time he ought to know all about “damnable heredity.” As a general rule
he keeps himself very far from the negro, and says things about him
that are not pretty. There are six million negroes, more or less, in
the States, and they are increasing. The American, once having made them
citizens, cannot unmake them. He says, in his newspapers, they ought to
be elevated by education. He is trying this, but it is likely to be
a long job, because black blood is much more adhesive than white, and
throws back with annoying persistence. When the negro gets religion he
returns directly as a hiving bee to the first instincts of his people.
Just now a wave of religion is sweeping over some of the Southern
States.
Up to the present two Messiahs and a Daniel have appeared, and several
human sacrifices have been offered up to these incarnations. The Daniel
managed to get three young men, who he insisted were Shadrach, Meshach,
and Abednego, to walk into a blast furnace, guaranteeing non-combustion.
They did not return. I have seen nothing of this kind, but I have
attended a negro church. They pray, or are caused to pray by themselves
in this country. The congregation were moved by the spirit to groans and
tears, and one of them danced up the aisle to the mourners' bench. The
motive may have been genuine. The movements of the shaken body were
those of a Zanzibar stick dance, such as you see at Aden on the
coal-boats, and even as I watched the people, the links that bound them
to the white man snapped one by one, and I saw before me the hubshi
(woolly hair) praying to a God he did not understand. Those neatly
dressed folk on the benches, and the gray-headed elder by the window,
were savages, neither more nor less.
What will the American do with the negro? The South will not consort
with him. In some States miscegenation is a penal offence. The North is
every year less and less in need of his services.
And he will not disappear. He will continue as a problem. His friends
will urge that he is as good as the white man. His enemies--well, you
can guess what his enemies will do from a little incident that followed
on a recent appointment by the President. He made a negro an assistant
in a post-office where--think of it!--he had to work at the next desk
to a white girl, the daughter of a colonel, one of the first families
of Georgia's modern chivalry, and all the weary, weary rest of it.
The Southern chivalry howled, and hanged or burned some one in effigy.
Perhaps it was the President, and perhaps it was the negro--but the
principle remains the same. They said it was an insult. It is not good
to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
But this is nothing to do with San Francisco and her merry maidens, her
strong, swaggering men, and her wealth of gold and pride. They bore
me to a banquet in honor of a brave lieutenant--Carlin, of the
“Vandalia”--who stuck by his ship in the great cyclone at Apia and
comported himself as an officer should. On that occasion--'twas at the
Bohemian Club--I heard oratory with the roundest of o's, and devoured a
dinner the memory of which will descend with me into the hungry grave.
There were about forty speeches delivered, and not one of them was
average or ordinary. It was my first introduction to the American eagle
screaming for all it was worth. The lieutenant's heroism served as a peg
from which the silver-tongued ones turned themselves loose and kicked.
They ransacked the clouds of sunset, the thunderbolts of heaven, the
deeps of hell, and the splendor of the resurrection for tropes and
metaphors, and hurled the result at the head of the guest of the
evening.
Never since the morning stars sung together for joy, I learned, had an
amazed creation witnessed such superhuman bravery as that displayed
by the American navy in the Samoa cyclone. Till earth rotted in the
phosphorescent star-and-stripe slime of a decayed universe, that
god-like gallantry would not be forgotten. I grieve that I cannot give
the exact words. My attempt at reproducing their spirit is pale
and inadequate. I sat bewildered on a coruscating Niagara of
blatherum-skite. It was magnificent--it was stupendous--and I was
conscious of a wicked desire to hide my face in a napkin and grin.
Then, according to rule, they produced their dead, and across the snowy
tablecloths dragged the corpse of every man slain in the Civil War, and
hurled defiance at “our natural enemy” (England, so please you), “with
her chain of fortresses across the world.” Thereafter they glorified
their nation afresh from the beginning, in case any detail should have
been overlooked, and that made me uncomfortable for their sakes. How in
the world can a white man, a sahib, of our blood, stand up and plaster
praise on his own country? He can think as highly as he likes, but this
open-mouthed vehemence of adoration struck me almost as indelicate. My
hosts talked for rather more than three hours, and at the end seemed
ready for three hours more.
