WASHEE--WASHEE.
Two days after the Widow had arrived, Washee-Washee, as the "boys" had
named him, stood out on the steps of his cabin all the afternoon,
looking up the Forks and down the Forks, and wondering what in the world
was the reason the "boys" did not come creaking along and screeching
their great gum boots together, with their extra shirt for wash wadded
down in one of the spacious legs.
Three days after the Widow had arrived she had absorbed all the
business. Four days after she had arrived, she absorbed Washee-Washee.
And now it was the brown hand of little moon-eyed Washee-Washee that
reached through the door, took the clothes, and handed them out again,
or at least such portions as he chose to hand out, to the bearded giants
standing there, patiently waiting at the door of the Widow's cabin.
The face of the Widow was now almost entirely invisible. It was as if
there was no sun at the Forks, and all the sky was in a perpetual
eclipse of clouds.
Soon there was trouble. Clothes began to disappear. One bearded
sovereign, a gallant man, who refused to complain because there was a
woman in the case, was observed to wear his coat buttoned very closely
up to his chin; and that too in midday in Summer. This good man had at
first lost only his extra shirt. He did not complain. He simply went to
bed on Sunday, sent his shirt early to the wash, expecting to rise in
the afternoon, "dress," and go to town. A week went by. The man could
not stay in bed till the day of judgment, so he rose up, buttoned up to
the throat, and went down to buy another supply.
Other circumstances, not dissimilar in result, began to be talked of
quietly; and men began to question whether or not after all the camp had
been greatly the gainer by this new element in its population.
One afternoon there was a commotion at the door of the Widow's cabin.
Sandy was in trouble with Washee-Washee. The moon-eyed little man tried
to get back into the house, but the great big giant had been too long a
patient and uncomplaining sufferer to let him escape now, and he reached
for his queue, and drew him forth as a showman does a black snake from a
cage.
The Widow saw the great hairy face of this grizzly giant, and retreated
far back into the cabin. She was certain she was terribly afraid of this
great big awkward half-clad exasperated man, and therefore, with a
woman's consistency, she came to the door, and in a voice softer than
running water to Sandy's ears, asked what could be the matter?
Sandy was taken by surprise, and could not say a word. He only rolled
his great head from one shoulder to the other, got his hands lashed up
somehow in his leather belt, and stood there sadly embarrassed.
But who ever saw an embarrassed Chinaman? The innocent little fellow,
turning his soft brown almond eyes up to the Widow, told her, as poor
Sandy stared on straight down the hill, that this dreadful "Amelikan"
wanted him to leave her, and to go home with him, to be his wife.
When Sandy heard this last he disappeared, crestfallen and utterly
crushed. He went home; but not to rest. He told Limber Tim all about
what had happened. How he had stood it all in silence, till it came to
the last shirt. How the Chinaman had lied, and how he was now certain
that it was this same little celestial who had been robbing him. Limber
Tim raised himself on his elbow where he lay in his bunk, and looking
at Sandy, struck out emphatically with his hand, and cried--
"Lay fur him!"
Sandy drew on his great gum boots again. Limber Tim rose up, and then
the two men kept creaking, and screeching and whetting their great boots
together, as they went, without speaking, and in single file down the
hill towards town.
There was an expression of ineffable peace and tranquility on the face
of Washee-Washee that twilight, as he wended his way from the Widow's
cabin to his own. His day's work was done; and the little man's face
looked the soul of repose. Possibly he was saying with the great good
poet, whose lines you hear at evening time, on the lips of nearly every
English artisan--
"Something attempted, something done,
Has earn'd a night's repose."
Washee-Washee looked strangely fat for a Chinaman, as he peacefully
toddled down the trail, still wearing, as he neared his cabin, that look
of calm delight and perfect innocence, such only as the pure in heart
are supposed to wear. His hands were drawn up and folded calmly across
his obtruding stomach, as if he feared he might possibly burst open, and
wanted to be ready to hold himself together.
In the great-little republic there, where all had begun an even and
equal race in the battle of life, where all had begun as beggars, this
tawny little man from the far-off Flowery Kingdom was alone; he was the
only representative of his innumerable millions in all that camp. And he
did seem so fat, so perfectly full of satisfaction. Perhaps he smiled to
think how fat he was, and, too, how he had flourished in the little
democracy.
He was making a short turn in the trail, still holding his clasped hands
over his extended stomach, still smiling peacefully out of his half-shut
eyes:
"Washee! Washee!"
