At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head
full of islands, towns, bars, “points,” and bends, and a curiously
inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut
my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving
out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I
could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those
little gaps. But of course my complacency could hardly get start enough
to lift my nose a trifle into the air, before Mr. Bixby would think of
something to fetch it down again. One day he turned on me suddenly with
this settler:
“What is the shape of Walnut Bend?”
He might as well have asked me my grandmother’s opinion of protoplasm. I
reflected respectfully, and then said I didn’t know it had any
particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course,
and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.
I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of
ammunition and was sure to subside into a very placable and even
remorseful old smoothbore as soon as they were all gone. That word “old”
is merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. I waited. By
and by he said:
“My boy, you’ve got to know the _shape_ of the river perfectly. It is
all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is
blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn’t the same shape in the
night that it has in the daytime.”
“How on earth am I ever going to learn it then?”
“How do you follow a hall at home in the dark? Because you know the
shape of it. You can’t see it.”
“Do you mean to say that I’ve got to know all the million trifling
variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I
know the shape of the front hall at home?”
“On my honor, you’ve got to know them _better_ than any man ever did
know the shapes of the halls in his own house.”
“I wish I was dead!”
“Now, I don’t want to discourage you, but——”
“Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.”
“You see, this has got to be learned; there isn’t any getting around it.
A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that, if you didn’t
know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away from every
bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a
solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every
fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all
the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can’t see a
snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the
shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there’s
your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a
pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem
to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you’d _run_
them for straight lines, only you know better. You boldly drive your
boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing
very well that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls
back and makes way for you. Then there’s your gray mist. You take a
night when there’s one of these grisly drizzly, gray mists, and then
there isn’t _any_ particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle
the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds
of _moonlight_ change the shape of the river in different ways. You
see——”
“Oh, don’t say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the
river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I
tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me
stoop-shouldered.”
“_No!_ you only learn the shape of _the_ river; and you learn it with
such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that’s
_in your head_, and never the one that’s before your eyes.”
“Very well, I’ll try it; but, after I have learned it, can I depend on
it? Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?”
Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W. came in to take the watch and he
said:
“Bixby, you’ll have to look out for President’s Island, and all that
country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are
caving and the shape of the shore changing like everything. Why you
wouldn’t know the point above 40. You can go up inside the old sycamore
snag, now.”
So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing
shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty
apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man has got to
learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other
was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every
twenty-four hours.
That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river
custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed. While
the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar, his partner,
the retiring pilot, would say something like this:
“I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale’s Point; had
quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain with the other.”
“Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip. Meet any boats?”
“Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the bar,
and I couldn’t make her out entirely. I took her for the _Sunny
South_—hadn’t any skylight forward of the chimneys.”
And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner would
mention that we were in such-and-such a bend, and say we were abreast of
such a man’s woodyard or plantation. This was courtesy; I supposed it
was _necessity_. But Mr. W. came on watch full twelve minutes late on
this particular night—a tremendous breach of etiquette; in fact, it is
the unpardonable sin among pilots. So Mr. Bixby gave him no greeting
whatever, but simply surrendered the wheel and marched out of the
pilot-house without a word. I was appalled; it was a villainous night
for blackness, we were in a particularly wide and blind part of the
river, where there was no shape or substance to anything, and it seemed
incredible that Mr. Bixby should have left that poor fellow to kill the
boat trying to find out where he was. But I resolved that I would stand
by him anyway. He should find that he was not wholly friendless. So I
stood around, and waited to be asked where we were. But Mr. W. plunged
on serenely through the solid firmament of black cats that stood for an
atmosphere and never opened his mouth. “He is a proud devil!” thought I;
“here is a limb of Satan that would rather send us all to destruction
than put himself under obligations to me, because I am not yet one of
the salt of the earth and privileged to snub captains and lord it over
everything dead and alive in a steamboat.” I presently climbed up on the
bench; I did not think it was safe to go to sleep while this lunatic was
on watch.
However, I must have gone to sleep in the course of time, because the
next thing I was aware of was the fact that day was breaking, Mr. W.
gone, and Mr. Bixby at the wheel again. So it was four o’clock and all
well—but me; I felt like a skinful of dry bones, and all of them trying
to ache at once.
Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for. I confessed that it
was to do Mr. W. a benevolence—tell him where he was. It took five
minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing to filter into Mr.
Bixby’s system, and then I judged it filled him nearly up to the chin;
because he paid me a compliment—and not much of a one either. He said:
“Well, taking you by and large, you seem to be more different kinds of
an ass than any creature I ever saw before. What did you suppose he
wanted to know for?”