Five Smooth Stones (81 page)

"Yes. His father told my father that his one hope was that the infant Zambana would remain stable, stay out of trouble long enough for them to put education within the reach of everyone. The way Solomon put it was: 'First the arrow and the bow so they will know they are men, then the knowledge.' All Solomon wants is the running start toward democracy that education will give the country. After that he's willing to hand the people the ball. And my father believes he is sincere in this. He's not a man who craves power."

"Do you suppose Jedediah cut his teeth on a bow and arrow?"

"He damned well better have. Notice those shoulders?"

"Hell, I sure wish Gramp was around. A real live bow-and-arrow African, even if he is up to his eyeballs in education. All Gramp's met have been seamen on the docks. And he had a hell of a time understanding them. A lot of them only spoke Portuguese or French, and it wasn't the French he grew up with. For an Afrophile like him, meeting Jedediah would be like taking part in the second coming."

For the next four days David, Jedediah, and Hunter talked, argued, laughed, and decided the world's fate in lounges, on decks, at meals, in smoking rooms, in staterooms, and on two mornings, exhausted, had watched the sun rise over a sea muted to a low murmur in the predawn quiet. Then they had returned to Jedediah's cabin to take up Plato's
Republic
where they had left it, and Hunter had fallen asleep on one of the beds, and left the field to David and Jed.

They set up straw governments for imaginary countries and blew them down, replaced them with other governments and made them work; they founded democracies and tried to shore up their weaknesses, and built republics that toppled because they had forgotten some key building block; David worked out constitutions and howled in anguish when the other two poked holes in them; they established economies and saw them crumble and rebuilt them and saw them prosper; they fought wars and negotiated peace pacts, and they wrestled with Plato and Aristotle and found fault with Athens. And every morning Jedediah walked around the deck twenty times before breakfast.

"Don't tell us," Hunter would say when Jed came to the table. "Don't, for God's sake, tell us."

And Jedediah would laugh aloud, his first greeting of the day to them, and say, "Twenty. How else can I clear my mind every morning and be able to take you both on?"

The night before landing, Jedediah said to David: "What will happen after we separate in Liverpool? We've left the world unfinished."

They were leaning on the rail of the ship. Hunter was below, finishing his packing. "Man, you know it," said David.

"You'll look me up when you come to London?" asked Jedediah. "I'll be there three or four months."

"Damn right I will. Hunter says he has a car. Can't you guys get up to where I'll be?"

"Easily." He turned to David almost shyly. "In my trunks in London I have a carving—a head—that is you. It's native work. Would you mind if I sent it to you?"

"Mind! Gosh, no. I'd be mighty proud to have it, as my grandfather would say."

"Your grandfather. You've talked so much about him and his interest in Africa. Would it please him if I wrote home and asked to have a native costume sent to him? A robe and—"

"The little round hat?"

"Yes, the little round hat, as you so disrespectfully call it All in a very small size. You think it would please him?"

"Please him! Man, he'll flip. That's damned thoughtful of you, Jed. He'll have it on as soon—" He stopped abruptly, and a deckhand hurrying aft turned suddenly at the sound of David's laughter and stared a forbidden stare at the two passengers at the rail, the black man and the brown man, the brown man with his head thrown back and his laughter rolling down the deck and out over the water.

When he spoke at last, David said: "I'm sorry, Jed. If you knew Gramp you'd know why I laughed. Look, don't send it to him. Send it to me. I have to be there when he gets it. This I have to see. A wise brown mouse in a long white robe. Damn, Jed, I wish he could have met you."

"He'll probably live a long time, David. We have a saying that, roughly translated, means the less meat on the bones, the more years on the life. Perhaps, in fact quite possibly, I shall be able to get back to your country. Who knows? Perhaps he may get to mine. You will, I hope, most surely?"

"I'll try. I'll sure as hell try. I want to. Man, you know I want to."

Below in his cleared-out stateroom, bags stacked neatly beside David's in the passageway, Hunter Travis sat at his typewriter. He was sure his father would be stunned at receiving a letter from him written at sea. He would mail it before the ship docked and it would be back in New York, by air, no later than the following day. He could no longer hold back the idea that had been growing in strength almost since the first afternoon David and Jedediah Abikawai had met.

