and what travellers' hunger to match it. Among Hugh and Ramsey's dozen,
if no further, how the conversation rippled, radiated, and out-tinkled
and out-twinkled the fine tablewares. One almost forgot his wine or that
the boat and her wheels had stopped; might have quite forgotten had not
certain sounds, starting in full volume from the lower deck but arriving
under the cabin floor faint and wasted--emaciated, as you might
say--stolen up and in. A diligent loquacity contrived to ignore the most
of them. The soft chanting of the priest as he walked down the
landing-stage and out upon the damp brown sands, followed by the bearers
of the new pine box and by a short procession of bowed mourners,
perished unheard at the table; but many noises more penetrative were
also much more discomfiting, and it was fortunate that the talk of the
bishop and others could charm most of them away even from the judge's
nervous sister, who, nevertheless, amid such remote themes as Jenny
Lind, Nebraska, coming political conventions, and the new speed record
of the big _Eclipse_ in the fourteen hundred and forty miles from New
Orleans, could not help a light start now and then. It was good, to Hugh
and to Ramsey, to see how the actor, Gilmore, despite this upward
seepage of ghostly cries--faint notes of horror, anguish, and
despair--attenuated groans and wailings of bodily agony--held the eyes
of the ladies nearest him with tales of travel and the theatre, and
mention of the great cut-off of 1699, which they would soon pass and
must notice. But quite as good was it to the wives of Vicksburg and
Milliken's Bend to observe with what fluency Hugh, commonly so quiet,
discoursed to Mrs. Gilmore and to Ramsey on other river features near at
hand: Dead Man's Bend, Ellis Cliffs, Natchez Island, the crossing above
it, Saint Catherine's Creek, and Natchez itself.
"Where I was born!" said Ramsey. "Largest town in Mississippi and the
most stuck-up."
The other Mississippians laughed delightedly.
"We stop there," said Hugh, "to put off freight."
"Mr. Courteney," asked Ramsey, "what _is_ a 'crossing'?"
There were new lower-deck noises to drown and Hugh welcomed the slender
theme. "The channel of a great river in flat lands," he said, "is a
river within a river. It frets against its walls of slack water----"
"I see!--as the whole river does against its banks!"
"Yes. Wherever the shore bends, the current, when strong, keeps straight
on across the slack water till it hits the bend. Then it swerves just
enough to rush by, and miles below hits the other shore, swerves again,
and crosses in another long slant down there."
"Except where it breaks through and makes a cut-off!"
"But a cut-off is an event. This goes on all the time, in almost every
reach; so that pilots, whether running down-stream in the current or
up-stream in the slack water, cross the river about as often as the
current does."
"Hence the term!" laughed Ramsey.
"I think so. You might ask Mr. Watson."
"No, I'll ask him what a reach is--and a towhead--and a pirooter--oh,
don't you love this river?"
While the talk thus flowed, what delicacies--pastries, ices, fruits--had
come in and served their ends! But also against what sounds from the
underworld had each utterance still to make headway: commands and
threats and cries of defiance and rage, faint but intense, and which all
at once ceased at the crack of a shot! The judge's sister let out a soft
note of affright and looked here and there for explanation. In vain. The
Vicksburg merchant lightly spoke across the table:
"Shooting alligators, bishop?"
"Oh!" broke in the judge's sister, aggrieved, "that was for no
alligator." She appealed to a white-jacket bringing coffee: "Was that
for an alligator?"
"I dunno'm. Mowt be a deer. Mowt be a b'ar."
His bashful smirk implied it might be none of the three. Ramsey looked
at Hugh and Hugh said quietly to a boy at his back:
"Go, see what it is."
XXI
RAMSEY AND THE BISHOP
"High water like this," casually said the planter, next to Ramsey,
"drives the big game out o' the swamps, where they use, and makes 'em
foolish."
"Yes," said the bishop. "You know, Dick"--for he and the planter were
old acquaintances--"not far from here, those long stretches of river a
good mile wide, and how between them there are two or three short pieces
where the shores are barely a quarter of a mile apart?"
