for the Laphams. He had never been so glad in his life as that Thursday, a few weeks after he had begun delivering newspapers, when he saw Cilla and Isannah standing by the town pump in North Square. He had left his last paper for the day with Paul Revere and was starting back to put up his horse at the Afric Queen. He had felt he could never again go to the Laphams’. Mrs. Lapham and her Mr. Tweedie had been too ready to let him hang. He’d just about kill Dove if ever he met him.

‘Cilla!’ he cried. She looked at him and her eyes shone.

Goblin stretched his muzzle toward the empty drinking trough.

‘I’ll pump him fresh water.’ Cilla pumped and the horse drank gratefully.

‘Cilla, do you come over often to fetch water?’ It hurt him that the heavy yoke and the two buckets which he had worn so often, to his humiliation, had somehow descended upon her thin shoulders.

‘Mr. Tweedie won’t have it that Dove and Dusty stop their work. Before breakfast they are supposed to bring in all we need for the day. When we run short, he says we girls are to go. He’s upset everything, Johnny.’

‘I didn’t know he had that much gumption.’

‘Ma abets him. And Ma says it’s not suitable for grown women like Madge and Dorcas to be carrying buckets through the streets. So I’m the one.’

‘If you’ll lead my horse,’ said Johnny, ‘I’ll carry the water as far as Fish Street. I’m not going into that house for a long time yet—but I’ll go pretty near. Close enough to spit at them all.’

‘Still mad?’

‘Sure. Of course I am. Why not?’

Isannah had wandered off because a passing clergyman had seen the sunlight on her hair and was asking her to say the shorter catechism as proof that she was as pious as she was beautiful. And he was giving her a poke of sweetmeats he had bought for his wife.

‘Look you, Cil,’ said Johnny. ‘Every Thursday, see? I’ll leave Mr. Revere’s paper and I’ll be here to help you, just about the same time as today.’

‘I can carry the water myself,’ said Cilla stiffly.

‘No, it’s not just that, but . . . I’ve been wanting to see you. And Isannah too. I didn’t know how to manage.’

They were stopping on Fish Street. It was not close enough for Johnny to spit at his old residence, but as close as he cared to go.

‘Don’t you go promising, Johnny,’ she said. She was stroking Goblin’s face. ‘I think your horse is the most beautiful horse I ever saw. I think he likes me already.’

‘Yes, I know. But I’m going to be here every Thursday. And Sunday afternoon, too. If there’s water to carry, I’ll carry it, but it’s more important that we talk. Couldn’t you sneak off and meet me up by the pump?’

‘Yes, I could.’

‘Well, will you?’ She was a ‘sot’ and stubborn girl.

‘I don’t know—but if you want me and Isannah very much, I can say . . . maybe . . .’

Isannah flew up to join them. She had just eaten every one of her sweetmeats and was now exclaiming over the beauty of the paper poke, suggesting, at least, that that was all the kind clergyman had given her—an empty paper poke—but Johnny could smell chocolate and peppermint on her. Cilla shouldn’t let her get away with such selfishness and gluttony.

Although ‘maybe’ was all Cilla promised, Johnny promised much more.

‘Every Thursday and every Sunday afternoon.’ Those were his last words and he thought he meant them. He thought six months, a year, six years from now, the girls would be as dear to him as they were at that moment.

Back once more in Goblin’s saddle, he turned to watch them, Cilla bent under the heavy load, Isannah skipping about and for no particular reason chanting the shorter catechism once more. But maybe she had reason—maybe another clergyman was in the offing.

There was a lump in Johnny’s throat.

–4–

So far in his new life there had been one, and only one, slight disappointment. Rab was so self-contained. It was as if nothing could come in from the outside to upset him. He owned himself. By temperament Johnny was expansive, easily influenced. Although Rab would have been exactly the same if he had been the son of the wealthiest merchant or the poorest tinker in Boston, Johnny would not. When he had been the prize apprentice of Hancock’s Wharf, the envy of all the other masters, the principal bread-winner of the Laphams (and he knew it), he had been quite a different boy from the arrogant, shabby young tramp of late summer and early fall. Those marketwomen who had counted their pats of butter after he brushed past their stands, Mrs. Lapham with her prophecies that he would end on the gallows, had not been so far wrong. For a little while it had been touch-and-go with him. If pushed a little farther, he might have taken to crime—because that was what was expected of him. But no matter what happened to Rab, good or bad fortune, good or bad reputation, he would never change. Johnny felt he knew him but little more than at their first meeting, but he admired him more and more all the time. Rab did not criticize him, but he had a way of asking him why he did certain things which had a great influence upon Johnny.

Once, as they sat in the attic toasting cheese and muffins by their hearth, the older boy asked why he went about calling people ‘squeak-pigs’ and things like that. Johnny was always ready to do his share, or more than his share, in fanning up friendship—or enmity. Sometimes it seemed to Rab he did not much care which.

‘Why do you go out of your way to make bad feeling?’

Johnny hung his head. He could not think why.

‘And take Merchant Lyte. Everybody along Long Wharf knows you called him a gallows bird. He’s not used to it.’ Was it fun, he wondered—going about letting everybody who got in your way have it?

