The New World (26 page)

To end my history lesson, I must also say that when Natty and I had confirmed our arrangement with the captain in respect of our fares, and even received a handful of coins in exchange, I quite forgot this view of the wide world for a moment, and returned to my own much smaller part in it. I mean, I pushed back through the crowd of passengers all eager to set their feet on dry land, and went to bid farewell to the ponies we had just sold.

Harder hearts than mine have insisted that the love that exists between mankind and animals is inferior to the feelings we have for others of our own kind. I have often had reason to disagree, but not that day. After I had stroked our ponies' faces, and tugged their ears, and thanked them for carrying us safely for hundreds of miles, through deserts and swamps, they gave me no more in return than a nudge with their noses, and a nibble at my tunic to see whether I had brought them any food to eat. They could not understand that we were parting. Perhaps they had even forgotten the journey we had made together. I walked away knowing my affection had in a sense not been shared by them—and might mean nothing at all.

This thought disturbed me a good deal, since it compared so unfavorably with my sense of how Natty and I might speak of our adventure one day. But when I rejoined her among the crowd and stood ready to disembark, she was too distracted to notice how preoccupied I felt; she merely waved at the ponies, then hurried to tell me she had spoken to Joshua and Anne Marie, and we had been invited to join them in their search for a place to stay. Here she said (or rather half-shouted above the hubbub that now surrounded us) we could lie out of sight until we discovered how to begin the last part of our journey toward England and home.

All this sounded very easy and convenient, but as I waved a final goodbye to the captain I lost my nerve for a moment. The city that lay ahead of us was not so much a city as a sort of massive convulsion. A bait-box. A pullulation. Women dressed in flowing gowns and women capped and bonneted; women trawling for sailors, and women shopping for their next meal; Yankees and Spaniards; Negroes and Chinamen; Mexicans and Scotsmen; Englishmen and Indians—Indians in tall hats and suits, and Indians slathered with paint and half-naked; mulattos both curly-haired and straight-haired; quadroons of every shade of brown and black and ebony and yellow and even tawny orange.

To be blunt, the effect of all this crowding-together was to make me feel we had arrived somewhere extremely
odd
. As compensation, I can add that if had been any other sort of town, our own appearance would have been a part of this strangeness, since we arrived wearing our Indian clothes and a thick coating of dust. As it was, I do not think we seemed in the least peculiar, and were therefore not in the least obvious.

On the contrary. When I pulled myself together and set my feet on the gangplank, and felt its boards bounce beneath my weight, I believed we were once more about to take our place among the ordinary children of light.

Joshua led the way with one arm around Anne Marie, I held Natty by the hand, and even before we reached the central square and the labyrinth on its farther side—which is to say, while we were still leaving the docks that lined the river—I felt so many elbows poke me in the ribs, apologized to so many different strangers of so many different colors for blocking their way, thanked so many others for standing aside, or patting me on the back, or ushering me forward, I thought that after my long exile from the world I had been reminded of each and every part of it in the space of ten minutes.

Our hotel was a clapboard affair recommended by the captain, where the porches and balconies were all wonderfully decorated with wrought iron, sometimes as barriers to prevent its guests from falling out of their windows, more often to show the city's exuberance in miniature, and to prove something about the ambitions of its owner. About his very great scale and weight, I should say. We found him overflowing the desk in his lobby, with his shirt open to the navel and his sleeves rolled up despite the fact that he was positioned directly beneath a large fan, which he operated by pumping a pedal with his right foot.

“What can I do for you folks?” The voice of this man-mountain was a dubious little treble.

“We're looking for rooms,” I said as firmly as possible. I thought that by speaking first and in English, I might reassure him that I was not as I appeared.

“For rooms?” repeated the mountain. His name, I now saw from a board that swayed in the breeze above his head, was Thomas A. Brydges; he looked me carefully up and down, staring at my Indian clothes, and seemed not in the least reassured.

“Would that be one room or two rooms or three rooms or four rooms?” he asked.

“Two rooms,” said Natty confidently, which I was pleased to hear.

Mr. Brydges rolled his shoulders, sending a flutter along the flesh of his arms, then looked aside into a dusty mirror that hung on the wall beside him, as if to remind himself he was as powerful as he thought, before facing us again and demanding to know how we would pay. By now we had all drawn into a semicircle in front of his desk and felt so pleased to be in the breeze of the fan, and the current of food-smells that floated from an adjacent kitchen, we would gladly have handed him whatever he asked for—except that all Natty and I had in our possession was the handful of coins given to us by our captain.

At this point Joshua surprised us again. Having seemed so meek when we first met him on the
Angel
, and then so mysterious and moralizing, he now became very efficient.