But when the lieutenant--such a big, brave, gentle giant--rose to his
feet, he delivered what seemed to me as the speech of the evening.
I remember nearly the whole of it, and it ran something in this
way:--“Gentlemen--It's very good of you to give me this dinner and to
tell me all these pretty-things, but what I want you to understand--the
fact is, what we want and what we ought to get at once, is a navy--more
ships--lots of 'em--”
Then we howled the top of the roof off, and I for one fell in love with
Carlin on the spot. Wallah! He was a man.
The prince among merchants bid me take no heed to the warlike sentiments
of some of the old generals.
“The sky-rockets are thrown in for effect,” quoth he, “and whenever we
get on our hind legs we always express a desire to chaw up England. It's
a sort of family affair.”
And, indeed, when you come to think of it, there is no other country for
the American public speaker to trample upon.
France has Germany; we have Russia; for Italy Austria is provided; and
the humblest Pathan possesses an ancestral enemy.
Only America stands out of the racket, and therefore to be in fashion
makes a sand-bag of the mother country, and hangs her when occasion
requires.
“The chain of fortresses” man, a fascinating talker, explained to me
after the affair that he was compelled to blow off steam. Everybody
expected it.
When we had chanted “The Star Spangled Banner” not more than eight
times, we adjourned. America is a very great country, but it is not
yet heaven, with electric lights and plush fittings, as the speakers
professed to believe. My listening mind went back to the politicians
in the saloon, who wasted no time in talking about freedom, but quietly
made arrangements to impose their will on the citizens.
“The judge is a great man, but give thy presents to the clerk,” as the
proverb saith.
And what more remains to tell? I cannot write connectedly, because I
am in love with all those girls aforesaid, and some others who do not
appear in the invoice. The typewriter is an institution of which the
comic papers make much capital, but she is vastly convenient. She and a
companion rent a room in a business quarter, and, aided by a typewriting
machine, copy MSS. at the rate of six annas a page. Only a woman can
operate a typewriting machine, because she has served apprenticeship to
the sewing machine. She can earn as much as one hundred dollars a
month, and professes to regard this form of bread-winning as her natural
destiny. But, oh! how she hates it in her heart of hearts! When I had
got over the surprise of doing business with and trying to give orders
to a young woman of coldly, clerkly aspect intrenched behind gold-rimmed
spectacles, I made inquiries concerning the pleasures of this
independence. They liked it--indeed they did. 'Twas the natural fate
of almost all girls--the recognized custom in America--and I was a
barbarian not to see it in that light.
“Well, and after?” said I. “What happens?”
“We work for our bread.”
“And then what do you expect?”
“Then we shall work for our bread.”
“Till you die?”
“Ye-es--unless--”
“Unless what? This is your business, you know. A man works until he
dies.”
“So shall we”--this without enthusiasm--“I suppose.”
Said the partner in the firm, audaciously:--“Sometimes we marry our
employees--at least, that's what the newspapers say.”
The hand banged on half a dozen of the keys of the machine at once. “Yet
I don't care. I hate it--I hate it--I hate it--and you needn't look so!”
The senior partner was regarding the rebel with grave-eyed reproach.
“I thought you did,” said I. “I don't suppose American girls are much
different from English ones in instinct.”
“Isn't it Theophile Gautier who says that the only difference between
country and country lie in the slang and the uniform of the police?”
Now, in the name of all the gods at once, what is one to say to a young
lady (who in England would be a person) who earns her own bread, and
very naturally hates the employ, and slings out-of-the-way quotations at
your head? That one falls in love with her goes without saying, but that
is not enough.
A mission should be established.
III. AMERICAN SALMON
The race is neither to the swift nor the battle to the strong; but time
and chance cometh to all.
I HAVE lived!
The American Continent may now sink under the sea, for I have taken the
best that it yields, and the best was neither dollars, love, nor real
estate.
Hear now, gentlemen of the Punjab Fishing Club, who whip the reaches
of the Tavi, and you who painfully import trout over to Octamund, and I
will tell you how old man California and I went fishing, and you shall
envy.
We returned from The Dalles to Portland by the way we had come, the
steamer stopping en route to pick up a night's catch of one of the
salmon wheels on the river, and to deliver it at a cannery downstream.