A double bolt of thunder was in his ears. A tremendous hand reached out
from behind a pine, and then the fat little Chinaman squatted down and
began to wilt and melt beneath it.
"Washee-Washee, come!"
Washee-Washee was not at all willing to come; but that made not the
slightest difference in the world to Sandy. The little almond-eyed man
was not at all heavy. Old flannel shirts, cotton overalls, stockings,
cotton collars and cambric handkerchiefs never are heavy, no matter how
well they may be wadded in, and padded away, and tucked up, and twisted
under an outer garment; and so before he had time to say a word he was
on his way to the Widow's with Sandy, while Limber Tim, with his mouth
half-open, came corkscrewing up the trail, and grinding and whetting his
screechy gum boots together after them.
There is a fine marble statue in the garden at Naples, near the massive
marble head of Virgil, which represents some great giant as striding
along with some little pigmy thrown over his shoulder, which he is
carelessly holding on by the heel. Sandy looked not wholly unlike that
statue, as he strode up the trail with Washee-Washee.
He reached the door of the Widow's cabin, knocked with the knuckles of
his left hand, while his right hand held on to an ankle that hung down
over his left shoulder, and calmly waited an answer.
The door half-way opened.
"Beg pardon, mum."
He bowed stiffly as he said this, and then shifting Washee-Washee round,
quietly took his other heel in his other hand, and proceeded to shake
him up and down, and dance him and stand him gently on his head, until
the clothes began to burst out from under his blue seamless garment, and
to peep through his pockets, and to reach down around his throat and
dangle about his face, till the little man was nearly smothered.
Then Sandy set him down a moment to rest, and he looked in his face as
he sat there, and it had the same peaceful smile, the same calm
satisfaction as before. The little man now put his head to one side,
shut his pretty brown eyes a little tighter at the corners, and opened
his mouth the least bit in the world, and put out his tongue as if he
was about to sing a hymn.
Then Sandy took him up again. He smiled again sweeter than before. Sandy
tilted him side wise, and shook him again. Then there fell a spoon, then
a pepper-box, and then a small brass candlestick; and at last, as he
rolled him over and shook the other side, there came out a machine
strangely and wonderfully made of whalebone and brass, and hooks and
eyes, that Sandy had never seen before, and did not at all understand,
but supposed was either a fish trap or some new invention for washing
gold.
Then Limber Tim, who had screwed his back up against the palings, and
watched all this with his mouth open, came down, and reaching out with
his thumb and finger, as if they had been a pair of tongs, took the
garments one by one, named them, for he knew them and their owners well,
and laid them silently aside. Then he took Washee-Washee from the hands
of Sandy and stood him up, or tried to stand him up alone. He looked
like a flagstaff with the banner falling loosely around it in an
indolent wind. He held him up by the queue awhile, but he wilted and
sank down gently at his feet, all the time smiling sweetly as before,
all the time looking up with a half-closed eye and half-parted lips, as
though he was enjoying himself perfectly, and would like to laugh, only
that he had too much respect for the present company.
"If I could only shake the lies out of him, mum, as easily as I did this
'ere spoon, and this 'ere candlestick, and this 'ere, this 'ere"--Sandy
had stooped and picked up the articles as he spoke, and now was handing
them to the Widow in triumph.
"Poor little, helpless, pitiful fellow!"
The Widow was looking straight at the celestial, who sat there piled up
in a little bit of a heap, the limpest thing in all the Forks perhaps,
save Limber Tim.
"Let him go, please; let him go. Bring the things and come in. You can
go now, John; but don't do so any more. It is not right."
The Widow smiled in pity as she said this to Washee-Washee. The Chinaman
understood the first proposition perfectly, but not the last at all. To
him all this was simply a bad investment. To him it was only a little
shipwreck; and having been taught by the philosophers of his country to
prepare for adversity in the hour of prosperity, he was not at all
lacking in resignation now. He rose up, smiled that patient and peaceful
smile of his, and wended his way to his home.
Sandy looked a moment at the retreating hungry-looking little Chinaman,
and then thrust his two great hands into his two great pockets, and
tilting his head, first on the left shoulder and then on the right,
tried hard to look the Widow in the face, but found himself
contemplating the toes of his great gum boots.
"Will you not come in?"
The man rolled forward. He sat down in the Widow's cabin in a perfect
glow of excitement and delight.