He ran paper into the typewriter and began. "Dear Chief, —Good trip. And an interesting fellow passenger. Jedediah Abikawai, son of Solomon of Zambana. He and David have become firm friends. I hope I'm not speaking out of turn, but if you keep to the schedule you had when I left you'll be in Washington next week. After you've explained the facts of life to the President, how about having a talk with Abner Chittock about David? My thought is this—"

Twenty minutes later he sealed and stamped the letter, dropped it off in the library for mailing, and set out in search of David and Jed. He found them still on deck.

"What you been doing, man?" asked David.

"Packing."

"All this time?"

"All this time. When Travis packs he packs right"

***

Standing at the rail with Hunter and Jedediah again the next morning, watching the bustle of the Liverpool dock as the ship was maneuvered into position, David pointed, grinned, and said—"Look. England."

Hunter glanced sideways at him and then laughed. "You look like a kid who's just been handed a cream puff."

Jedediah said, "England is no cream puff. I can assure you of this."

"And a Zambanian is one who knows it," said Hunter. "But you'll part friends."

"We will part friends. With wisdom on both sides."

"Drop the politics, you guys," said David. "Here comes the gangplank."

"Listen, David—Jed and I will make a dash for the dock and round up all our luggage—his, yours, and mine—and an inspector. If we don't, that little bit of England you're seeing down there is damn all you will see of it for two or three hours. Take your time—"

David remained standing at the rail for a few minutes, letting the first group of impatient passengers crowd to the gangplank. A Liverpool dock, he decided, differed in no major point from a New Orleans or a New York dock. The sun had surprised all three of them when they had come on deck earlier. In David's mind there had always been a picture of England as a beautiful island, perpetually green under perpetually gray skies. Now he was standing with all of England, a new world, before him, with the sun warm enough on his shoulders so that before he started toward the gangplank he slipped off his light topcoat and carried it over his arm.

He had not been thinking of Sara, and then, suddenly, he was. All through the trip Sara had kept in the background, unobtrusive, making herself known only in those occasional moments when he had been alone, saying, "David, David—"

And now she was here, not a few hundred miles south but here, walking the deck beside him, her quick, half-running footsteps louder than the solid reality of the footsteps of the passengers hurrying to the gangplank.

There had been no questions asked of Hunter; he had gritted his teeth and determined not to ask them. But Hunter, on the first night out, before seasickness obscured everything but the joys of the hereafter, had said, "Oh, hell. I can't take it any longer."

"Can't take what?"

"That lost-dog look you get every now and then. Just like all the stray pups looking for a home that I picked up when I was a kid. Sara's in London."

"Oh?"

"Don't give me that wide-eyed 'Oh?' bit. I just answered a question that's been bugging you ever since I got back to the States five weeks ago. I'll even tell you where she's living. The Crown Hotel in Russell Square."

"My God, you don't have to get mad about it!"

"I'm not mad. Hell, yes, I suppose I am. It all seems so blasted stupid. Anyhow, there's your information. You're on your own now. I won't, God damn it, play cupid. You might try standing under the statue of Eros in Piccadilly and saying a few prayers."

"Hey, look. Cool off. I didn't ask—"

"You didn't. And Sara didn't. And you're both screaming it whenever I see you."

"Did she—"

"I told you. No. But find out for yourself."

"O.K., O.K., grampaw." He had smiled at the other's exasperation. "And thanks, pal."

CHAPTER 52

David had taken it for granted that Oxford would be a quiet backwater by the side of a pleasant river on which there was a good deal of boating, according to prints and English novels, and that over its spires and ancient gray-walled colleges there would brood a deep, academic peace gently broken by the swish of black gowns and occasional low talk and equally low laughter.

