"What's its real cause? Hatred of the American Republic?"
"In a large measure. The toffs don't like the idea of English people —they think of Americans as English—getting along well without a king and all that pertains to a king. The idea of freedom and equality in the American sense of the terms is obnoxious in the extreme—the swain no longer doffing his cap to the squire—Tom no longer a cut below Dick and Dick three cuts above Harry—with wealth and personal achievement taking the place of rank. Often the feeling's merely resentment or pretended scorn. Sometimes it's deadly malice. And I'm afraid it will last a long time."
Plainly Alan was trying to answer my questions fully and intelligently. No doubt he suspected what was in my mind, but still he put a damper on his hopes. I could see it in his face.
"You told me that you hoped to work your way back to England," I said. "Have you any employment there?"
"I hoped to find some. I love the island dearly. I don't think I'm cut out for a colonial."
"Would you like to work for me in a position of secretary? I would expect you to live at my establishments for the time being and travel with me on some of the journeys I intend to make, so your salary of three hundred guineas a year would be largely found."
He turned pale in the face, then red. "It would be heaven," he answered.
"Then you can start tomorrow."
"I will—if after I tell you something—give you a warning—you still want me." He was trembling so he could hardly speak. "Although technically speaking I belong to the aristocracy, I'd be a Liability to you instead of an asset in the matter of you getting on in English society."
"I don't want anything from English society except what I buy and pay for. English society will want nothing of me except my gold. I can assure you, you won't get in my way."
"That settles it, Mr. Blackburn."
"My factor Jim, yourself, and I will sail from Cape Town on the first England-bound vessel having accommodations for passengers. Make tlie necessary arrangements."
Early in October we put out in a fine East Indiaman of eight hundred tons burden. My hired cabin was nearly as large as Captain Phillips's on the Vindictive; Alan and Jim had cubbies larger than the little room where I had first slept aft the mast. Neither fast nor yare, she was staunch and steady; and without once heaving to in heavy weather, we made Lisbon in forty-five days. Here I gave Jim a money belt, a letter of credit on an English bank in Syracuse, and some long-mulled instructions. Wearing western clothes of a plain sort and with Arabic raiment in his chest, he set sail for Gibraltar on his way to Malta. I did not expect to lay eyes on him for six months at least and probably a year.
Sailing on, we passed Cape Finisterre and the very waters where we had lost Thomas Childers, whereby I had become bosun and Ezra Owens had signed on the ill-starred ship, the last comer, the next of the last to die of all those gone. The last time I had seen this land was in the spring of 1801—the days already numbered before I should go into slavery—and this was the year's end, 1817. Our next landfall was Ouessant Island, which we rounded to enter the English Channel; and on a raw, chill, gray morning in early January, 1818, we came up on the tide to London.
While Alan attended to our baggage, I walked across the dank-smelling wharf up to the street. My clothes tailored in Cape Town and my hat and greatcoat bought in Lisbon proclaimed me a man of substance, although not yet of fashion, so only a few urchins, ready to run, remarked openly and pointedly on my appearance. "Coo, 'ere's Jack Ketch, dressed like a toff," cried one, more imaginative than the rest. Most passers-by gave me troubled glances. No beggars came near me.
I hardly noticed these expressions. All my thoughts and musings and perceptions busied seeking an answer to a vital question. I had come here in smoldering anger against England. It seemed to have no bearing as yet on my attitude toward a little knight I had once known, which was cold as a stone; but it would worry Captain Phillips if he knew of it. The fact remained that twice within fifty years English soldiers had ravaged my native land. In the first war the)' had hanged our patriots and employed red Indians with scalping knives to murder our frontiersmen, and in the second war they had burned our capital to the ground. In the years between the Royal Navy had impressed our seamen and the bigwigs of the government had treated us like dirt beneath their feet. Although I remembered pleasantly most of the Englishmen whom I had met in the hospital at Malta, I recalled too clearly some high-handed doctors and arrogant officers. Now I wanted to go and look at some plain English people. Maybe they would mitigate the bitterness in my heart.
So I walked about and watched them—sailors, deck hands, costermongers, shivering pinched-faced clerks, custom officers, merchants, housewives with market baskets, artisans with their tools— an endless eddying river of humanity in the streets and alleys. Although an occasional lordling in his coach or carriage seemed not to care whom he ran over and the high-handedness of some of the officials reached the point of insult, I got over my feeling of being in enemy country. The governor of Cape Town had spoken of Lord Tarlton as being "so very English." I did not think he was a perceptible fraction as English as an apple-cheeked woman selling "Irish lice." On the whole the people seemed as kindly disposed as the folk of Naples or Syracuse, almost as polite as the Maltese, and as warmly human as the crowds at the Khartoum fair.
I need no longer fear dissipating my energies and emotions in the coming struggle. By the bearings I had taken, I could chart my course.
Until now I had considered going to Tavistock as soon as London tailors could array me suitably for my mission there. Now I decided to wait until I had completed more pressing business in America, then undertake all my English affairs in unbroken order. My preparations went forward swiftly. During my absence Alan would undertake various missions.
"Keep in mind that my favorite sports will be gaming, steeple-chasing, fox hunting, gunning, and cockfighting in the company of die best bloods in England," I told him.
He gave me a great wondering glance.
I was greatly tempted to take passage on a Yankee ship. In the end I chose an English vessel, with no very good reason other than that most traveling Englishmen did so, and for more practice in English ways.
Then up rose Beacon Hill, crowned by a great edifice of red brick, and the tower of Christ Church on Copp's Hill, where hung the lanterns that sped Paul Revere on his famous way; but the city had spread and grown so, I would have hardly known it; and my heart could not lift in pride because of its load of loneliness.
"I have no one in my homeland any more," I had told Isabel, "but I have everyone." I had hardly known what I was saying and did not know my meaning, and maybe the words were empty. Maybe the people had changed in this long while and some great dream had died. Maybe the righting of one old wrong as far as it could be righted by two men's mighty striving was a hollow dream.
Standing on the dock, I began to hear familiar accents and to see faces reminiscent of those I had known in my childhood. From hence I re-embarked for Newburyport, at the mouth of the Merrimac River, and after that I knew I had come home.
Long sharp ships, to the yare manner born, were a-building in her yards. About her docks hung codgers and lobsterers with crinkled eyes and red faces who spoke with a nasal twang. Men as lean and light of movement as the Tuareg, with something of the same grace of gesture and even beauty of facial bone spoke together of sparms and bowheads, crow's-nests and harpoons, and the "grounds" off Greenland, but these grounds were icy-blue and icy-cold. There was such a thing as aristocrats among human kind, and there they stood. Of all the great equestrian orders, they lived the most daring and beauty-flooded lives. Riding the most gallant of horses-of-tree, they hunted Leviathan.