I am bound to admit that, upright and great as Sandy was, he kept
thinking to himself, "What will the Judge and the boys say of this?" He
even was glad in his heart that Limber Tim stood with his back glued up
against the palings on the outside, and his hands reached back and wound
in and around the rails, so that he could testify to the boys, tell it,
in fact, to the world, that he had entered in, and sat down in the
Widow's cabin.
It was not easy work for Sandy sitting there. He soon began to suffer.
He hitched about and twisted around on the broad wooden stool as if he
had sat down on a very hot stove.
The Widow sat a little way back across the cabin, a bit of work in her
lap, looking up at Sandy now, and now dropping her half-sad blue eyes
down to her work, and all the time, in a low sweet way, doing every word
of the talking.
Sandy's hot stove kept getting hotter and hotter. He began to wish he
was down with the boys at the Howling Wilderness, consulting the oracle
of cocktails. All at once he seemed to discover his great long legs.
They seemed to him as if they reached almost clean across the cabin,
like two great anacondas going to swallow up the Widow. He fished them
up, curved them, threw his two great hands across them, nursed them
affectionately, but they seemed more in the way and uglier than ever
before. Then he thrust them out again, but jerked them back instantly,
and drove them back under his bench as if they had been two big and
unruly bull-dogs, and he nearly upset himself in doing it. They had
fairly frightened him, they were surely never half so long before. It
seemed to him as if they would reach across the room, through the wall,
and even down to the Howling Wilderness. He twisted them up under the
bench and got them fast there, and was glad of it, for now they would
not and could not run out and rush across the room at the Widow.
But now poor Sandy saw another skeleton. His eyes came upon them
suddenly, in a sort of discovery. It seemed as if he had just found them
out for the first time, and knew them for mortal enemies, and determined
to do away with them at once, and at any sacrifice.
Such hands! had the Widow really been looking at them all this time? the
back of that hand was big and rough as the bark of a tree. That finger
nail had a white rim of dough around it; that thumb nail was as big and
about as dirty as a crevicing spoon! He picked up that hand, thrust it
under him, sat firmly over on that side, and held it down and out of
sight with all his might. The other one lay there, still in the way. It
was uglier than the one he had just slain and hidden away in the bush.
There was dirt enough about the nails to make a small mining claim. He
rolled the hand over and over on his lap, as if it had been somebody's
baby; and a baby with the colic. At last, in a state of desperation, he
rolled it off and let it fall and take care of itself. It hung down at
his side like a great big felon from the scaffold.
It twisted and swung around there as if it had just been hung up by the
neck in the expiation of some awful crime. It felt to Sandy as if it
weighed a ton. He tried to lift it up again, to take care of it, to
nurse it, to turn it over on its stomach, to stroke it, and talk to it,
and pity it, and soothe away its colic, but lo! he could not lift it. He
began to perspire, he was so very warm. It was the warmest time that
Sandy had ever seen. All this time Sandy had sat close by the door, and
not one word had he uttered.
The Widow rose up, laid her work on the table, all the time smiling
sweetly, half sadly, and going up to the fire-place, took from the box
in the corner, pine knot after pine knot, and laid them on the blazing
fire.
"Come, the evening is chilly, will you not sit closer to the fire?"
Sandy sat still as the statue of Moses in the Vatican, but that
abominable felon hanging by the neck at his side kept twisting around
and around and around as if he never would die or be still. The Widow
sat down with her work as before, and this time she began to talk about
the weather, trusting that on this subject at least, her great good
friend could open his lips and speak.
"How very cold it is this evening. The chill of the snow is in the air;
it blows down from the banks of snow on the mountain, and I fancy it
may be cold here in this rickety cabin the Summer through."
Still the ugly convict, that now began to grow black in the face, swung
and twisted at his side; but he did not speak.
"Do you not feel cold?"
"Yes 'um."
The two words came out like the bark of a bull-dog; as if one of the
brutes he had drawn back under his bench had stuck out his nose and
yelped in the face of the Widow, and Sandy was frightened nearly to
death. The perspiration dropped from his brow to his hand, and he knew
that things could not last in this way much longer. The bull-dogs would
be out, and he knew it. The dead man that he was sitting down upon would
rise up to judgment, and the felon at his side was only swinging and
turning and twisting more than before.
