Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

You did not have to be a Christian to see that Father’s insights into the nature of man were brilliant and that his principles were admirable; in fact, it probably helped if you were not a Christian, for many of Father’s views significantly departed from those held by the modern churchmen. You did, however, have to look at things afresh, as if no one had ever asked your question before. How does one conduct an ambush? How does one assassinate an enemy chieftain? How does one oppose a large, well-trained professional army with a small, ragtag force of angry civilians?

In every case, the Old Man simply answered with another question: How is it done in the Bible? Unlike most Christians, Father did not go to the Bible merely to confirm what he wished to be the case, whether about man or God; he went there to inquire what was the case. And where better to look after all? Where else had the nature and doings of man and God been more closely observed over a longer period of time than in the Bible?

In London we did not tarry, and I barely had a glimpse of the city. Which I somewhat regretted, as it was the hugest conglomeration of people and buildings that I had ever seen or imagined, and I would have liked to take its measure, if nothing else. It consumed fully an hour for our coach to make its way from the edges of the city to the center. All those crowded, twisted, narrow streets and maze-like lanes lined with brick warrens and tiny, dark hutches — it was a literally dizzying sight, and I staggered when I stepped down from our coach to the street! The sky was but a thin, gray satin ribbon zig-zagging overhead, and a light mist drifted down from it upon us, making us shine like smooth, wet stone and giving everything a strange, heightened clarity. I wanted to walk off into the city, to leave the others behind and wander aimlessly, utterly anonymous and invisible in such a crowd.

But perhaps it was just as well that Father was so intent on getting to the continent of Europe, for it would have taken me months, even years, to gain sufficient perspective on the city and its thronged enormity to know where in it I stood at a given moment. I could see and wonder only at what was directly in front of me and had no way of knowing its relation to the rest. My viewpoint was all foreground, no background.

Father’s was also, but this seemed not to bother him. From the instant that we stepped all stiff and damp from the coach to the cobbled street, he was busily arranging our departure for Belgium. Before bidding goodbye to our fellow passengers, however, he took Mr. Forbes aside and obtained from him both his London address and his address in New York, which he wrote into his pocket notebook. He then said that he would soon be contacting Mr. Forbes personally or would be sending one of his agents to speak with him in strictest confidence concerning a matter of grave importance and utmost secrecy. The agent would likely be one of his sons and would identify himself as such by recalling certain details of our voyage.

“You’re quite serious, aren’t you?” Mr. Forbes said. He stood, carpetbag in hand, his weight carefully balanced on one foot, the other nearly in the air, as if he were ready to run.

“I am, indeed, sir. I believe that I will want you for an ally in some business that I am planning. You have certain experiences and knowledge that I may have need to draw upon.”

“I thought the Bible was all you needed.”

The Old Man smiled slyly. “Perhaps the Bible has told me that I need a man like you at my side. Just as Abraham, to free his brother Lot from Sodom, needed the Canaanite chieftains.”

“Ah, yes. Abraham. Very well, then,” he said. “You are an interesting man, Mister Brown, and I believe you bear watching. And as I am a journalist, I shall do that. Shan’t I?”

“Just so,” Father said, and shook his hand firmly.

When Mr. Forbes had gone on his way, the Old Man turned to Miss Peabody, who stood beside a heap of suitcases, her own and, I assumed, her niece’s. She appeared to be waiting for a carriage. Father said, “Is there any way I can help you, Miss Peabody?”

She politely answered no, that she had hired a porter and would be on her way directly to her hotel.

“My son and I would both once again like to express our sympathy to you.”

She said, “Thank you, Mister Brown” and turned pointedly away from us, leaving Father’s hand hanging in the air and mine just behind it.

“Goodbye, then,” he called to her. “Goodbye! I will pray for your relief from sorrow!”

She did not answer, and we moved off from her. “I believe I offended her earlier,” Father said in a low voice. “With my persistent sermonizing aboard the ship.”

“Never mind. It’s her niece who needs your prayers.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right. Of course. But I do go on sometimes. I forget myself’

I said to Father, “Speak to me about your conversation with Mister Forbes. Really, what do you need him for?”

He smiled, as if relieved not to think about the Peabody women and the sometimes ticklish business of his enthusiasm for prayer and sermonizing. “Wal, my boy;’ he drawled, “as the man himself said, he is a journalist. And though he is atheistic, he is sympathetic to our cause.”

“But he’s not an American. He’s English.”

“All the better. Americans are always readier to believe foreign reports on our affairs than they are the homegrown variety. Don’t you think?” he said, mimicking the Englishman’s accent. He laughed and grabbed up his valise and said, “Come on, m’ boy, we’ve got to catch the very next train to Dover! Enough of these hard English coaches, eh? We can do it, if we hurry. We’ll be on the other side of the English Channel by nightfall!”

We had disembarked at King Street near the Covent Garden Market Hall, and it was only a short walk to the station at Charing Cross, which was located on a wide boulevard called the Strand. Father strode along in his usual straight-legged fashion, led by his chin, and I scrambled to keep up, distracted by the passing crowd, by the elegantly coiffed and bustled women in their long dresses, the gentlemen with their canes and silk hats, the fine, high-wheeled carriages and tall chaises with liveried drivers and footmen and the handsome matched teams that drew them through the jammed streets.

The over-abundance of visible wealth, power, and suave self-assurance amazed me. This, I thought, is the other side of those smoking factories and the hovels we saw in Manchester and the other towns, where children collapse and die daily at their machines. And this is the visible profit produced by the terrible sugarcane plantations in Jamaica and Barbados, where slavery has been replaced by serfdom. The whole country seemed like a single, huge factory, whose raw materials and labor were fed into it from the barren hills of Ireland and Scotland and from distant tropical plantations. Liverpool was its shipping dock and London its counting house. I could not imagine myself as a member of the ruling class, one of these grand men and women passing me on the street; consequently, I thought that if I were an Englishman living in England, I would surely be one of those old Luddites, smashing machinery with hammers. And if I lived in one of the colonies, I would be like those old Maroons under Cudjo, escaped slaves living up in the mountains and slipping down to the plantations at night to set the cane fields on fire. In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.

So on we went to Europe itself, hurrying east by train to Dover and by ferry boat to Flanders, and then by train again, click-clacking our way across green, marshy Walloon country to Brussels, and thence by foot, as the early morning mists rose from the meandering streams of Brabant, out the Charleroi road to the farm village of Waterloo, where a generation earlier the greatest armies and generals of Europe had hurled themselves against one another, settling in smoke and blood, once and for all, or so we believed back then, the fates of half the nations of the world. We knew nothing of what was coming after, of course; little enough of what had gone before. I was there that day merely because Father had led me there — Hurry, hurry, hurry! — and he had come to Waterloo because he wanted to see how, just when Napoleon was about to win it all, he had lost everything.