Orbus
Written for Nanni.
Harbert Brown was an orphan.
His parents had died when he was quite a young child. He remembered a tall, handsome sea captain with a red beard and a big, important way of talking, and he remembered the blue uniform with its brass buttons, which he'd loved to play with when he was five or six, rubbing them shiny and sometimes cutting them off and hiding them. His father roared and demanded to know what his wretched little boy had done with the expensive brass buttons! and Harbert pretended to be frightened and brought them right back, like a good child. He remembered also a little woman with pretty smiles on an ordinary face, who sang him to sleep at night with lullabies that were really sea songs she'd learnt from her husband. He remembered that she always missed his father terribly and used to sit in the picture windows at night crying. Now that he was older he thought that she had been awfully young. Perhaps she missed her mother and father, too, just as he missed her and his sea captain father now that they were gone.
It had been a sea battle for his father, who was killed by the mast as it fell, shot in half by cannon. His mother had taken ill not too long afterwards and died in bed, a little death for a little woman, her brown hair all damp and her cheeks hot, crying like a little girl and asking for her husband. Harbert was eight, he thought, at the time, and he leaned across the bed by standing on the tips of his toes, because then he was short and had to stretch, and held her hands until the doctor sent him out.
He got a new father after that, though not a new mother, and he still considered himself an orphan. One of his father's favourite sailors, a wonderful laughing man named Pencroff, came to the house, spoke to the lawyer, and then went in to see Harbert. Harbert remembered him, too. When he was a young child, Pencroff had come to visit once or twice with his father, and knew how to carve things with a little knife, and knew all the sea songs his mother sang, and knew just how to treat a child, with a wonderful laughing frankness. Harbert thought it funny because Pencroff always knew how to behave around him, but around his mother, he blushed and dropped his eyes and spoke in a mutter. Pencroff had blue eyes and a straw sailor's hat with a blue ribbon on it, and he always smoked a pipe. He told Harbert what horrible bad luck it was about his father, and what a fine seaman the US Navy had lost, and what a fine sweet lady New Jersey had lost, and then explained that he was to take care of Harbert from now on.
Back then, Harbert was a young child, and he thought he might live on the sea. With a few oaths and some annoyance, Pencroff explained he would actually have to go to boarding school in Boston.
"But it'll be the best teaching place they could send any boy short of the sea," Pencroff promised him. "You'll learn things, as I suppose, that we couldn't show you on the Jackson. I fancy you'll learn to read."
"I already know how to read, Mr. Pencroff," said Harbert, with a little eager smile.
"My boy!" Pencroff cried excitably--Harbert had learned that he was easily excited-- "I don't really see why you need to go to school at all if you know that, but there you are. They'll make you into a fine man, at any rate. A lawyer or a doctor or something."
"I want to be a scientist," said Harbert hopefully.
"That, too," said Pencroff.
So Harbert went off to school, with all the money from his father's commissions there ready to make him into as fine and clever a student and as magnificently well-taught a one as could be imagined. During holidays, he often saw Pencroff, who always managed to get leave on those occasions, for back then the United States had not yet gone to war. No one could have been more proud of him than Pencroff. No one could have been so wonderfully laughing and praised him so highly and wanted to know everything, even though his dear Pencroff, as Harbert always called him, hardly understood a great deal of it. Every now and then, Harbert would talk about some lesson to do with geography, or astronomy, or physics, and Pencroff would cry out,--
"Oh, that! Why, we do that at sea all the time, but we don't need to have anything particular for it! We use our compasses and our heads," or "we use the block and tackle," or "we call that star the Fisherman's Star!"
It made Pencroff feel rather clever and pleased. Still, he would always protest Harbert's superiority to him in anything to do with learning, and loved to tell his fellow sailors about his astounding, clever boy. Harbert blushed and hoped he wouldn't ever need to meet any of those fellow sailors, as, he told himself, he'd feel quite a self-conscious fool for having been praised so greatly.
But he loved Pencroff dearly.
The war began when Harbert was eleven, but for four years Pencroff kept him in school. When he was fourteen, however, he was called back to New Jersey, for Pencroff said that he wanted him nearby where he could properly take care of him and watch after him.