Sandy shut his eyes and attempted to rise. His gum boots screeched, the
bench creaked as he began to undouble himself. It turned up and hung on
behind him as if it had been a lobster. He shook it off, and began to
tower up like a pine. He feared he would pierce through the roof, and
began to look out through the half-open door, and to stretch out the
prostrate hand. Then he stood still and was more bewildered than before.
The Widow was looking straight at him, and expecting him to speak. He
wished he had not got up at all. If he was only back on that overthrown
bench, with the dead man beneath him, and the bull-dogs below, and the
felon swinging loosely at his side, how happy he would be. He tried to
speak, tried like a man, but if it had been to save his life, to save
her life, the world, he could not find will to shape one word. He backed
and blundered and stumbled across the threshold and drew a breath, such
a breath! the first he had drawn for half an hour, as he stood outside,
with the Widow's little feet following to the threshold, and her pretty
miniature face looking up to his as if looking up to the top of a pine.
"You will come again, will you not? you have been so very kind; please
to call, step in as you pass, and rest. It is so lonesome here, you
know! nobody that anybody knows. And then you are such good company."
And then the pretty little Widow with the sad sweet face, laughed the
prettiest little laugh that ever was laughed this side that other Eden
with its one fair woman.
Limber Tim closed his mouth and unscrewed himself from the palings on
the fence without as Sandy appeared, and the two took their way to their
cabin.
"And you are such good company." That was all Sandy could remember. What
could he have said? He tried and tried to recall his observations,
whatever they may have been, on the various topics of the day, but in
vain. He could only remember the circumstance of driving two ugly
bull-dogs back under his bench, of slaying and hiding away his mortal
enemy, and then hanging a felon for high treason; and then chiefest of
all, "You will come again, it is lonesome here; you are such good
company."
"You are such good company." The wind sang it through the trees as he
wended his way home. The water, away down in the canon below the trail,
sang it soft and low and sweet, sang it ever, and nothing more, and the
tea-kettle that night simmered and sang, and sang this one sweet song
for Sandy.
He took the first opportunity after supper to slip out and away from
Limber Tim; and there in the dark, with his face to the great black
forest, he stood saying over and over to himself, in his great coarse
voice, trying to catch the soft tones of the Widow, "You are such good
company."
That evening Limber Tim leaned up against the logs of the Howling
Wilderness, and told all that had happened, and how Sandy had seen the
Widow, how he had sat in her cabin, how he had talked, and how she had
smiled, and what a very hero his "pardner" had become. He told of
Washee-Washee.
The story of Washee-Washee went through the Forks, and then the next
morning the Forks rose up and "went through" Washee-Washee.
Perhaps it was what the Widow had said about the "poor little, helpless,
harmless man," that saved him, but certain it was, for some unknown
reason, the miners dealt gently with this strange little stranger. Had
this been one or even a dozen, of their own kind, some tree in the
neighborhood of the Forks would have borne in less than an hour one, or
even a dozen, of strange and ugly fruit. They went to Washee-Washee's
cabin. He smiled as he saw them approach, half shut his eyes as they
entered, laid his head a little to one side as they tore up his bunk,
and looked perfectly happy, and peaceful as a lamb, as they pulled out
from under it enough old clothes to open a shop in Petticoat Lane, or
even in Bow Street.
They found a rifle-blanket in one of his wooden shoes, and it was heavy
with gold-dust. Poor Washee-Washee, when called upon to explain, said
timidly that he had found it floating up the river past his cabin, and
took it in to dry it. He seemed hurt when they refused to believe him.
They found a hose coiled up in his great bamboo hat. One of the men took
hold of his queue, his beautiful long black queue that swept the ground
with its braided folds and black silk tassels tipped with red and gold,
and found it heavy with nuggets, hidden away, for what purpose goodness
only knows. It was heavy enough to sink it like a shot were it a fish
line--and all this gold was his!
They threatened hard things to Washee-Washee, these rough, outraged,
hairy fellows, who had patronized him and helped him and tried to get
him along in the world, but he was perfectly passive and tranquil.
A man who stood there with a bundle of recovered treasure-trove, in the
shape of shirts and coats of many colors, because of many patches, took
Washee-Washee by the little pink ear, and twisted him up and around till
he saw his face. Then he let him go, and catching his clothes up under
his arm strode on out of the cabin and on down to his claim and his
work. The meekest man that the world has seen since Socrates, was
Washee-Washee. He sat there with the same semi-grin on his face, the
same half smile in his almond eyes, though a man shook a rope in his
face, jerked it up, thrust out his tongue, pointed to a tree, and hung
himself in pantomime before this placid Chinaman.