When the proprietor of the wheel announced that his take was two
thousand two hundred and thirty pounds weight of fish, “and not a heavy
catch neither,” I thought he lied. But he sent the boxes aboard, and
I counted the salmon by the hundred--huge fifty-pounders hardly dead,
scores of twenty and thirty pounders, and a host of smaller fish. They
were all Chenook salmon, as distinguished from the “steel head” and the
“silver side.” That is to say, they were royal salmon, and California
and I dropped a tear over them, as monarchs who deserved a better fate;
but the lust of slaughter entered into our souls, and we talked fish and
forgot the mountain scenery that had so moved us a day before.
The steamer halted at a rude wooden warehouse built on piles in a
lonely reach of the river, and sent in the fish. I followed them up a
scale-strewn, fishy incline that led to the cannery. The crazy building
was quivering with the machinery on its floors, and a glittering bank of
tin scraps twenty feet high showed where the waste was thrown after the
cans had been punched.
Only Chinamen were employed on the work, and they looked like
blood-besmeared yellow devils as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that
lay upon the floor. When our consignment arrived, the rough wooden boxes
broke of themselves as they were dumped down under a jet of water, and
the salmon burst out in a stream of quicksilver. A Chinaman jerked up
a twenty-pounder, beheaded and detailed it with two swift strokes of a
knife, flicked out its internal arrangements with a third, and case it
into a blood-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped from under his hands as
though they were facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them from the vat
and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter, which, descending,
hewed them into unseemly red gobbets fit for the can.
More Chinamen, with yellow, crooked fingers, jammed the stuff into the
cans, which slid down some marvellous machine forthwith, soldering their
own tops as they passed. Each can was hastily tested for flaws, and then
sunk with a hundred companions into a vat of boiling water, there to
be half cooked for a few minutes. The cans bulged slightly after the
operation, and were therefore slidden along by the trolleyful to men
with needles and soldering-irons who vented them and soldered the
aperture. Except for the label, the “Finest Columbia Salmon” was ready
for the market. I was impressed not so much with the speed of the
manufacture as the character of the factory. Inside, on a floor ninety
by forty, the most civilized and murderous of machinery. Outside, three
footsteps, the thick-growing pines and the immense solitude of the
hills. Our steamer only stayed twenty minutes at that place, but I
counted two hundred and forty finished cans made from the catch of the
previous night ere I left the slippery, blood-stained, scale-spangled,
oily floors and the offal-smeared Chinamen.
We reached Portland, California and I crying for salmon, and a
real-estate man, to whom we had been intrusted by an insurance man, met
us in the street, saying that fifteen miles away, across country, we
should come upon a place called Clackamas, where we might perchance find
what we desired. And California, his coat-tails flying in the wind, ran
to a livery-stable and chartered a wagon and team forthwith. I could
push the wagon about with one hand, so light was its structure. The team
was purely American--that is to say, almost human in its intelligence
and docility. Some one said that the roads were not good on the way to
Clackamas, and warned us against smashing the springs. “Portland,” who
had watched the preparations, finally reckoned “He'd come along,
too;” and under heavenly skies we three companions of a day set forth,
California carefully lashing our rods into the carriage, and the
by-standers overwhelming us with directions as to the saw-mills we were
to pass, the ferries we were to cross, and the sign-posts we were to
seek signs from. Half a mile from this city of fifty thousand souls we
struck (and this must be taken literally) a plank road that would have
been a disgrace to an Irish village.
Then six miles of macadamized road showed us that the team could move.
A railway ran between us and the banks of the Willamette, and another
above us through the mountains. All the land was dotted with small
townships, and the roads were full of farmers in their town wagons,
bunches of tow-haired, boggle-eyed urchins sitting in the hay behind.
The men generally looked like loafers, but their women were all well
dressed.
Brown braiding on a tailor-made jacket does not, however, consort with
hay-wagons. Then we struck into the woods along what California called a
camina reale--a good road--and Portland a “fair track.” It wound in and
out among fire-blackened stumps under pine-trees, along the corners of
log fences, through hollows, which must be hopeless marsh in the winter,
and up absurd gradients. But nowhere throughout its length did I see any
evidence of road-making. There was a track--you couldn't well get off
it, and it was all you could do to stay on it. The dust lay a foot thick
in the blind ruts, and under the dust we found bits of planking and
bundles of brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the air. The
journey in itself was a delight. Sometimes we crashed through bracken;
anon, where the blackberries grew rankest, we found a lonely little
cemetery, the wooden rails all awry and the pitiful, stumpy head-stones
nodding drunkenly at the soft green mullions. Then, with oaths and
the sound of rent underwood, a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a
“skid” road, hauling a forty-foot log along a rudely made slide.