"Yes," replied Dick and others.
"Well, last week, on my down trip, as we rounded a point in one of those
narrow places, there, right out in mid-river, was a big buck, swimming
across. Two swampers had spied him and were hot after him in a skiff."
"Oh," cried Ramsey, "I hope he got away!"
"Why, _I_ partly hoped he would," laughed the bishop, "and partly I
hoped they'd get him."
"Characteristic," she heard the planter say to himself.
"And sure enough," the tale went on, "just as his forefeet hit the
bank--" But there Hugh's messenger reappeared, and as Hugh listened to
his murmured report the deer's historian avoided oblivion only by
asking:
"Well, Mr. Courteney, after all, what was it?"
"Tell the bishop," said Hugh to the boy.
"'T'uz a man, suh," the servant announced, and when the ladies exclaimed
he amended, "leas'wise a deckhan', suh."
"Thank Heaven!" thought several, not because it was a man but because
the bells jingled again and the moving boat resumed her own blessed
sounds. But the bishop was angry--too angry for table talk. He had his
suspicions.
"Did deckhands make all that row?"
"Oh, no, suh; not in de beginnin', suh."
"Wasn't there trouble with the deck passengers?"
"Yassuh, at fus'; at fus', yassuh; wid dem and dey young leadeh. Y'see,
dey be'n so long aboa'd ship dey plumb stahve fo' gyahden-sass an'
'count o' de sickness de docto' won't 'low 'em on'y some sawts. But back
yondeh on sho' dey's some wile mulbe'y trees hangin' low wid green
mulbe'ys, an' comin' away f'om de grave dey make a break fo' 'em. But de
mate he head' 'em off. An' whilse de leadeh he a-jawin' at de mate on
sho', an' likewise at de clerk on de b'ileh deck an' at the cap'm on de
roof----"
"In a foreign tongue," prompted the bishop, to whom that seemed the
kernel of the offense.
"Yassuh, I reckon so; in a fond tongue; yassuh."
"About his sick not having proper food?" asked Ramsey.
"Yass'm--no'm--yass'm! An' whilse he a-jawin', some o' de crew think dey
see a chance fo' to slip into de bresh an' leave de boat. An' when de
mate whip' out his 'evolveh on 'em, an' one draw a knife on him, an' he
make a dash fo' dat one, he--dat deckhan'--run aboa'd so fas' dat he
ain't see whah he gwine tell it's too la-ate."
The bishop tightened his lips at Hugh and peered at the cabin-boy: "How
was it too late?"
"De deckhan' he run ove'boa'd, suh."
The ladies flinched, the men frowned. "But," said the querist, "meantime
the mate had fired, hmm? Did he--hit?"
"Dey don't know, suh. De deckhan' he neveh riz."
"Awful!" The bishop and Hugh looked steadily at each other. "So that
also we owe to our aliens!"
"Yes," said Hugh.
"We don't," said Ramsey softly, yet heard by all.
Across the board Mrs. Gilmore said "Oh!" but in the next breath all but
the judge's sister laughed, the bishop, as Hugh and he began to rise,
laughing most.
"Wait," said Ramsey, laying a hand out to each and addressing Hugh. "How
are those sick downstairs going to get the right food?"
The cabin-boy almost broke in but caught himself.
"Say it," said Hugh.
"Why, dem what already sick dey a-gitt'n' it. Yass'm, dey gitt'n' de
boat's best. Madam Hayle and de cap'm dey done see to dat f'om de staht.
H-it's de well uns what needs he'p."
"But," said Ramsey, still to Hugh, "for sick or well--the right
food--who pays for it?"
"The boat."
"Who pays the boat?" she asked, and suddenly, blushing, saw her
situation. Except the bishop and the judge's sister, who were conversing
in undertone--except them and Hugh--the whole company, actually with
here and there an elbow on the board, had turned to her in such bright
expectancy as to give her a shock of encounter. But mirth upheld her,
and leaning in over the table she shifted her question to the smiling
bishop: "Who pays the boat?"