After that Johnny began to watch himself. For the first time he learned to think before he spoke. He counted ten that day he delivered a paper at Sam Adams’s big shabby house down on Purchase Street and the black girl flung dishwater out of the kitchen door without looking, and soaked him. If he had not counted ten, he would have told her what he thought of her, black folk in general, and thrown in a few cutting remarks about her master—the most powerful man in Boston. But counting ten had its rewards. Sukey apologized handsomely. In the past he had never given anyone time to apologize. Her ‘oh, little master, I’se so sorry! Now you just step right into de kitchen and I’ll dry up dem close—and you can eat an apple pie as I dries,’ pleased him. And in the kitchen sat Sam Adams himself, inkhorn and papers before him. He had a kind face, furrowed, quizzical, crooked-browed. As Sukey dried and Johnny ate his pie, Mr. Adams watched him, noted him, marked him, said little. But ever after when Johnny came to Sam Adams’s house, he was invited in and the great leader of the gathering rebellion would talk with him in that man-to-man fashion which won so many hearts. He also began to employ him and Goblin to do express riding for the Boston Committee of Correspondence. All this because Johnny had counted ten. Rab was right. There was no point in going off ‘half-cocked.’

Twice that fall he saw Rab moved out of his customary reserve. Johnny always spent Friday night with Rab’s folks at Lexington. There were hundreds of fine acres called ‘Silsbee’s Cove.’ Old Grandsire, who had brought Rab up, lived in the big house, but he had sons, grandsons, nephews, close about him. Grandsire, Major Silsbee, was confined mostly to his chair. An old wound he had received fighting forty years ago in the French and Indian Wars had stiffened up on him.

At the end of harvest the Silsbees had a dance in Grandsire’s big barn. There were at least twenty Silsbees there and both Johnny and Rab came out from Boston. The tall, powerfully built, silent Silsbee men were easy to pick out from among the neighbors and friends invited, but Grandsire and Rab were more completely Silsbees than anyone else.

At this country dance Johnny for the first time saw Rab move suddenly into action. He flung himself into the dancing. Johnny thought in amazement how nonchalant and even sluggish Rab could seem about the printing shop, and yet he did his work with a machine-like perfection. Now he saw the dark eyes glowing and the white teeth flash. It was amazing that an old fiddle in Grandsire’s hands and the old voice calling, ‘Gents ’round the Ladies—Ladies ’round the Gents’ could work such a change in him. He had stepped out of his imperturbable usual self. Here was a Rab Johnny had always known existed, but had never before seen. All the Lindas and Betsys, Pollys, Peggys, and Sallys of Lexington were clamoring to stand up with him. He loved to dance, and seemingly all the girls loved him and he all the girls. Johnny, two years younger, noticed with disapproval.

One other thing happened at that barn dance that made a great impression on Johnny. He forget entirely about his hand. Although in the reels and jigs they danced, every moment a different girl was clinging to it, none of them seemed to notice. Johnny spoke of this fact to Rab as they undressed at Grandsire’s. The Boston girls (he was thinking of Isannah’s words—such cruel words he had never even told Rab) had said his hand disgusted them. He wasn’t to touch them with it.

‘It is you who put the idea in their heads,’ said Rab, pulling off his shirt. ‘You know you usually go about with that hand in your pocket, looking as if you had an imp of Hell hidden away, and then someone asks you and you pull it out with a slow flourish, as if you said, “This is the most disgusting thing you ever saw.” No wonder you scare everybody. Tonight happens you just forgot.’

The other time he saw Rab moved out of himself was a few days later. The Webb twins were timid, weakly little fellows, natural butts for any bullies. They never seemed to need any company except each other and their cat. Mrs. Lorne one day sent them to the butcher for stew meat, and they, thinking it was an errand a cat might enjoy, carried her with them. The butcher’s boy was a well-known tyrant. He grabbed the Webbs’ cat, trussed her, hung her up by her heels to a hook, and began to sharpen his knife. He was going to butcher her, skin her, and give the carcass to the Webbs for stew meat. The butcher sat by and roared with laughter at the frantic children’s tears and cries.

Rab heard the terrified screams of the little boys. He rescued the cat, who was the first to get home, with the Webbs on her heels. Next he began on the butcher’s boy. By then Johnny had arrived. Together they took on the butcher, his oldest son, the butcher’s wife, armed with boiling water she had prepared for scalding pigs, her mother, and a passer-by. Yet before the constable had arrived, Rab was out of it, back cleaning his press, and he had got Johnny out of it, too. Johnny had a black eye, a lame shoulder, a torn shirt, a bite in his wrist—that was the butcher’s wife’s mother; she had good teeth for seventy. Rab had nothing except an uncommonly high color in his face and a look of intense pleasure. It was strange that a boy who could fight like that and enjoy it so intensely never quarreled, never fought, and he had almost nothing to say about this really Homeric battle. But for days afterward Johnny would see a look of dreamy content in his eyes, a slow smile form absent-mindedly on his lips. Rab was thinking of the fun he and Johnny had had at the butcher’s shop. All he would say was, ‘We certainly made hash of that shop.’ The boy was a born fighter—ferocious, utterly fearless, quick and powerful—but he didn’t fight often and he hadn’t much to say afterward.

Seemingly Silsbees were like that. Johnny had already seen a pack of them out at Lexington, and there over at the Lornes was Rabbit repeating the old pattern. One day Aunt Lorne came in as Johnny sat reading, with the baby in her arms.

For once she looked a little discouraged. ‘My land, I don’t know what’s wrong with baby. There’s something—and he won’t tell me—’

‘Isn’t he pretty young to tell much?’

‘Oh, no, no. Other babies can tell you whether it’s gas or a pin, or milk souring on them. But he’s a real Silsbee, and they never do, you know.’

‘Aren’t you a Silsbee too?’

‘Me? Oh, no. Thank Heaven, it skipped me. Look at my red hair—and my build. I’m just like Mother—a mere Wheeler. I can say what hurts me—sometimes before I’m hurt. Those Silsbees—they just about can’t. They don’t tell anything, but they are about the best men ever lived. If you’ll just learn to take ’em or leave ’em.’

Johnny was learning to ‘take or leave’ Rab.