Citizen Tom Paine (7 page)

It was only then, after they had laid out their dead and tended their wounded, that the farmers realized a victory had slipped through their fingers. A cold New England bitterness took the place of their hot-headed fury. They picked up their guns and began to run—down the road to Lexington.

It was six miles to Lexington, six miles of perdition for the redcoats. The whole countryside blazed, and that April afternoon every stone wall, every fence, every house, every bush, every tree roared defiance. Sick men crawled to their windows to fire at the invaders, boys crept through the grass and picked their targets, women behind barn doors loaded guns for their husbands, farmers ran the length of New England stone walls, firing again and again. A boy climbed into a tree with a brace of horse pistols, killed a redcoat subaltern passing underneath, and himself was shot. But on the whole, the redcoat volleys were useless against this stabbing, hacking, hidden warfare.

There was no leadership, no direction, no command; the farmers fought instinctively, desperately, more brilliantly than they were ever to fight again, as if they knew that here, today, the poor, suffering simple folk had finally felt their power.

Six miles to Lexington before the British had any surcease. The town was a place of homes, and in the town were women and children, and therefore the men waited out in the fields and the woods. At Lexington, reinforcements met the redcoats, but at the same time hundreds and hundreds of farmers, drawn by the noise of the firing, by the swiftly spread news, were converging on the village.

Reinforced, the British set out once more on their retreat to Boston—and this time the hell was worse. Stabbed, hacked, bleeding, they staggered along—

“They got to Charlestown,” the rider said, “what was left of them.”

5

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONIST

O
UT OF
it, the noise, the tumult, the strange story that the rider brought down from New England, was coming something new, something colossal and beyond understanding, something that could be translated into movement and action, but not into plan and reason. So Tom Paine thought the next day, standing as one of the surging mob in front of the State House, the biggest mob in all the history of Philadelphia, almost eight thousand people. The mob was a mob and no more; it yelled, shouted, flurried, eddied, and quieted partially now and again to listen to various speakers who climbed up to denounce tyrants and oppression, both very general and very safe terms. Predominantly, the mob was pro-Boston in sentiment, but here and there. a Tory stood, smiling the way Tories were prone to smile these past several months.

For all that speakers were addressing the whole mob, smaller fry competed in their own particular circle, and Jackson Earle, a journeyman wheelwright, who was delivering a furious indictment of kings and tyrants in general, and one king in particular, called upon Paine to be his witness.

“Tom,” he demanded, “do we have over us a German or an Englishman?”

Paine shrugged. Yesterday had excited and terrified him, but today he was cold, and the old lassitude was returning. He had dreamed one brief, bright vision, and he didn't know now why this crowd was helping it to dissipate. Yet he knew one thing, that he was outside of it; he was Paine, the editor, he had been Paine, the beggar, but in both stages, he had nothing. He could hate and squirm and protest, but how could he dream?

“George, I mean,” Earle persisted.

“German, I suppose.”

“German! And what manner of a German?” Earle asked the crowd. “A slaving Hanoverian, a fat, guzzling swine—and his is the divine right! From God? Now listen, my good friends, and I'll tell you! Put me in God's place—”

The speaker, Quincy Lee, perched on an impromptu platform of boxes, was begging for quiet. Arnold, who was a Quaker, had just proposed a militia, armed. “And what of it?” Lee yelled at the top of his lungs, a tall, gangling, crosseyed man, hopping with excitement. “What have the people to say?”

The crowd roared.

“Who will be the first to step up and offer, as I offer, my life, my arms, my sword for this sacred thing called freedom—”

How the crowd roared!

“As they died at Lexington and Concord—”

As Paine pushed out of the crowd, Arnold was crying, “As Englishmen have always fought for the rights of Englishmen—”

“Drinking?” Aitken said to him as he came in out of the cool, starlit night.

“Drinking,” Paine nodded.

“Yer liver will be so rotten ye'll no' have it in you long.”