"The boat? Why--ha, ha!--that's the boat's lookout."
"It isn't," she laughed, but laughed so daintily and in a gayety so
modestly self-justified that the group approved and the Vicksburg man
asked her:
"Who ought to pay the boat?"
"We!" she cried. "All of us! It's in the Bible that we ought!" She
looked again to the bishop. "Ain't it?"
"Why, I don't recall any mention of this matter there."
"Nor of strangers?" she asked, "nor of sick folks?" and her demure
mirth, not flung at him or at any one, but quite to itself and for
itself, came again.
"Ah, that's another affair!" he rejoined. He felt her and Hugh, with
half the rest, saying to themselves, "It is not!" but was all the more
moved to continue: "My fair daughter, you prepare the way of the Lord.
Brethren and sisters, I want you to gather with me here as soon as
those yonder are through"--a backhanded toss indicated the children's
table, whose feasters showed no sign that they would ever be through
at all. "We must--every believer--and whosoever will--on this
passenger-deck--spend an hour--more if the spirit leads--in prayer
for this pestilence to be stayed." He fastened his gaze on Hugh; no
senator was present to overtop him now, and certainly this colt of John
Courteney's should not. Yet the largeness with which the colt's eyes
stared through and beyond him was significant to all.
"And we must do more!" he persisted.
"We shall," said Hugh.
"We must!" said the bishop; "we must beseech God for a spiritual
outpouring. We have on this boat the stranger of our own land and the
sick of our own tongue: the stranger to grace and the sick in soul, who
may be eternally lost before this boat has finished her trip; and as
much as the soul's worth outweighs the body's is it our first duty to
help them get religion!"
With her curls lowered nearly to the table Ramsey--ah, me!--laughed. Her
notes were as light as a perfume, but to the bishop all perfumes were
heavy. He turned to the actor. "Isn't that so, brother?"
"Oh, bishop, you know a lot better than I do."
"He doesn't," tinkled Ramsey, and, as the bishop swung back to her--"Do
you?" she ingratiatingly challenged him. "No, you don't! You know you
don't!"
The company would have laughed with her if only to save their face, and
when he made a very bright retort they laughed the heartier. They rose
with Hugh. Ramsey said she wished she knew again how her brother was,
and Hugh sent his servant to inquire. As all loitered aft, the bishop
held them together a moment more.
"You don't object to such a meeting?" he asked Hugh.
"Not if you don't alarm or distress any one. The doctor forbids that."
While Hugh so replied, the circle was joined by the commodore. The
bishop flared:
"Doctors always forbid! How can we exhort sinners without alarming or
distressing them?"
Hugh's answer was overprompt: "I don't know, sir."
But Ramsey, drawing the Gilmores with her, came between. "Just a bit
ago," she said to the bishop, "didn't you say yes, we must all be as gay
and happy as we can?"
"I did, verily. But surely that shouldn't prevent this."
"Oh, surely not!" exclaimed both the players.
"It needn't," said Ramsey. "But if we five"--Gilmores, Courteneys, and
herself--"and some others--help you with your meeting to-day will you
help us with ours to-morrow?"
"If I can, assuredly! But how will you help me to-day, my young sister?"
On three fingers the young sister--so lately his daughter--counted:
"First, we'll get the people to come; we'll tell them you're not going
to alarm or distress anybody. Second, if you forget and begin to do it
we'll remind you! And, third, we'll take up the collection!"
The senator laughed so much above the rest that the bishop colored as he
said: "I never exhort and collect at the same time."
"Oh-h!" sighed Ramsey. "We must collect, you know, to pay our share,
each of us, for the care of the sick. And we can't collect to-morrow;
we'll all be so busy getting up our own meeting." Her eyes wandered to
the senator, so fervently was he urging some matter upon the commodore.
"What," asked the bishop, turning to the players, "is to-morrow's
meeting to be for?"
"Why," brightly said the wife, "just to keep every one as gay and happy
as we can." But Ramsey added: "And to raise money for the not-sick
emigrants, to get them the right food."