"Imagine," he said thoughtfully, twisting the blue ribbons on his hat around his fingers, "imagine something happened and Boston was cut off from New Jersey. They don't need the navy right now, on account of being too busy fighting on land. We'll both go together somewhere safe."
"What is it like to go to war, Pencroff?" Harbert asked. He was thinking of his brave father, killed in battle. The boys at school talked about war, but he knew that none of them had ever been in one, and they wouldn't know, he was convinced. Pencroff, though, had fought along with his father.
"You don't want to go to war?" Pencroff exclaimed. Suddenly, he wasn't a wonderful laughing Pencroff any longer--he was an astonished, fierce Pencroff who looked at Harbert as though he had said "what is it like to murder someone, and may I?". "The devil! What in hell do you want to go to war for, my boy? It's a bloody, useless, horrible, sickening way to get killed, and at any rate you're only a lad! I don't care, my boy, if I am a selfish coward--any man may call me one, and I won't say a word to defend myself!--but you won't go to war! Let men who know what they're doing go off to get killed. You're to stay with me." He seemed at once both angry and frightened, and Harbert was entirely surprised.
He took Pencroff's hands in his little white ones and said gently, "Oh, dear Pencroff! I don't want to go to war. I only wanted to know what it's like. What was it like for my father? It's different, I'm sure, on the sea from the way it is on land, here, but I thought perhaps you could tell me. I don't want to go to war--I admire our soldiers, and surely they're the bravest men in the world, but I'm afraid I would rather learn than fight."
"Bless the lad for that!" Pencroff muttered, not entirely placated. "It's a fine, noble thing for a man to do for his country, but it's a hideous, stupid business for a boy. If I thought you meant to go off and leave me and die the way your father did...! Come, now, we're going to go someplace safe. Perhaps I'll take you on a passage to Africa--how does that sound?"
Harbert laughed. "Oh, let's! I'm sure there are hundreds of wonderful things to find in Africa!"
"It's settled, then. In the morning I'll find a ship."
With Pencroff, Harbert smiled as hard as he could and talked excitedly of Africa, but while he was trying to fall asleep later, he looked over at the opposite wall and tangled his fingertips together curiously. It did feel rather like running away. He wished it were possible to stay in school, and not leave America at all. He wished his brave sea captain father were there and could tell him whether it was proper to stay or go: his father was soldier, too, a soldier of the sea, and he would have known whether it was cowardly to go away.
And he did want to know what it was like. Pencroff hadn't told him. It wasn't that he wanted to go and fight, at all, but he wanted to understand it. He wanted to know why men went to war. If it was really as horrible as Pencroff said, there must be a terribly important reason to start one and fight in it. There must be a reason.
After all, he argued with himself, people didn't do things without reason; and the reasons for big, important things like wars must be very big and important. That was only logical; and he wanted to know. Perhaps he would ask Pencroff again to-morrow or the next day, and see whether he would answer then, or perhaps he would ask someone else. There might be someone in Africa who could tell him.
There probably wouldn't be any other American boys in Africa. Harbert curled his fingers happily. Of the other boys at school, some were as studious and eager to go to classes as he was, but a good many more teased him and poked fun at him, and one of them always insisted on hiding his schoolbooks. The professors loved him, and he loved them, but the boys--he found it difficult to be very good friends with any of them. In Africa, there would probably be only him and Pencroff, and perhaps some men and women who were living there--sailors and hunters, perhaps, or African people. There might be African children, too, but they wouldn't speak enough English to want to have much to do with him. Of course, he might meet some of them anyway, but they wouldn't know to tease him, he thought. They wouldn't know that he was fond of classes and could recite the scientific names of eighty-one species of birds by heart. That part, then, would be wonderful, would be quite all right. He smiled sleepily.
It wouldn't be a bad thing. He would be with Pencroff, and that would be quite enough. It couldn't be too bad to leave the United States and the war if he was too young to fight in it anyway. Perhaps--probably--his father would understand. And, someday, he would find out about war. Finally satisfied, Harbert curled up under the bedclothes and went to sleep.
But they didn't go to Africa.