“Here are five dollars,” he said, pulling the sum from his pocket and slapping it down on the desk. “Is that your tariff?”

Mr. Brydges gathered himself with more trembling and shaking. “For one room, yes,” he said truculently. “For two, no. Five dollars will pay for one room for a week.”

I thought that Joshua would now explain to me, politely or otherwise, that he would accept this offer and in the same breath say goodbye to us. But with a glance at the satchel hanging around my neck, and no doubt a thought about the value of what lay inside it, he said, “Very well, two rooms for three days, and change of fifty cents due to me. Three days are all we shall need. Because in three days we shall find employment and a home elsewhere.” He bent forward over the desk so the jacket of his suit stretched tight across his shoulders, then continued in a confiding way, “You see, we have come here to make our fortune.”

Mr. Brydges, who must have heard this sentiment a thousand times before, was nevertheless impressed by Joshua's determination. Sufficiently impressed, at any rate, to forget he must keep tramping on the pedal connected to his fan, so the slicing sound ceased above our heads and warm air fell down on us like a cloth.

When he began pumping again, the effect pleased him enough to accept our offer. Joshua did not seem surprised. “Thank you, Mr. Brydges,” he said quite calmly, and with that he straightened his back, extended his hand palm upward, received his change, pocketed it, and so began his career as a businessman. A moment later we had climbed to the floor above, taken rooms next to one another, arranged to meet a few hours later in the evening, and shut our doors.

Natty and I crossed to the bed and lay down together with as little fuss as we had lain down side by side in the wilderness. Although less than two months had passed since we last slept under a roof—in Mr. Vale's hotel—I thought it might as well have been a year, because our feelings for one another had changed so much. Or rather, our feelings had not changed, but the way we showed them had changed. My jealousy had burned away and our good companionship had returned; beneath these things, and as the source of both, everything was the same as ever. Unsayable and unsaid. Waiting until we reached England to find an expression, as Natty had stipulated.

For this reason all we did next, when our heads had cleared and our land-balance was restored, was to look about us. To find our windows showed the blank brick wall of a house across the way; to hear our peace broken every so often by the shouts, cries, sobs, moans and laughter of others in the street below; to be grateful we had privacy enough, and comfort enough, and clean water in a pitcher, and a shiny white wash-bowl; to feel the strangeness of all these things, and to know we were perfectly content.

This is all the description I shall give of our time in that room, except to say that after we had slept for an hour or so we woke refreshed, and cleaned our faces, and ran our fingers through our hair, then knocked on Joshua's door and told him we were about to return to the docks, where we would ask how best to make our way to London.

To London? Wherever we went and however we put the question, the response was always to laugh us nearly back to our hotel. To London? No boats ever sailed to London. To London? Did we think London was just over the horizon and could be reached in a single stride? When we replied that we did indeed know the answers to these questions, having lived in that city some time before, having come from there in fact, we were laughed at even more loudly. As far as these sailors were concerned, we were two Indians who had been driven mad by losing our homes, or by the sun, or by drinking.

All this—until we approached our umpteenth whiskery old captain, and this time found our replies were taken as proof of spirit not lunacy, and so waited on the quayside until he had climbed down from his wheelhouse to examine us more closely.

“New York is the way to go,” he told us. Initially, while he had been regarding us from his ship, which was a twin-masted clipper a little smaller than the
Nightingale
, I had thought his beard was wild as a hedge. Now I could see it was carefully trimmed, but so profuse it had almost crawled across his eyes, which perhaps for this reason had become very fierce. Despite that eagle stare, or perhaps because of it, he did not seem to mind us being dressed for the wilderness, and if he noticed Natty was an unusual sort of sailor—which he could hardly fail to do—he never mentioned it.

“You look lively,” he said, when he had studied us both from head to toe. “Do you know anything about ships? And about sailing?”

We told him we did, without saying that all our expertise had ended in a wreck.

“And do you know about hard work?” he went on.

“More than we care to know,” I told him, which was facetious but true enough.

The captain folded his arms and made his decision. “I'll take you to New York,” he told us. “If you'll work for me.”

I promised him we would, and then wondered how soon we might set sail.

When he told us next day I almost said we could not join him after all, because it surprised me so much: I had expected a longer delay. But once I had gulped once or twice and felt Natty tap me on the shoulder, I informed him that this would do very nicely, and we would return the next morning if he liked, and acquaint ourselves with the ship. As soon as he agreed we bade him farewell and went on our way rejoicing.

We made these arrangements very swiftly and simply in contrast to our previous travels. So much so, I felt we were at last keeping step with destiny, and fulfilling whatever purpose Fate had in store for us, rather than pushing against the grain of things. Yet I must also admit that in passing over certain details (such as the names of our ship and her captain, which were
Mungo
and Yalland respectively; and the color of her sails, which were a dark liverish brown; and the number of her crew, which I estimated to be a dozen or so; and her business, which was to carry cotton) I also intend to suggest a less comfortable aspect to all this speed.