"What will we do with him?" A bearded citizen stood there with a bundle
of clothes under his arm, waiting to be gone.
"Poor, lonesome, harmless little man." Sandy stood there, repeating the
words of the little Widow without knowing it.
"He does lie so helplessly," said one. "If he could only lie decently,
we might hang him decently."
"Tell you what, flog him and send him adrift." The man who proposed this
was a stranger, with an anchor and other hall-marks of the sea on his
hairy arms.
"Wolves would eat 'im on the mountain."
"Wolves eat a Chinaman! They 'd eat a gum boot fust!"
"Tell you what we'll do," growled the Gopher, "reform him."
"Reform hell!" said the sailor to himself.
"Come, let's do a little missionary business, and begin at home," urged
the Gopher. "Get the Judge to reprimand him. Have him talk to him an
hour, then let the Parson speak to him another hour. If he lives that
through he will be an honest man, or if not honest he will at least be
harmless."
Now they had no preacher in the Forks, not even the semblance of one
yet, neither had they a lawyer or doctor, but this Parson was a power in
the camp. He was perhaps the most popular man there. He was certainly
the most influential, for he was a man who could talk. They called him
the Parson because he was certainly the profanest man in all the mines.
The idea was novel and was at once adopted.
Here at last was a practical application of the popular feeling, in
older republics, that the officers are the servants of the public.
The little Judge here was certainly the people's servant. If he had not
been, if he had asserted himself at all and taken up arms and fortified
himself behind a barricade of books, they would simply have called a
miners' meeting in half an hour, and in half an hour would have had the
little man ousted and another man in his place, and then back to their
work as if nothing ever had happened. Never in the world had men known
such absolute liberty as was attained here. There was not even the
dominion of woman. And yet they were not happy.
They marched Washee-Washee to the Howling Wilderness, told the sentence,
and called upon the Parson to enforce judgment.
He now took a cordial and began. Washee-Washee sat before him on a
bench, leaning against the wall. The little man seemed as if he was
about to go to sleep; possibly his conscience had kept him awake the
night before, when he found that all his little investments had been a
failure in the Forks.
The Parson began. Washee-Washee flinched, jerked back, sat bolt upright,
and seemed to suffer.
Then the Parson shot another oath. This time it came like a cannon ball,
and red hot too, for Washee-Washee was almost lifted out of his seat.
Then the Parson took his breath a bit, rolled the quid of tobacco in his
mouth from left to right and from right to left, and as he did so he
selected the very broadest, knottiest, and ugliest oaths that he had
found in all his fifty years of life at sea and on the border.
Washee-Washee had lost his expression of peace. He had evidently been
terribly shaken. The Parson had rested a good spell, however, and the
little, slim, brown man before him, who had crawled out over the great
wall of China, sailed across the sea of seas, climbed the Sierras, and
sat down in their midst to begin the old clothes business, without pay
or promise, was again settling back, as if about to surrender to sleep.
Cannon balls! conical shot! chain shot! and shot red hot! Never were
such oaths heard in the world before! The Chinaman fell over.
"Stop!" cried the bar-keeper of the Howling Wilderness, who didn't want
the expense of the funeral; "stop! do you mean to cuss him to death?"
The Chinaman was allowed time to recover, and then they sat him again on
the bench. A man fanned him with his broad bamboo hat, lest he should
faint before the last half of the punishment was nearly through, and the
Judge was called upon to enforce the remainder of their sentence.
The Judge come forward slowly, put his two hands back under his coat
tails, tilted forward on his toes and began:
"Washee-Washee! In this glorious climate of Californy--how could you?"
Washee-Washee nodded, and the Judge broke down badly embarrassed. At
last he recovered himself, and began in a deep, earnest and entreating
tone:
"Washee-Washee, in this glorious climate of Californy you should
remember the seventh Commandment, and never, under any circumstances or
temptations that beset you, should you covet your neighbor's goods, or
his boots, or his shirt, or his socks, or his handkerchief, or any thing
that is his, or--"
The Judge paused, the men giggled, and then they roared, and laughed,
and danced about their little Judge; for Washee-Washee had folded his
little brown hands in his lap, and was sleeping as sweetly as a baby in
its cradle.