Paine grinned and nodded again.

“Were ye at the square today?”

“I was there,” Paine said, dropping into a chair and staring at his feet.

“And were ye happy now that ye got yer blood and thunder?”

“I was not happy,” Paine said. “I was afraid.”

“Then ye're drunk. My little man, ye're good on paper, but bad with a clenched fist.”

“I wasn't afraid of that.”

“Ye should no' be.” The Scotsman had settled his long form back against the counter, and now was taking a savage delight in prodding his editor. “Ye should no' be, I tell ye, for what is yer life worth?”

“Nothing.”

“Ah, then—and ye admit it?”

“I know it,” Paine said savagely.

“But ye're afraid.”

Someone knocked at the door, and Aitken broke off his attack to answer. It was an old man whom Paine knew by sight, Isaac de Heroz, the beadle of the Jewish congregation. Under his arm he carried a tattered prayer book, which, after bowing in slow greeting to both Paine and the Scotsman, he spread on the counter, handling the loose pages gently and lovingly.

“Can you print one like it?” he asked Aitken.

Both Paine and Aitken bent over the book, Paine looking curiously at the first Hebrew writing he had ever seen, Aitken squinting at the old type.

“I have no' the letters nor the skill.”

“I have some type, not all. The rest you can cast. You set as they are set.”

“And what is the meaning? I will no' set a devil's concoction.”

“They are prayers,” the old man smiled.

“I would no' set a Papish prayer,” Aitken said doggedly. “I would no' set a heathen prayer. Yet ye ask me to break my neck contriving the letters.”

“They are simple prayers that anyone could understand,” the old man said softly.

“Read that in English,” Aitken said, turning the pages and pointing at random.

The old man read,

“
These things I do remember: O I pour

my soul out for them. All the ages long

hatred pursueth us; through all the years

ignorance like a monster hath devoured

our martyrs as in one long day of blood
.

Rulers have risen through the endless years
,

oppressive, savage in their witless power
,

filled with a futile thought: to make an end

of that which God hath cherished. There was once

a tyrant searching in the Book of God

For some word there to serve him as a sword

to slay us; and he found the line which spake:

‘
He that doth steal a man and selleth him
,

he shall be surely put to death—'”

Paine stopped him, putting a hand on the old man's arm. “That's enough, father, we'll print it.”

Aitken, who was going to say something, looked at Paine and stayed quiet, and Paine asked the old man, “Were you at the State House today?”

“I was there.”

“And what did you think?”

“I thought that this is the beginning of something long and hard.”

That night, past midnight, hours after the old man had gone, Paine sat and watched Aitken wrestle with the Hebrew characters and curse under his breath.

“Go to bed,” Aitken told him for the fifth time.

“I'm in no mood for sleep.”

“I ought to give ye notice, getting me into this hell's broth.”

Paine wanted desperately to talk; he wanted a human being to sound to his thoughts; he wanted to hear laughter and tears, song and music.

“Have you ever loved a woman?” he asked Aitken.

“Are ye daft?”

He wanted to find a part of his past he could take something from, and then give it to another before it vanished like smoke.

Paine had been a staymaker in Thetford, in London, in Dover, in Sandwich, in Portsmouth and Brighton in the south, at Bath, at Winchester, at Bristol—no place could hold him. Always when he tried another trade, it was back to stays, from weaving, cobbling, carving, sewing, digging, plowing, planting, it was back to stays, which was his place. And it was at Sandwich that he saw Mary Lambert.

She was plump, saucy, pretty in a way; she had a dimple in either cheek, brown eyes, round arms, and she was a few years younger than he. At that time, he was twenty-one.

She was in service, and the first time he saw her, she was out buying chops. She wasn't the kind to be content with looking at her meat; she felt it, pinched it, and then spoke up to the shopkeeper, “Now, mind you, not all fat. I won't be cheated.”

“They're as pretty chops as you ever seen,” the butcher said.

