three standers in the aisle so privately, calmly saying together--with
the actor as chief speaker, Hugh grim, and the Californian mostly a
nodding listener? Was Hugh--whose big eyes and stone visage so drolly
fitted each other yet seemed so sadly unfitted to this big
emergency--was he insisting that it would be idle for him to go to
Basile without the twins, as was only too true? Or that John the Baptist
and his two disciples must first be disposed of? Or was it his word that
the most pressing need was for the actor, long trained to perceive just
what would capture an audience in such a stress, to step between
footlights and curtain, tell the people that honest facts had never been
more crazily twisted into falsehood and slander, and explain the true
situation in a brief, apt speech, dignified and amusing? Certainly
something had to be done and done this instant. But not that, ah, no!
Or if that, not done by him, the actor. She could never imagine such
a manoeuvre attempted on a boat of her father's, whose sole way of
mastery was by pure lordship and main force. Yet here, with these
Courteneys, who, he had always said, outmastered him by their clever
graciousness, and dealing here not with subordinates but with
passengers--a living nerve of the river's whole public--talk treatment
might be the cleverest, wisest kind to give, if only Hugh--oh, if only
Hugh!--could give it. But of course he could not, with that face, that
visage, so much _too_ lordly and forceful--and hard--and glum--for a
clever task.
Julian ceased. His high head went a shade higher; the Californian was
advancing straight upon him. With a pang Ramsey remembered that she had
failed to charge the gold hunter not to let the twins know that their
brother's summons included Hugh, lest that should keep them away. But
surely he would see that necessity; and in fact he did. Hugh stood
still, looking in the opposite, her, Ramsey's, direction, where the
actor was coming toward her. The old nurse had stolen to her side. The
player went by without a glance at her. It was so much like asking why
she stood there doing nothing that she granted the old woman's whispered
prayer and sat down. Behind her he spoke busily for a second to the cub
pilot and passed out by a side exit. The pilot's cub came by, had a word
or two with the exhorter, and stayed there as if on guard.
Now, for all these small things to happen in the one moment and to
happen in the midst of a waiting audience made its show of suspense more
vivid than ever; excitement was in all eyes; every chin was lifted. The
Californian seemed to tell Julian a startling thing or two. The general
rose, the senator helped Lucian to his feet. The four came close about
the news bearer and he told more. Ramsey could almost feel his mention
of the bishop and then of Basile. Lucian asked a question or two and the
five came down the aisle, one pair leading, the other following, and
Julian between, alone, overpeering all sitters, with a splendid air of
being commander and in the saddle.
XLV
APPLAUSE
Diffidence! Hugh had spoken of diffidence--in himself--in the twins.
Could Julian really be hiding such a thing behind such a mask? Ramsey
wondered.
Every eye was on him and again the floor thundered, shaming her,
flattering him. As he came on, the exhorter began to put out an arm, to
speak and to rise, but the cub pilot blandly intervened and Julian
ignored him. For there both brothers came face to face with the first
mate. He had entered where Gilmore went out, and now passed them with a
stare like their own, fire for fire, and at close quarters began to
accost the exhorter and his two adherents.
They rose, and with evident change of meaning thunder came again, though
not for them. The departing twins and their triple escort; the exhorter
and the four about him; Ramsey, Joy, and the returned Gilmore, who just
then touched her shoulder and whispered something to which she replied
with quick nods of consent--all these groups lifted their gaze, with the
whole company's, to the curtained stage.
Diffidence! oh, where _was_ diffidence? Hugh had stepped in behind the
footlights and was standing and looking out across them as foursquare
and unsmiling as a gravestone.
Their light was on his brow, whose frown smote her with foreboding. Half
folded he held a slip of paper as if about to give official notice of
some grave matter, and his aggressive eyes, that seemed to her to look a
greater distance away from a greater distance within than ever before,
were fixed on one man. Absolute silence fell. And thereupon, to the
open-mouthed amazement of the audience, with his stare yet on that one
face, and in a voice that seemed octaves below hers, he began to sing
straight at the exhorter:
"Do you belong to Gideon's ban'?"
A shout of laughter, a rain of clappings, a thunder of canes and feet.
Sitters bumped up and down. They were safe home again in nonsense and
were glad. Ramsey's laugh was like a dancer's bells though under cover
of the dusk she let the tears roll down. Old Joy moaned and shook her
head. John the Baptist had begun to retort but withered before a
ferocious muffled threat from the mate while following him into the
aisle. "Bucked and gagged," was the mate's odd phrase, at which a dozen
or so nearest him laughed again, a bit nervously. They looked back to
see if the twins had heard it, and were just in time to catch from
Julian and the general a last glare of scorn as the group of five left
the cabin. Then again came silence, except behind the footlights, where
the sphinx-like singer bore straight on through the refrain and came to
the new lines. Sing them out, sphinx; the more senseless the better.