"Ho, ho! Another collection!"
"No, only admission fees. Six bits for the play, four bits for the
dance."
Half offended, half amused, the bishop swelled. "And you ask me"--he
laughed, but she had turned away and he reverted to the players--"on top
of our prayers for God's mercy upon our bodies and souls you ask me to
help get up a play and a dance!"
Eagerly, amid a general merriment that was not quite merry, the Gilmores
answered with amused disclaimers for themselves and copious excuses for
him. Ramsey's eyes, like Hugh's, were on the commodore and the senator,
who were starting off together. The commodore's nod called Hugh and he
moved to overtake them. The boy whom Hugh had sent to the texas,
returning, sought to intercept him, but Hugh passed on and the messenger
found Ramsey. She had just been rejoined by her old nurse, and to both
servants her questions were prompt and swift. Their low replies plainly
disturbed her, and she wheeled to the bishop where he still stood
addressing the Gilmores and a dozen others in a manner loftily
defensive. He forestalled her speech with good-natured haste. "Now, if
our gay and happy young sister will ask me to do something befitting a
minister of the gospel," he began----
"Amen to dat!" said old Joy, and as Ramsey's eyes showed tears the
speaker paused.
"All right," she quietly said. "Come to my sick brother. Won't you,
please?"
"Why--why, yes, I--I will. Cer-certainly I will. Yet--really--if I'm
forbidden to alarm him"--his smile could not hide his sense of mortal
risk.
"Oh, he's already alarmed!"
"He's turrified!" softly said old Joy.
"Why, then, the moment we're through our meeting----"
"Don't begin it!" said Ramsey. "It can wait heaps better than he can.
He's waiting now and begging for you. Come! You needn't be afraid; I'll
go with you!" She laughed.
"No!" cried Joy. "Lawd, Mahs' Bishop, she mus'n't!"
"She need not," said the bishop. "But for me to go now, before I--why, I
couldn't come back and mingle----"
"Oh, come!" The girl drew him by the sleeve. But the Gilmores held her
back and he went on alone, his face betraying a definite presentiment as
he glanced round in response to a clapping of hands.
"Oh, thank you!" cried Ramsey. "Gawd bless you!" droned Joy. "We'll run
your meeting while you're gone!" called Ramsey. "And we'll pray for you!
Won't we?" she asked the players, and they and others answered: "Yes."
XXII
BASILE AND WHAT HE SAW
For these twenty hours of constant activity one young passenger, save
only when asleep in his berth, had contemplated the _Votaress_ and her
swarming managers and voyagers with a regard different from any we have
yet taken into account. The Gilmores, softly to each other, termed him
"a type." To the face of nature he seemed wholly insensible. As the
gliding boat incessantly bore him onward between river and sky, shore
and shore, he appeared never to be aware whether the forests were gray
or green, the heavens blue or gray, the waters tawny or blue. No
loveliness of land or flood could deflect his undivided interest in
whatever human converse he happened to be nearest as he drifted about
decks in a listless unrest that kept him singled out at every pause and
turn. His very fair intelligence was so indolently unaspiring, so
intolerant of harness, as we may say, and so contentedly attuned to the
general mind, mind of the multitude, that the idlest utterance falling
on his ear from any merest unit of the common crowd was more to him than
all the depths or heights of truth, order, or beauty that learning,
training, or the least bit of consecutive reasoning could reveal.
Earlier he had not lacked books or tutelage, but no one ever had been
able to teach him what they were for. This was Basile Hayle, the
overdressed young brother of the twins. Now that his seventeen years had
ripened in him the conviction that he was entitled, as the phrase is,
"to all the rights of a man and all the privileges of a boy," he seemed
yet to have acquired no sense of value for any fact or thought beyond
the pointblank range of the five senses. He could not have read ten
pages of a serious book and would have blushed to be found trying to do
it.
