Bennie Ben Cree | Page 5

odd and humorous in his manner and had a look of imperturbable
happiness, round faced, smooth-shaven, with straight hair and rather
long, thin lips sticking out when something amused him, a
well-muscled, large-framed man; the third stranger always sat opposite
the others, with his back and square, slender shoulders to the rest of the
room. And when all three men were there, the first two seemed to talk
to the third loudly and genially; but sometimes these two came alone,
and then they talked to each other and were more quiet.
One afternoon I stood within the door that led from the long verandah
to the hall and floor above, the door of the public close beside it; and
my father was asleep in his chair far at the other end of the verandah.
I heard the three strangers come to the door of the public, heard the
third say good-by, not two yards from my ear, and go down the steps
briskly. And in a moment the elder stranger spoke thus in a drawling
way:
"He's close, Dan, he is. He takes a man's confidence like it belonged to
him natchully, but he don't appear to have any opinion on it. Hey?"
"Folks are diff'ent, cap," said the other blandly. "You don' expect a
te'apin to open hisself. He can't 'ithout bustin', an' he may be a very
good sort of te'apin an' a warm-hearted te'apin. An' another man comes
along whoopin', 'How d'ye do! Here's me. Who are you?' like he
couldn't help his candor. Ever hear o' the snake in the gyarden o' Eden,
cap? He was very co'dial, that snake."
"Still," said the first, "I shan't open on him till the time comes. He can
have his choice then."
"As how, cap?"
"Not here. Off shore."

With that they went down the steps also. My father woke with the noise,
and they nodded to him pleasantly.
After a time Tony, the waiter in the public, came out and winked at me
wonderfully.
"Those fellies is fittin' a ship," he said. "Say, she's jus' goin' in der
navvy yard. Say, I hear 'em tell she's a keener."
My father only gazed down the slip with absent, pathetic eyes, thinking,
as always, those September days, of what was slipping away from us in
the white-curtained room above that looked out on the garden.
When I think of the thing we call death in a general way, spelling it
maybe with a capital, it never seems to me a going down at sea--and I
have seen that--or any violent accident; but it seems like a
white-curtained room with a little breeze blowing the curtain in, and
outside you hear the rattle and mutter of the city, as though it were
making comments on the matter in a hoarse undertone. A broad white
bed is near the wall, the doctor and nurse are sometimes in and out of
the room, and on the pillows is a thin white face with the hair drawn
neatly back. The lips are moving with a faint sound, and the eyes look
out softly and peacefully, at me kneeling beside, and my father sitting
with his chin on his crutch and his beard rumpled. There is a lost look
in his eyes, wide and lonely; like a man under whom a ship is going
down at sunset, who sees the sun for the last time and the red clouds
doing his burial service. My mother is speaking; her voice is not like
any sound that seems natural to the earth, but thin, creeping, and slow,
like the mists you see in the early morning that cling and whisper to
slack sails.
"You were always my big boy, Tom," she says, "like Ben, only bigger."
"Ben's growing," says my father, hoarsely.
"You'll not remember it against me, Ben, for it was not I. And he shall
go to sea, Tom, remember, like all the Bensons and Crees, all sailing
folk and proud to be, proud to be all sailing folk. But I'm glad you're

not a woman, Ben, for the sea's hard on women, very hard."
When I went to school in the brick schoolhouse on Willet Street I
studied Latin in a green-covered book of selections, which for the most
part I greatly disliked. There was a passage ending with these words,
"sunt lacrim¾ rerum" and what "lacrim¾ rerum" means I find less easy
to say in common English than I did then, when we called it "the tears
of things," and appeared to satisfy the master with that. But now I
suppose it might mean, there is a hidden sorrow in the middle of God's
universe that likely has been there always. However it may be, I
suppose it quite beyond a plain man to describe