"Nex' come de 'coon and de cockatroo,
Nex' come de 'coon and de cockatroo,
Nex' come de 'coon and de cockatroo,
De hawg and de whoopdedoodendoo.
Do you belong----?"
The inquiry was drowned in applause, which swelled as the mate and the
exhorter went out with the latter's two backers--more eagle-eyed and
stallion-eyed than ever--and with Watson's cub at the rear. A number
stretched up for a glimpse of Ramsey but she too--and the actor--and
Joy--were gone. There was another waiting hush, and the droll singer, so
droll because so granite solemn, resumed:
"Den turkle-dove an' blue-bird blue,
Den turkle-dove an' blue-bird blue,
Den turkle-dove an' blue-bird blue,
De merry-go-roun' and de hullabaloo.
Do you belong----?"
Applause! Was that the end? Not if the applauders could help it! The day
was coming when a boiler-deck and pilot-house tradition, heard by many
with hearty enjoyment, by many with silent disdain, would be this: that
aboard the old _Votaress_ on her first up trip--late spring of
'52--cholera on every deck--mutiny hotly smouldering--the unreason of
fear and of wrath were beaten in fair fight by the unreason of mirth,
and men's, women's, children's lives--no telling how many--were saved,
through the cleverness of some play-actors and first the youngest of all
the Hayles and then the youngest of all the Courteneys singing a
nonsense song! Sing it! sing on!
He sang on:
"Den de grizzly-b'ah and den de mole,
De grizzly-b'ah and den de mole,
De grizzly-b'ah and den de mole,
De terrapintime and de wrigglemarole.
Do you belong----?"
The plaudits were at their height and Hugh still on the interrogative
line when there came from behind the curtain a voice skilfully thrown to
reach only him:
"Give them one verse more and we'll be ready!"
He gave it:
"Las' de cattlemaran and de curlicue,
De cattlemaran and de curlicue,
De cattlemaran and de curlicue,
De daddy-long-legs and de buggaboo.
Do you belong----?"
He stepped quickly from the "stage." The curtains drew apart. The scene
revealed was a drawing-room. In it stood alone, as if playfully
listening for something, the housemaid; not "Harriet" but Ramsey.
(Laughter and applause.)
XLVI
AFTER THE PLAY
Neither Hugh nor Ramsey slept a moment that night. And no more did the
Gilmores or "Harriet" or John the Baptist or even the senator or the
Californian. The play, second act, was cut without mercy and rushed to a
close to let its hero and heroine off at Napoleon, which Ned called a
"future city" but which, some years later, became a former city, by
melting into thin air, or thick water, and leaving not so much behind as
a candle-end or a broken bottle.
It was not far above there that these unsleeping passengers began to
remark a fresh rise in the river's flood, which her "family" and crew
had noticed much earlier by a difference in the nature and quantity of
its driftwood. Near the mouth of White River, about an hour's run above
Napoleon, a great floating tree stump, with all its roots, was caught on
the buckets of the "labboard" wheel--"like a cur on a cow's horn," said
Gilmore--and carried clear over it with a sudden hubbub in the
paddle-box, tenfold what ten curs could have made, bringing to his feet
every passenger not abed, and scaring awake every sleeping one. Neither
Ramsey nor Hugh ever forgot it, for it evoked the last stir in the
supine form of Basile, and a faint spasm in his cold grasp on Hugh's
fingers. Under his freer hand, on his all but motionless breast, lay his
mother's crucifix. Shortly before, while waiting for Hugh's tardy
coming, he had held a hand of his sister, whose other held her mother's.
On the edge of the berth, at his feet, sat Lucian, very pale, with
Julian standing by him. Both betrayed deep feeling yet kept a brave look
that was good to see even with eyes as prejudiced as Hugh's. Only Basile
himself was without tears.
How fashions change! There are styles even in death-bed scenes. This one
was of the old fashion, bearing a strong tinge of fatalism; no hopeful
make-believe to the dying that death was other than death; no covert,
diligent, desperate economies of the vital spark; but a frank, helpless
reception of the dread angel as a royal guest, and a pious, inert
consent to let the dying die. Before either Hugh or Ramsey could come
from the cabin the twins had reached the bedside and had been received
with a final lighting up of the boy's spent powers, which his mother
made no effort to restrain. In a feeble, altered voice, without heat,
scorn, or petulance, with a mind stripped of all its puerilities and
full of fraternal care and faithfulness, and with a magisterial dignity
far beyond his years, he slowly poured out a measured stream of
arraignment and appeal which their hardened hearts were still too young
to withstand unmoved.