I felt driven forward by a force I could not control. In the wilderness, where a particular day had often seemed identical to the one before and the one after, I had generally thought of time as a slow current. On the river it had been the same, and literally. Now everything was hasty, with appointments to keep and meals to eat, and every one of them tied to a particular moment, so we were continually in danger of being too early or too late. I could not help thinking again how much peacefulness I had left behind me, amidst the danger.

Having said that, I also believed our first task was to return to our hotel. But as soon as we got there and found Mr. Brydges inflating himself under his fan, I discovered that haste was the least of our difficulties.

“Ah-ha!” he sighed, as we tried to slip past him and reach our room without starting a conversation.

“Yes, Mr. Brydges?” said Natty, pretending to be taken aback.

Our host kept twitching his foot to operate the fan, making our hair fly around our ears.

“What is it, Mr. Brydges?” I asked again.

“Pleasant afternoon?”

“Very pleasant, thank you.”

“Sunshine?”

“Always sunshine.”

“Ah-ha.” Mr. Brydges worked faster at his pedal, which began to squeak like a bat.

After a moment I asked, “Was there anything, Mr. Brydges? You wanted something, I think?”

At last he looked at me directly. “A man called for you,” he said, in his finicky little voice.

Natty and I knew at once. Knew as we had known at a similar moment in Mr. Vale's hotel in Santa Caterina. Knew so well we wanted to run—but at the same time not. We must hear all there was to hear; we must not seem alarmed.

Natty found a way. “What sort of man?” she asked.

“A strange one,” said Mr. Brydges, relaxing his footwork and smiling because he knew he had something we needed, which gave him power over us as long as he kept it to himself.

“One man?” I asked.

“I can see you know him then,” Mr. Brydges replied. “And you are quite right. Not one man. Two men.”

“Indians?” I continued.

Mr. Brydges now abandoned his fan entirely and tilted against one side of his chair to spit a bullet of tobacco juice into a bowl placed beside him on the floor.

“You could say that,” he said when he was working his fan again, more gently than before.

“We know them, Mr. Brydges,” Natty and I said together. My intention, which I am sure must have been hers as well, was to show we were still in command of the situation; that we were not in the least alarmed.

Mr. Brydges was unimpressed. “Friends of yours, are they?” he asked.

We were less unified in our response this time, and replied in a jumble, “Not quite”; “Not exactly.”

“I thought so,” Mr. Brydges murmured, nodding his head.

I waited for him to continue, and when he did not I asked, “You thought what?”

“I thought they were not your friends,” he said, and raised himself a little in his chair to bring the current of air away from his head and onto his chest, where his shirt-front began to panic and open, revealing skin as white as chicken meat.

“I thought they could not be friends,” he said again. “Although they said they had traveled a long way to meet you. A long way and a long while.”

“They spoke to you in English?”

“What passes for English round here. I understood them well enough.”

“Did they say they would come back?” Natty had recovered from our confusion a moment before and now spoke very intently. I thought this might annoy Mr. Brydges, and provoke him into behaving even more like a cat with a mouse; in fact, and to my great relief, it had the opposite effect.

“They did not say anything about that,” he said, then paused and gave another tremulous roll of his shoulders. “
They
did not say,” he went on, with a little smile of self-congratulation, “because
I
did not say you would be here to meet them. In fact
I
did not say you would be here at all. Would be or ever had been.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Brydges,” I burst out, with so much relief I embarrassed myself somewhat.

“Yes, thank you,” Natty added, with more dignity.

“Things that happen in my hotel!” Mr. Brydges said, swelling even more enormously in his chair. “Things that happen!” This phrase, which he clearly felt to be very rich in meanings, gave him so much food for thought he let it hang in the air between us for a while, before narrowing his eyes and staring at us more closely, to make sure we were as grateful as we should be. Once he had satisfied himself on this score, he drew a plug and a knife from the pocket of his trousers, cut off a piece of the tobacco, popped it into his mouth, and began to chew.

After he had continued in this way for another minute, he felt able to repeat his judgment a third time—“Things that happen in my hotel!”—and then to elaborate it. “They happen,” he said, “when I let them happen. The folk I allow in, I allow in. Them I don't, I don't. Them two, I don't.”

He stopped chewing for a moment, which allowed his chins to settle onto his neck, and I thought this might be a signal for us to speak again, and say once more how indebted we were to him. But I let the moment stretch until it became a silence, at which point he waved one hand loosely like a flipper to show he thought our conversation was over and done with. We were free to go.