There was no lack of laughter, but a lot of this was derisive. Newport folks, Adam reckoned, might well be thought solemn alongside these English; yet he didn't sense any large measure of happiness here, much less contentment. It must have been more than a frame of mind, it must have been a physical misalignment, that made Londoners look so sour. Even their smiles had acid in them. Even their grins canted. Two out of three persons you passed might have been suffering from some mild but persistent stomach trouble, a disorder encasing all their thoughts and impulses in a thin fibrous film of suffering.
And the noise! Men tramped on his feet, jogged his elbows, or pushed their faces into his, thrusting things at him, the while they shrieked "What d'ye lack?" Folks dropped things on him from windows, rolled things in front of him. Twice, jostled against a wall, he lost his footing and slipped to hands and knees; but nobody paid him any mind.
Here was the oddest part of it alclass="underline" the attitude of these Londoners, who could loaf in the midst of turmoil and wouldn't trouble to turn head for anything less loud than a scream for help, if then. Had Adam been caught up in a mob clamoring for the blood of some miscreant he might have caught from his fellows some touch of their hysteria. Yet no common cause united the members of this teeming world, no purpose inspired them. It took Adam a good while to accept the all-but-unbelievable truth that these folks weren't flying around in any frenzy, that this was the way they acted all the time.
You were given no chance to take offense. You were bumped from behind, or butted, or shoved, and before you could whirl around and demand an apology the offender had bared off, leaving you to confront some totally different person, who had no interest in you. But then, nobody had any interest in you. Adam had known lonesomeness most of his life; but he had never before been as lonesome as this.
He had seen kicked-over ant heaps; nor was he one to disremember what the Book says about going to the ant, thou sluggard; but ants knew what they were doing, and they worked for one another.
He issued from out of an alley narrow enough so that he might have touched the houses on either side, and emerged into a street comparatively broad; and he saw a coach approaching.
Now Adam Long had never before seen a coach, though he recognized it from descriptions. This street was spacious only in comparison with the alleys he'd recently roamed: in itself it was scarcely wide enough to accommodate the coach, a yellow monstrous lumbrous contraption drawn by four fat horses. Most of the folks near him flattened themselves against walls or squeezed into doorv\'ays, but Adam stood staring, head cocked.
The coach was all over small wooden steeples and tassels, some red, some silver. Out of its center, high, wobbling precariously at every lurch of the coach as though it were going to break off, rose a flat wooden triangle on one side of which—Adam couldn't see the other side—were painted two diagonal white stripes, their edges clipped like the edge of a pie, against a background of red.
There were two men sitting up in the driver's seat, which didn't seem necessary. Only one held the reins. They wore red coats with silver froggery, the same sort of coats the two men who rode the left-hand horses wore. Adam couldn't for the life of him see a kernel of reason in those two men. They didn't do anything, just sat there.
Before the coach and on either side, behind, too, marched soldiers. There must have been twenty of these. They carried muskets, holding them out, away from their bodies, in readiness to use the butts as clubs. Folks faded before them. But Adam Long loitered a moment out from the line against the wall, rubbering for a peek at the person or persons within the coach. A soldier struck him in the chest.
"Out of the way, bumpkin!"
This was not a push but a substantial blow. Adam was slammed against the wall. He bellowed, reaching for his sword.
Instantly another soldier stooped low to slap his musket butt sideways across Adam's shins.
The pain was an explosion. The first blow had dizzied him but at the same time enraged him. Now all he could do was double up. He might have toppled into the path of the coach itself had not a third soldier kicked him in the mouth. That held him straight until the coach had passed. It also caused his mouth to bleed.
The coach gone, then, a final quartet of soldiers marching backward behind it, the street resumed its clangor, men tumbling about like water in a wake. Only one man, a pursy fellow of merchantlike mien, took the trouble to help Adam to his feet.
"Tut, tut! Lucky it isn't raining today. Might have ruined this." He was feeling the material of the coat as he brushed it. "Where, uh, did you buy this, if I may be so bold as to ask, sir?"
Adam had started to lug out his blade.
"No, no!" The pursy one grabbed his arms. "They're down to the river by now. You'd never even get near his lordship. They'd beat you to a pulp-"
Adam licked his lips, tasting the salty blood. He shook his head, clacked his sword back.
"Thank you, sir," he said as quiedy as he could.
"You're an American colonial, sir, I take it? "
Adam looked at him in amazement.
"Now how'd you ever know that?"
The pursy one summoned a water-seller, gave her a farthing for a can, proffered his own kerchief, and wiped Adam's mouth.
"Tut, tut! But you're lucky. I've seen men get all their front teeth smashed in, they didn't jump back fast enough."
"I was never taught to jump out of the way."
" 'Tis a good thing to know. There. Take care of that coat. You didn't buy it in Boston, I'll wager. Philadelphia perhaps?"
"Kingston, Jamaica."
"Ah," slowly raising and lowering his head. "Ah, yes. I see. Well, goodbye, sir. Your servant."
"Your servant, sir. And—thank you a bushel of times."
Still stunned, unsure of himself, struggling to hold his rage in, Adam must have walked half a mile after this before he as much as looked up —to see a sight so strange that in a wild moment he wondered whether he had been knocked unconscious and was dreaming this.
It was an open space, large for London, roughly round, the sort of place, as Adam later learned, though he was never to learn why, that was called a circus. There was a considerable crowd, in the center of which stood one of the largest persons Adam ever had seen, a man with immense shoulders, an ape's arms, black lank hair, a mouth continually atwist, hands that might have been hams, bare feet. This creature wore only a shaggy tuniclike affair seemingly made of the pelts of small animals, tasseled in unexpected places, and more than a little motheaten. He rumbled and growled pauselessly.
Prancing and capering around, and waving a branch of spruce, was a thin short man with the eyes of a malicious old monkey. He wore an extremely tall conical hat made of some sort of paper, on which had been crayoned pictures intended to represent (as near as Adam could make out) bears, birds, and bushes. He talked all the time.
". . . and the soil's rich and black, thousands of acres for any man wants to take 'em . . . and he don't have to work!" Grimacing, he pointed to the pictures on his hat. "The fruits of the orchards and the vegetables of the field, they're hisn for the picking!"
"Speakin' of vegetables," cried somebody, and threw a rotten turnip. It missed the talker by inches.
"Out to 'eave a paving stone at 'im, that's what," the man next to Adam muttered.
"What in Tophet's he talking about?" Adam asked.