After an initial period of adjustment to Oxford as it is, busy, noisy, bustling, traffic-jammed, he met the two tutors who would guide him through the term. The first, in international law, was a man who belonged in the fantasy Oxford of David's imagining; the second, in political science, was a man of forceful, outgoing personality who, except for his accent, might have stepped from the campus of any large American college. At least, he thought, one will relax me and the other will jar me. He found that they both jarred him, and for the first time in his life he had a full appreciation of what Bjarne Knudsen had done for him. It had been a long time since those sessions with the Prof, but now he could fall back on the conditioning they had given him for Oxford's academic approach. The Prof had never made him study—he had studied because the Prof had succeeded in sowing the seeds of a desire for knowledge. At Pengard there had been assigned work, and necessarily more discipline in spite of small classes and individual attention from instructors, and he had fallen into a different pattern of learning. He realized now that it had been, in a certain sense, a lazier pattern, and his mind at first responded slowly to the prodding of these dons, then began to assert itself as it had under the Prof's tutelage, when it had been, as it was now, first whetted, then pitted against another, more knowledgeable mind that was anxious that his own should match it. Of the two it was the quiet, quaint, and spectacled don who more often brought from him a gusty "Whe-ew!" of relief and exhaustion as he limped down the stairs from that gently spoken man's study, full of tea and law.

He knew that when he went to the city and saw the Travises again—especially Marcia—he would be expected to make enthusiastic sounds about Oxford. He could do that without dissembling when it came to certain aspects of it— the Bodleian, the scholastic challenge, the dons. But he could not turn faint with awe, as most Americans were reputed to do, at its great age, its hoary traditions. And why, he thought, should he? What did these have that would move an American Negro whose own traditions went no further back than a legendary great-grandfather, a good man dead of burning in an open field in the Deep South? Beyond the first David Champlin—the dark. And this was something he would never be able to explain to anyone not of his own people, that there was no answering chord of Anglo-Saxon pride in him at the things that meant so much to others.

The best he could do, when he met white friends in England, would be to come on strong about the whole general scene, and stress those things that really moved him, such as the Bodleian, the dons, and the riverbank on a cool evening when there was a nip in the air and the sense of peace he had expected to find everywhere. And the pubs, and the unconcerned live-and-let-live friendliness. Someone had said—he thought it was Tom Evans on a quick trip to Boston—"You won't like it. Damned snobs—" Snobs they might be among themselves, he didn't give a damn; with him they had shown casual, easy friendliness, with no apparent thought to color.

Three weeks went by with unbelievable speed before he dared think of London. Hunter called and offered to come up with Jed and drive him down, but he put him off, not admitting to a childish desire to sample a British train; remembering scores of motion pictures with interesting people ducking in and out of cozy little compartments, the men all carrying briefcases loaded with important documents, the women invariably beautiful, the two coming together—the meetings always fraught with future love or dire peril—over sticking windows. And then, unexpectedly, there was a Friday ahead of him, and a tense mind and time to go to London on a train that would put him in Paddington Station late in the afternoon.

On Thursday he called Hunter, who said: "I'll meet you. We'll have dinner.... If we miss at the station call my mother.... Got the number and address?... Right... Or you can take a cab and go there.... You in funds?... Want to put up with me, or the family, or go to a hotel? I can fix you up with a reservation at one you'll like near Green Park.... Sure. Decide when you get here.... No problem this time of year..."

***

One picture sold at a pretty price: "Peace, 1960"; and another, the one of the small, defiant black boy facing a world of chill snow, was being held in reserve for Hunter's father. Sara tried to convince herself that it was silly to feel guilty because for a month she had been able to do no more than sketch stupid, meaningless scratches, not even worthy of a high-school art class, or daub meaningless blobs of color on canvas, blobs with no relation to anything in her mind, as though her brush had been held in the hand of a stranger. You could paint when you first came over, my girl, she told herself, when you were all shattered and hopeless; now you can't because a month ago David Champlin walked aboard a ship in New York and a week later walked ashore in England.

She knew that much because Hunter had said so, adding gratuitously that David had been seasick; other than that— nothing. The stinker, the sadistic, objective stinker... If you had any sense, Sara Kent, you'd head for the Continent. That's what you told yourself you'd do when he came over; that was the decision you made; only it wasn't, really. You decided you'd let go and do what seemed right when the time came, and that's what's right; only, I can't go because I'm weighted down, my feet and my heart and my life—they're weighted down with knowing David's in England.... God, where are my guts! All it takes is to walk into a travel bureau and say "Copenhagen." And the man behind the counter will say "Return?" And you'll say "Yes." You know you will.