A valley full of wheat and cherry-trees succeeded, and halting at
a house, we bought ten-pound weight of luscious black cherries for
something less than a rupee, and got a drink of icy-cold water for
nothing, while the untended team browsed sagaciously by the road-side.
Once we found a way-side camp of horse-dealers lounging by a pool, ready
for a sale or a swap, and once two sun-tanned youngsters shot down a
hill on Indian ponies, their full creels banging from the high-pommelled
saddle. They had been fishing, and were our brethren, therefore. We
shouted aloud in chorus to scare a wild cat; we squabbled over the
reasons that had led a snake to cross a road; we heaved bits of bark
at a venturesome chipmunk, who was really the little gray squirrel of
India, and had come to call on me; we lost our way, and got the wagon so
beautifully fixed on a khud-bound road that we had to tie the two hind
wheels to get it down.
Above all, California told tales of Nevada and Arizona, of lonely nights
spent out prospecting, the slaughter of deer and the chase of men, of
woman--lovely woman--who is a firebrand in a Western city and leads
to the popping of pistols, and of the sudden changes and chances
of Fortune, who delights in making the miner or the lumber-man a
quadruplicate millionaire and in “busting” the railroad king.
That was a day to be remembered, and it had only begun when we drew rein
at a tiny farm-house on the banks of the Clackamas and sought horse feed
and lodging, ere we hastened to the river that broke over a weir not a
quarter of a mile away. Imagine a stream seventy yards broad divided
by a pebbly island, running over seductive “riffles” and swirling into
deep, quiet pools, where the good salmon goes to smoke his pipe after
meals. Get such a stream amid fields of breast-high crops surrounded
by hills of pines, throw in where you please quiet water, long-fenced
meadows, and a hundred-foot bluff just to keep the scenery from growing
too monotonous, and you will get some faint notion of the Clackamas.
The weir had been erected to pen the Chenook salmon from going further
up-stream. We could see them, twenty or thirty pounds, by the score in
the deep pools, or flying madly against the weir and foolishly skinning
their noses. They were not our prey, for they would not rise at a fly,
and we knew it. All the same, when one made his leap against the weir,
and landed on the foot-plank with a jar that shook the board I was
standing on, I would fain have claimed him for my own capture.
Portland had no rod. He held the gaff and the whiskey. California
sniffed up-stream and down-stream, across the racing water, chose
his ground, and let the gaudy fly drop in the tail of a riffle. I was
getting my rod together, when I heard the joyous shriek of the reel and
the yells of California, and three feet of living silver leaped into the
air far across the water. The forces were engaged.
The salmon tore up-stream, the tense line cutting the water like a
tide-rip behind him, and the light bamboo bowed to breaking. What
happened thereafter I cannot tell. California swore and prayed, and
Portland shouted advice, and I did all three for what appeared to be
half a day, but was in reality a little over a quarter of an hour, and
sullenly our fish came home with spurts of temper, dashes head on and
sarabands in the air, but home to the bank came he, and the remorseless
reel gathered up the thread of his life inch by inch. We landed him in
a little bay, and the spring weight in his gorgeous gills checked at
eleven and one half pounds. Eleven and one half pounds of fighting
salmon! We danced a war-dance on the pebbles, and California caught me
round the waist in a hug that went near to breaking my ribs, while he
shouted:--“Partner! Partner! This is glory! Now you catch your fish!
Twenty-four years I've waited for this!”
I went into that icy-cold river and made my cast just above the weir,
and all but foul-hooked a blue-and-black water-snake with a coral mouth
who coiled herself on a stone and hissed male-dictions.