“Coo! I should have a shilling for all I seen better!”

“One dozen.”

“And cut the fat, mind you.”

All this time Paine was staring at her, and she knew it, staring and forgetting why he had come into the shop, whether to buy a piece of meat for his supper, or a bone for the dog he had at that time, or because he had known that she would be there and then nothing on earth could keep him away.

As she left, he followed her, not hearkening to the butcher's, “'Ere you, what do you want?” walking after her some twenty feet before she turned and faced him and told him,

“Be on your way.”

Paine stood foolishly and dumbly.

“Now get on! I want nothing of your sort.”

“I meant no harm,” Paine said.

“Cool” she snapped, and turned on her heels and strode along, Paine after her, Paine catching up and begging, “Please, tell me your name.”

“Tell you my name! And what else should I tell you?”

“Let me carry your bundles, please.”

“I'm well enough able. And get along and keep a clean nose, or I'll have a word to my master about you.”

He saw her again; it was impossible not to in a little place like Sandwich. He asked about her, and discovered that her name was Mary Lambert. Of course, she knew; he couldn't keep away from her, but followed her, stalked her, even managed to say a word to her now and again. When she smiled at him, as she sometimes did, he would be in an ecstasy of delight. His master at that time, John Greeg, took to winking at him, poking him in the ribs, and putting a tongue in his cheek.

“Eh, Tom, you be a sly un, but I know.”

He was hopelessly, madly in love, and at something like that would only smile foolishly.

“Eee—un got an arm around 'er yet? I'll be putting ye up a shilling.”

Sometimes she let him walk with her. He had taken to buying her things because he found she was more tractable toward him when he gave her a gift. He had asked her to walk down toward the stream with him one quiet evening, to which she said, “Coo, it's softy, dirty marsh!”

“It's pretty there. And you're so beautiful—”

“You're a funny un, you are, Master Paine. Ain't you not had a girl before?”

He screwed up his courage and said, “Not one I loved.”

She shrugged her shoulders and tossed her head.

“Mary—”

“I like to walk in town,” she said. “A maid shouldn't be off alone.”

“Mary, don't you care for me, a little?”

“Maybe.”

“Mary!”

She began to ramble on about the house, her mistress, the second housemaid, the cook, the footman who was quite crazy about her. “Bussed me yesterday, 'e did,” she said.

“Mary, I love you!”

“Coo!” she smiled.

He asked her once about being in service.

“I always been with quality,” she said.

“But did you like it, being a servant?”

She bristled. “It's better than some I knows ain't got the graces to go in service.”

“I didn't mean any wrong,” he apologized. “Only I don't like to think of you as a servant.”

“Think what you please.”

“I love you.”

She tossed her head.

“Doesn't that mean anything? I tell you I love you, I tell you I'd be willing to die for you—I'm not just a staymaker. I want to do things and be things; I want the whole world and I want to give it to you!”

“Coo!”

“I can give it to you,” he said fiercely.

She placed her hands on her hips and dropped a curtsey. “Master Duke!”

He tried to kiss her, and she slapped his face with all her might. He stood there and stared at her and rubbed his cheek and thought of the footman.

“High and mighty,” she snapped. “Just a corsetmaker, but them in service ain't fit to be with you.”

“You hate me, don't you?”

“Maybe.”

Then he made up his mind that he would never look at her again, and for two weeks he managed not to see her, muttering at his work, black and hopeless.

“Get an arm around un,” Master Greeg advised him.

“Shut up and go to the devil.”

“I'll dock ye that shilling.”

The black mood passed, and he had a fit of tremendous resolve. He would set up for himself. Carefully, he had laid by nineteen pounds, and now he left Greeg, took an old shop, and moved his tools and bench in. Morning until night he worked, putting by every penny he could save, denying himself food, denying himself every little bit of comfort a man could have, drink, things to read, dreaming only of the day when he could afford to marry the woman he loved. And then he sought her out and asked her.