His conversion, he told them, had come to him with a great light, "on
the road to Damascus," and by that light he saw, as he implored them to
see, the hideous deformity of the life he and they and the young fellows
of their usual companionship had been living. Even Ramsey knew, he
continued as she and their old nurse silently reappeared, that by the
plainest laws of the land, they were not too good for the penitentiary.
An overweening pride in their lawlessness did not justify or excuse it;
the devils had that, in hell. They, the twins, were not Christian
gentlemen. They were _not gentlemen at all_. They'd shoot a man down in
his tracks for saying so, or for calling them liars, yet they'd turn the
truth wrong side out every day in the year. These last two days they'd
done it right along. At this moment they had a fixed design to kill Hugh
Courteney on the first good chance and didn't care a continental whether
they did it in face-to-face murder or from behind a bush. Lying at
death's door, he said, and in jealousy for the same Hayle name they
professed to be so jealous for, he demanded their oath to abandon that
design; to stop it, drop it, "right here and now," and never to seek the
life of any Courteney but in clear defence of some other life. His own
seemed almost to fade out at that point, yet presently:
"Hold up your right hands," he gasped, trying to raise his. The mother
lifted it for him while giving the twins a tearful flash of command.
Unconsciously Ramsey put up hers as Lucian's left suddenly caught
Julian's right and he held up both it and his own.
But neither the boy nor Ramsey nor the old nurse felt assured, and all
three were glad when the mother asked:
"You swear?"
Julian stood mute but, "With that provision," said Lucian, "we swear."
"So help you God?" insisted the mother, and while she spoke and the
twins bowed, the narrow door let some one in.
"Is that Hugh Courteney?" asked the boy. "You're just in time, Hugh. The
feud's off."
"Oh, there's no feud, Basile," tenderly murmured Hugh.
"No, it's off, thank God. I got it off. The twins have just sworn it
off. Shake hands, boys. Come, you first, Jule."
But Lucian led, with a certain alacrity, Julian following with less.
"Now take my hand, Hugh." The voice was failing but once more it
rallied. "Give it to him, sis'.... Thank you.... Keep it, Hugh
Courteney. I love a brave man's hand. We heard you singing, Hugh. My!
but you've got grit. I wish you belonged to Gideon's band yourself.
You're braver than most men, though most men'll always think they're
braver than you."
Hugh could only dry the damp from the cold brow. He grew fiercely
ashamed not so much of his tears, which those around him were too
tearful to observe, as of the boy's praises, before which he could only
stand dumb.
"He's brave, sis'," Basile went on, "and he's clean, and he's square,
mother, boys. You were on the _Quakeress_ when she burned, wa'n't you?
Ah, me!--wish I'd known you then. I'd be a different man now. I don't
believe I'd be dying. My heavenly Father wouldn't 'a' had to call me in
out of the storm."
[Illustration: "My heavenly Father wouldn't 'a' had to call me in out of
the storm"]
His mother sank to her knees against the berth's side, covered her face,
and shook with grief. The daughter sank too, weepingly caressing her,
yet was still able so to divide her thought as yearningly to wish Hugh,
for his own sake, well away, as she saw his hand softly endeavor to draw
free from Basile's. But it was on that instant that the great tree root
came thundering up through the wheel-house and the dying clasp
tightened. The shock of surprise revived him. "Hugh--do something for
me?... Thank you. Bishop's gone, you know. Read my burial service. I
don't want the--play-actor--though he's fine; nor the priest, though
he's fine, too. Mom-a'd be a saint in any--persuasion, and pop and us
boys are Methodists, if anything, and I--I didn't get religion in Latin
and I don't want to be buried in it." He waited. Hugh was silent.
The Creole mother, still kneeling, drew closer. "Yass," she said, "he
shall read that."
But plainly there was one thing more though the tired eyelids sank. "Let
down your ear," murmured the lips.
Hugh knelt, bent, waited. The distressed twins watched them. The hold on
his hand relaxed. He lifted and looked.
"What do he say?" tearfully asked old Joy, pressing in.
"Nothing," said Hugh; and then to the twins: "He's gone."
* * * * *
Out in the benign starlight and caressing breeze Hugh hastened to his
father's door.
XLVII
INSOMNIA
Down in the cabin, in one of its best staterooms, where all were choice,
the senator wooed slumber.
In vain. Sounds were no obstacle. They abounded but they were normal.
Except--"Peck-peck-peck" and so on, which the steady pulse of normal
sounds practically obliterated. The peck-pecking was not for him.