He was not greatly to blame. That way of life was much the fashion all
about him, and he was by every impulse fashionable. Moreover, as he
measured success by the crowd's measure, it was the way of life oftenest
successful, the way of his father. He did not see the difference between
the father's toiling up that way and his idling down it. So, at any
rate, agreed the indulgent Gilmores, reading him quite through in a few
glances, while all about the boat those who thought they knew best
pronounced him more like Gideon Hayle in his regard for "folks just as
folks" than were either the twins or the sister, from all three of whom
his impulses kept him amiably aloof.
Of the three brothers certainly he had soon become the most widely
acceptable among not only the young people of the passenger guards but
also the male commonalty of the boiler deck. In a state of society which
he, as "a type," reflected they saw themselves; saw their own spiritual
image; their unqualified straightforwardness, their transparent
simplicity of mind and heart, their fearlessness, their complacent
rusticity, their childish notions of the uses of wealth, their personal
modesty and communal vanity, their happy oblivion to world standards,
their extravagance of speech, their political bigotry, their magisterial
down-rightness, their inflammability, and their fine self-reliance. They
saw these traits, we say, reflected in him as in a flattering
hand-glass, perceived the blemishes rather plainer than the charms, and
liked them better.
So it was that our friend the senator had early discovered Basile and
later had found a capital use for him. In him he saw a most timely
opportunity, one not afforded by anybody besides. He showed the youth
marked attentions, affirming in him all the men's rights and boys'
privileges he had ever thought of, got him assigned to his sick
brother's place at table, presented him to the committee of seven,
called him Gideon by mistake, and at the right moment made him an
instrument, not to say tool, by diverting his idle course through the
crowd into a highly successful soliciting of signatures to the
committee's, or let us say his own, the senator's, petition.
Unlucky task! An exceptional feature of the _Votaress_ was that her
passenger guards ran aft in full width all round her under the stern
windows of the ladies' cabin. Beneath, the lower deck ended in a fantail
of unusual overhang, around whose edge curved the stout bars of the
"bull-ring," to fence it off from the billowing white surge that writhed
after the rudder blade and the trailing yawl, so close below. Among the
petition's subscribers were several pretty girls of an age at which
their only important business was beauty and levity and who gave small
heed to the document's purport, readily assuming that nothing _they_
were asked to sign needed to be taken seriously. There was much laughter
over the performance. They turned it into a "Signing of the
Declaration," patterned after the old steel engraving. One of them, as
the scroll lay open on the rail under her pen hand, unwittingly set foot
in a scrubbing bucket kept there with a line attached for bailing water
from the river, and was so unnerved by the fun of it that all at once
the scroll flirted back into scroll form and fell through the whirling
air that eddied behind the boat. Yet it had the luck to drop upon the
deck below, and there presently an immigrant stood mutely gazing up with
it in his lifted hand. Otto Marburg came and stood looking up beside
him.
Dropping the bucket's line through the balusters under the rail, Basile
stepped over the guards and proceeded, while the girls acted out their
girlish distresses, to let himself down. The foolish exploit was
sufficiently unsafe and painful to be its own reward, the rough line
cutting his hands and forcing him, as soon as he dared, to drop into the
arms of the two men. With them and others he passed from sight between
the great wheels but soon was with the pretty signers again, coming up
alone by way of the cook-house and pantry. His hands showed ugly red
scars as he brushed away a few flies that liked his perfumery and had
stubbornly followed him from below.
But the fun was over. It was not his galled palms but his pallid face
that struck the young company with a frank dismay. His whole bearing was
transformed and betrayed him smitten with emotions for which he found no
speech. Had it made him ill, they asked, going down by that dreadful
rope? No, he was not ill at all. But when they vacantly proposed to
resume the signing he exclaimed almost with vehemence that he had names
enough, and left them, to return the petition to the senator.
This was an incident of the forenoon. As he delivered the paper the
senator spoke a pleased word and then gazed on him in surprise. "Why,
what's the matter? Sick?"
"No, I'm not sick."
"But, look here, where--where's your own signature?"
"You can't have it."
"Oh, you want to sign, don't you?"
