Chapter 6: John Silver; New Conditions of Lifestyle and New Hardships
It soon became eminently impossible to find John Silver. The little Ursid seemed to have melted into the churning of the crowds at the port, or into the gray, morose streets of his poor town; he easily disappeared entirely in front of the eyes that sorely searched for him. The house—where the boy could be seen living in with his father since he was born—stood alone and dim, sagging in its emptiness, as though something inside no longer supported it. The vacuous shelter remained unlit, unused, and desolate. It resembled an old man, bent and tarnished, and looking at the world sadly through his veiled eyes. The house's only visitor was Doctor Isaiah Welling—the amicable and tender man who had heretofore established a sentimental connection with the family—since he regularly perambulated around the house in search for evidence of John's having been there. His benevolent scrutiny, however, was always in vain.
Nevertheless, he continued to pursue the lost child. Occasionally, Welling, departing toward the house in which he sought for John, would see the police—commencing an enterprise to search about the house in pursuit for the very same youth—as he approached. When such circumstances occurred, he would mill idly amongst this crowd as the mildly-concerned passer-by, asking questions of a fastidious kind; had they found the boy? Oh, no? Had they sniffed out a lead to where he might be? No luck, eh? Have you any idea if the child is still alive? Alive, he is, you say! And what makes you think so? Oh, the child's father sees him? I see.
Jonas Silver, now an authentic malefactor in the grievous arms of the Marshalea Debtors' Prison, answered affirmatively that he did indeed see John once a week, or, in some instances, every other week. He could not say, however, that John mentioned where he had come from, or where he was going to go from the prison after his visit. When asked, it was not seldom that John would laugh, loudly, like a thing that did not possess a continuance beyond the cell of the prison; or—although this happened more sporadically—John would be convulsed into an impassioned rage, and strike the iron bars that stood hard against his fists, until Jonas awkwardly captured John in his arms as he reached for his son through the cell, and held him enduringly until John calmed.
John's visits to his father were also erratic in nature; he would never arrive at a specifically appointed time, nor did he appear near the same time he had visited before; but—serving as the only stability in Welling's postulation for John's agenda—it was infrequent when John would only visit Jonas for a short engagement.
Welling concluded with caliginous gloom that Jonas Silver was the only person who was allowed audience with John any more. The boy remained hidden under the curtain of color that cascaded down the streets of the ports, the square, and his hometown, to where Welling, in deep tribulation—when hope would elude him as much as the boy he sought did—would intermittently feel John had blurred from the mortal world he knew, and had transformed into an entity only Jonas claimed sighting.
But his inner strength would renew in the rare fortuity when John's face—still as extant as his own—would peer out from beneath the swirled interior of the streets, and look at him impishly, and then would fade into the undulations of his hiding place once again, and Welling would have his proof that John was still humanly attainable.
Twelve-year-old John Silver was afraid; although he was still humanly attainable, he could barely attain himself. The first night of Jonas's arrest, John slept fitfully by the cell his father was bound to, but woke up in the streets next to the prison, with no memory of the guards somehow placing him there. Somewhat detachedly, John, from this point in the morning, continued on like the day before; he proceeded to the port to attend to his job there, and acted as though the night before simply had no reality.
It was only when, at the end of the day, as he approached his home and his father was not there, John comprehended the verity of his father's imprisonment, and that he no longer had anyone to support and care for him. His apperception, although numbed, drove him from his dwelling, and led him confusedly through the wharfs from which he had come, now darkly and hideously enchanted by the night. Fits of terror would then spasm through his little frame, until he collapsed near one of the piers and slept deeply.
John spent his nights wherever he could, thinking only once of taking refuge in Welling's protective shelter, but the very fear that now consumed him and influenced him divulged him from the thought, with a disoriented conclusion that Welling would not welcome him because he had pick-pocketed his four silverpieces a year ago.
The shelters John would acquire were predominantly ones by the wharf, either huddled in a mass of ropes left out by sailors, under a tree, or—if fortune favored him—in an unlocked ship's hold, or an unkempt, abandoned shed. Nights spent at his home saw their demise some time after Jonas's arrest; John was awoken during one night while he slept there, and, realizing it was a group of police inspecting the property in search of him, he slipped out of the house unnoticed, and never returned.