The next cast--ah, the pride of it, the regal splendor of it! the thrill
that ran down from finger-tip to toe! Then the water boiled. He broke
for the fly and got it. There remained enough sense in me to give him
all he wanted when he jumped not once, but twenty times, before the
up-stream flight that ran my line out to the last half-dozen turns, and
I saw the nickelled reel-bar glitter under the thinning green coils. My
thumb was burned deep when I strove to stopper the line.
I did not feel it till later, for my soul was out in the dancing weir,
praying for him to turn ere he took my tackle away. And the prayer was
heard. As I bowed back, the butt of the rod on my left hip-bone and the
top joint dipping like unto a weeping willow, he turned and accepted
each inch of slack that I could by any means get in as a favor from on
high. There lie several sorts of success in this world that taste well
in the moment of enjoyment, but I question whether the stealthy theft of
line from an able-bodied salmon who knows exactly what you are doing and
why you are doing it is not sweeter than any other victory within human
scope. Like California's fish, he ran at me head on, and leaped against
the line, but the Lord gave me two hundred and fifty pairs of fingers in
that hour. The banks and the pine-trees danced dizzily round me, but I
only reeled--reeled as for life--reeled for hours, and at the end of
the reeling continued to give him the butt while he sulked in a pool.
California was further up the reach, and with the corner of my eye I
could see him casting with long casts and much skill. Then he struck,
and my fish broke for the weir in the same instant, and down the reach
we came, California and I, reel answering reel even as the morning stars
sing together.
The first wild enthusiasm of capture had died away. We were both at
work now in deadly earnest to prevent the lines fouling, to stall off a
down-stream rush for shaggy water just above the weir, and at the same
time to get the fish into the shallow bay down-stream that gave the
best practicable landing. Portland bid us both be of good heart, and
volunteered to take the rod from my hands.
I would rather have died among the pebbles than surrender my right to
play and land a salmon, weight unknown, with an eight-ounce rod. I
heard California, at my ear, it seemed, gasping: “He's a fighter from
Fightersville, sure!” as his fish made a fresh break across the stream.
I saw Portland fall off a log fence, break the overhanging bank, and
clatter down to the pebbles, all sand and landing-net, and I dropped on
a log to rest for a moment. As I drew breath the weary hands slackened
their hold, and I forgot to give him the butt.
A wild scutter in the water, a plunge, and a break for the head-waters
of the Clackamas was my reward, and the weary toil of reeling in with
one eye under the water and the other on the top joint of the rod was
renewed. Worst of all, I was blocking California's path to the little
landing bay aforesaid, and he had to halt and tire his prize where he
was.
“The father of all the salmon!” he shouted. “For the love of Heaven, get
your trout to bank, Johnny Bull!”
But I could do no more. Even the insult failed to move me. The rest of
the game was with the salmon. He suffered himself to be drawn, skip-ping
with pretended delight at getting to the haven where I would fain bring
him. Yet no sooner did he feel shoal water under his ponderous belly
than he backed like a torpedo-boat, and the snarl of the reel told me
that my labor was in vain. A dozen times, at least, this happened ere
the line hinted he had given up the battle and would be towed in. He was
towed. The landing-net was useless for one of his size, and I would not
have him gaffed. I stepped into the shallows and heaved him out with a
respectful hand under the gill, for which kindness he battered me about
the legs with his tail, and I felt the strength of him and was proud.
California had taken my place in the shallows, his fish hard held. I was
up the bank lying full length on the sweet-scented grass and gasping in
company with my first salmon caught, played and landed on an eight-ounce
rod. My hands were cut and bleeding, I was dripping with sweat, spangled
like a harlequin with scales, water from my waist down, nose peeled by
the sun, but utterly, supremely, and consummately happy.
The beauty, the darling, the daisy, my Salmon Bahadur, weighed twelve
pounds, and I had been seven-and-thirty minutes bringing him to bank! He
had been lightly hooked on the angle of the right jaw, and the hook had
not wearied him. That hour I sat among princes and crowned heads greater
than them all. Below the bank we heard California scuffling with his
salmon and swearing Spanish oaths. Portland and I assisted at the
capture, and the fish dragged the spring balance out by the roots. It
was only constructed to weigh up to fifteen pounds. We stretched the
three fish on the grass--the eleven and a half, the twelve and fifteen
pounder--and we gave an oath that all who came after should merely be
weighed and put back again.