"No." A sudden anguish filled the boy's face. "Not for all the gold in
California. God A'mighty, sir, I've been down there and seen those
people!"
"Oh! my! dear! fellow! If we let mere sights and sounds--of things that
can't be helped--upset us--There's the dinner-bell--come, have a
cocktail with me--a Rofignac!... Ah! general--judge--wet your whistle
with us?"
The general and the judge, accepting, looked sharply at Basile.
"Why--what's the matter? Sick?"
But he went with them to the bar and to the board.
XXIII
A STATE OF AFFAIRS
Watson was in the pilot-house, though not at the wheel.
So early of a Sabbath afternoon, in the middle of his partner's watch,
he might well have been in his texas stateroom asleep, but to a
Mississippi River pilot Sunday afternoon, or any afternoon, or forenoon,
or midnight, or dusk or dawn, on watch or off, the one thing in this
world was the river. Else what sort of a pilot would he be, when the
whole lore of its thousands of miles of navigation was without chart,
light, or beacon, a thing kept only in pilots' memories, a lamp in a
temple?
Glancing down forward of the bell, he was reminded of a certain young
lady the sight of whom on the previous evening just after his brush with
Hayle's twins, standing there before Hugh Courteney with her arms
akimbo, had led him to say: "If that's to be the game I'm in it." He
wished she were there now, or up here again in the pilot-house asking
her countless questions about this endlessly interesting world's
highway. He would be answering that the mouth of Red River was now
twenty miles behind, the mouth of Buffalo Bayou ten and of Homochitto
River four; that right here they were in the great cut-off of a hundred
and fifty-odd years before. He would say they were passing up the west
shore because the current was over yonder on the east side, Palmetto
Point, and that behind there, inland, lay the great loop of still water
which had once been part of the river. He would explain that now the
slender Homochitto ran through that still water lengthwise, for miles,
until, within forty rods of the Mississippi, it recoiled again to launch
in at last farther down, opposite Black Hawk Point, still in sight
astern. And he would tell how, over here on this west side, Red River
was yet only four miles away and actually sent Grand Cut-off Bayou
across into the Mississippi, but likewise swerved away southward through
seven leagues more of wet forest before it finally surrendered to the
mightier stream. All this would he tell, without weariness, to one who
loved his great river.
Yet really he was in the pilot-house at this time not chiefly for the
river, nor the girl, nor the _Votaress_, though the _Votaress_ was new,
with kinks of character quite her own and important to be learned. He
was there because the stateroom given Hayle's twins in the texas was
next to his, and they, rarely in their life having restricted themselves
to tones of privacy and being now especially in a state of storm and
stress, had made sleep impossible even to a pilot off watch after a
midday Sunday dinner. Lounging in his berth, he had overheard things
which ought to be told to one Courteney or another early, though, of
course, casually.
Meantime he enjoyed not telling his partner, at whose back he quietly
chatted while the partner stood with hands and foot on the wheel and
with eyes well up the river, holding the jack-staff close to his "mark"
far ahead in the next bend.
"I couldn't stay," drawled Watson. "Noth'n' 'twixt the sick one an' me
but a half-inch bulkhead."
"Cholery can't scratch through a half-inch bulkhead," said the partner.
"Sounds kin. Funny what little bits o' ones kin. An' the sawt o' keen,
soft way he hollas an' cusses through his sot teeth an' whines an' yaps
into his piller--why, he's suffered enough by now to be dead five times
over."
"That sufferin', that ain't the peggin'-out stage."
"No, I know that, an' I don't misdoubt but what he's a-goin' to git
well."
"Hmm!--sorry fo' that. What's goin' to kyore him?"
"His simon-pyo' cussedness! He's so chuck full of it--looks like it's
a-p'isonin' the p'ison o' the cholery."
"Pity!" said the partner.... "Humph! _Now_ what's up?"
To see what was up, Watson rose and looked down. On the roof below,
evidently having come there for privacy, were the commodore, the
senator, and Hugh. Watson loitered from the pilot-house and disappeared.