His lucky employment at the docks soon had its demise, as well. John, now living on only three goldspecies a day, could afford little at the market place, and oftentimes John would unknowingly purchase food highly perishable, which would decay or lay victimized by insects overnight and leave John without leftovers—on which Jonas fed the family most of the time—and so John would have to buy more to keep himself fed, or he would have to go hungry until the next day. This inconsistent diet, comprised of only one meal a day besides, forsook John to physical fatigue at an easier expense, and he fell more and more behind as John's body searched exhaustively for the energy it was used to having.
The sailors swarmed in an austere cloud about him, void of the once familiar and gentle friendship they had once represented to John. They seemed as though he was a trespasser among the ships and crates as he suffered through his enervation—they could not recognize him; John's exhaustion was anomalous, and they feared he had caught a disease, as so many spacers were superstitious and wary of illness when John was a child—and John, struggling under the strain of his frailty and the weight of the crates, disappeared from his transient welcome to their inscrutable dimension, and he suddenly again feared them with a new horror.
The little Ursid, now with no accord to any individual save his father in the Marshalea—and fought for none after this detachment, besides—separated strangely from his identity; his mindset dropped wearily into simple routine, shutting down any emotional response to his own prisons that seemed to rise up about him. He lived a long period of time in this mental reduction, wandering aimlessly through his ports and wherever he could find shelter. He now moved through the crowds of people at the ports as though dreamlike, or like one dead, with no requisite purpose among the living. The only circumstance John would wake from this state was when he visited his father.
John, however, continued to return to export crates with these strangers until finally the keeper, the one who had hired him when the Terran had presented John to him, said that John's function was no longer necessary.
This threw the Ursid boy into an inconsolable, violent, wrathful depression, but, despite his great misfortune, and the sense of profound hopelessness that clutched and choked at his spirit, this explosion of misery was brief. He decided with severity that the adoption of Doctor Welling's services was the only chance he had of his survival, and his only opportunity to see his father remitted out of the Marshalea. This decision, however, despite its resolve, was not enacted—the thought was perhaps even as brief as John's depression—and John's mind abandoned it.
The rejection of his conclusion was thusly initiated when John rediscovered the benefits of theft. Suddenly, through this vile immorality, John quelled his vengeance on the world's devilish acrimony by purloining from the creatures of its port. Suddenly, John could harvest anything he longed for by a swift exploration through a man's coat pocket that stood beside him on a street corner, or an inquisition through a woman's purse that idly hung in front of John's nose like a baited fishhook.
John replaced his lost occupancy rapidly and without hesitation, and found his own feet with which to stand upright in the streets of the port, instead of his former bearings where he clung to the aid of his father.
The creativity that once flourished in John's childhood now reinstituted itself again with ways to embellish his thievery. He would act as though starving; he would seem homeless—both of these not entirely fraudulency—and now he would be a poor beggar's son who would be frenziedly abused if he did not come home with money—or food, if he so desired to gain this instead of the latter—now he was a blind orphan who would explain to victims that he could find no employment, and sometimes he would simply lay out a piece of cloth and sonorously weep in a public vicinity where the crowds grew thickest and stagnant.
After his escapades, John would huddle underneath the shadow of a pier or bridge and eat what he would buy with his earnings, very pleased with himself indeed, and dream of the great many things John would do for his father. First and foremost, he would pay for Jonas's freedom from the prison when he would save enough money pieces, and then he would pay for two berths on a ship dispatching to another planet, and there he would purchase a house—an extravagant house; brick, stone, or perhaps even marble—and he dreamed of himself rich, and of his father happy.
For now, after a month's expansion, John assuaged these dreams somewhat with the fact that he became talented enough in his secret trade to bring his father little gifts—portions of food, peppermints, a comb, handkerchiefs; and once there was a golden pocket watch on a chain—which gave Jonas an enthralled incredulity that delighted John.
"Where did this come from?" his father would ask him, looking at him with a playfully suspicious smile.
"I've found my expertise, Father," John responded lightly, "and I'll get you out of here, and make us both as rich as we could possibly imagine with it."
And Jonas, unaware of John's evil expertise, wanted very much to believe—at the very least—in the former of John's promises.