A friend of Pencroff's requested he come down to Richmond, and although Pencroff made a real effort not to have to go, he finally gave in. As he explained in the train to Harbert, the friend was of course a sailor, and an old friend, but "a blasted fool and not at all worth waiting on our trip for". The friend needed someone to speak for him to a creditor and also to lend him money, and as he had once done Pencroff a great favour when they were shipped together, Pencroff did not mean to refuse, although he said he wished he could.
"A fine man like him," Pencroff said reproachfully, propping his feet up on the opposite seat and eliciting a Look from the gentleman sitting there, "needing me to help him get his business done. He's a good sailor, and strong man, and I know he's a pretty sight better than any other man for getting his cannon ready at a moment's notice. I can't see why the devil he's gone and got himself nearly carted off to a court for not paying his bills."
In Richmond, then, they assisted Pencroff's friend, who Harbert saw was a good-natured clever man. He could understand why Pencroff liked him, and also why Pencroff had not been able to refuse him. He was that sort of a man. The business went slowly, to Pencroff's agitation, and every day Harbert was able to spend hours at the city's library while Pencroff and his friend worked together. He spent his fifteenth birthday there, reading his favourite books as a gift to himself, and wondering if a birthday in Africa would have been much the same, except that Pencroff would have been there also.
At last everything was complete. The day after, Pencroff sighed with relief and said,--
"Good, it's over. To-morrow, my boy, we'll start on our way to Africa."
The next day, however, they quickly discovered that they were not allowed to leave Richmond. Pencroff cursed and argued, and got quite loud and upset, but the police were quite firm, and finally he and Harbert were forced to give up. They walked around the city all day long, while Pencroff plotted ways to escape.
"Suppose, my boy," he said, "suppose we took that big balloon they've left out in the square for anybody to make off with."
"Dear Pencroff," Harbert smiled, laughing a little, fondly. He had begun to feel as desperate as Pencroff to get out, but he didn't let on. "Isn't that impossible? Don't they mean to make off with it themselves, and go in it to General Lee?"
"Never the less, never the less," said Pencroff darkly, looking at the balloon as if commanding it to help them. "You never know what might come up."
Despite his words, and his threatening look at the balloon, they were forced that evening to rent for a second time their rooms at the hotel, from which they had gone that morning hardly expecting to return. As Harbert undressed for bed, he paused, and thoughtfully stroked the fabric of the one stocking he had on as he looked down at his feet. Something had suddenly occurred to him.
Pencroff was worried. Of course, he was rather impatient always, but Harbert could really see that he was worried.
It was a little funny, but he thought--he thought Pencroff was worried that something would happen to him-- that they wouldn't leave before the war came to them (for it had already touched Richmond once), that he might get killed, that he might finally find out what war was and there would be nothing to do about it when he discovered that it really was as horrible as Pencroff said. Perhaps Pencroff was even worried about himself, that he might get called upon to be in either one of the armies, that he might be put in prison, that--well, anything could happen, Harbert thought. That was obvious because they'd just come down from New Jersey as merely travellers, and already weren't allowed to leave the city--and he only a boy, if Pencroff was to be believed. Of course Pencroff was worried. It made perfect sense. One could only be worried, if all those things which could be worried about were true.
But it was funny that so much of it was about him.
He sat there, with one stocking on and one stocking off, in his shirtsleeves, and rocked himself slightly. Pencroff loved him. Pencroff had been taking care of him since his poor little mother and his brave sea captain father had died, and Pencroff loved him so dearly that he was afraid of things happening to him, and Harbert had never quite realised before.
Perhaps, Harbert said to himself, perhaps I'm not truly an orphan, after all. He glanced over at Pencroff, who was lying in bed and looking grouchily at the ceiling, contemplating what he'd say to Jonathan Forster, if only he could, to convince him to give up his balloon for them quite sharply!
Harbert smiled. No. He did not think anyone could possibly call him an orphan now. He pulled off his other stocking and got into bed. Who knew? To-morrow Pencroff might be right. You never knew what might come up.
The next day was the seventeenth of March. Still one day before the balloon would be sent out. You never knew what might come up.
You never knew...
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