An unwelcome odor may keep one awake, but the senator's berth was
fragrant of fresh mattresses and new linen, the wash-stand of jasmine
soap, and the room at large of its immaculate zinc-white walls and doors
and their gilt trimmings. Nor could the cause be his supper of beefsteak
and onions, black coffee, hot rolls, and bananas, for every one about
him had had those, and every one about him was sound asleep. It could
not be for lack of the bath; he had already slept well without it too
many nights hand-running. Nor could it be a want of special
nightclothes; he had won his election over a nightshirt aristocrat, as
being not too pampered to sleep, like the sons of toil, in the shirt he
had worn all day and would wear again to-morrow. Nor yet was it nicotine
or alcohol, the putting of which into him was like feeding cottonwood to
Hayle's old _Huntress_. Such, at least, was his private conviction. Oh,
he knew the cause! He believed he could drop into sleep as this boat's
sounding-lead could drop to the river's bottom, if for one minute he
could get his mind off that singularly old, contemptibly young
poker-face.
Recalling that face and the grandfather's as he had confronted them
together earlier in the journey, they were a double reminder of the
Franklinian maxim--he kept a store of such things for stump use--that an
old young man makes a young old man. But maxims didn't bring sleep; he
turned the pillow and damned the maxim and the men, with Benjamin
Franklin to boot.
It tossed him from his right side to his left, to think of his own part
in this two days' episode, and of the flocks of passengers stepping
ashore at various landings who, as sure as--hmm!--would at every step
drop that story into the public ear as corn is dropped into the furrow.
It tossed him back again, to think how his adversaries in the political
game, where cunning was always trumps, would light down on that story
like crows behind the plough. He mixed his metaphors by habit; the
people loved them mixed. Another maxim, his own invention, was, Take
care of your character and your reputation will take care of itself. The
---- it will! You've got to take _at least_ as much care of reputation.
But here both were concerned. He could not, for the sake either of his
character _or_ his reputation, let himself be made a fool of by any one,
however small, anywhere. He had got to recover a personal importance
solemnly pilfered from him by a half-grown Shanghai still in his
pin-feathers. Against Hayle's girl he was excusably helpless, but him he
had got to get the upper hand of and get it quick. Memphis in the
morning! More passengers to be dropped there and the whole town's
attention to be attracted by the burial of the bishop. Good Lord! That
"verbatim report for the newspapers"! And of all papers the Memphis
papers! _Avalanche_--_Appeal_--it was all one, he happening to be at the
moment equally at odds with both. It, the "report," would not take a
defensive attitude. Poker-face was too sharp for that. It would take the
offensive from the start and it would take the start. Gentlemen of the
jury, in a war of words there's just one word better than the last, and
that's the first! And moreover! the brief "report's" main theme would
not be he, the senator, nor his vanished committee of seven. No, sir-ee,
it would be the cholera, and he would be dished up in a purely casual
way; as the French say "on, pass on."
He rubbed his head and sat up. There was a chance that he might find
Hugh awake and on duty. If so his cast-iron lordship might yet be
browbeaten, or wheedled, into inaction. Or if sleeping he might yet be
circumvented. Was he worth circumventing? How absurdly troubles magnify
on a waking pillow. Despise your enemy and sleep! Well--hardly. Let
_him_ do that, especially when _you can't_.
He threw off the light cover, rose, and dressed. He began to see a way
to win. He would countermine. He would raise a counter-issue--"Harriet."
Loitering by the twins' door he listened and rightly judged they were
asleep, Lucian being so feeble and Julian so full. The office was open
but empty. Its clock read two. The card-tables were vacant. The bar was
closed. Out on the dim boiler deck he found only the two who had fleeced
Basile. They sat at the very front, elbow to elbow, with their feet up
on the rail. Their quiet talk ceased as he came near and stood looking
out over the gliding bow and the waters beyond, which were out of their
banks and stretched everywhere off into the night, a veritable deluge.
"A good forty miles wide, no doubt," he remarked to the pair, and they
assured him he was right.
"What piece of river is this?" he inquired, and was told that they were
in the long, winding, desolate sixty-mile stretch between White River
and Horseshoe Bend; that they had just put Islands Sixty-two and
Sixty-three astern and would be more than two hours yet in reaching
Helena.
"Arkansas your State?" he asked. "Helena your town?"
"No," they said, they were of the "hoop-pole State," meaning Indiana. He
knew better but changed the subject. "The Ohio," he remarked, "must be
up on her hind legs."
"Yes, everything was up: the Saint Francis, the Tennessee, Cumberland,
Illinois, Wabash, Kentucky, Miami, Scioto--" The pair did not talk like
men narrowly of the hoop-pole commonwealth. Modestly speaking on, they
seemed to know the whole great valley quite by heart.
So the senator, to show how quite by heart he knew this whole little
world, said affably: "The pan-fish ain't biting so very lively this
trip."
The reply was as flawless for candor as though they had the same hope to
use him which he had to use them. Said one:
"No, we ain't paying expenses."
And his mate: "We've caught a few little flappers."
"Captain's son make it hard to do business?"
"Oh, he--we've all got our prejudices, you know."
"Yes, you ought to have some against him by now."
"Maybe so. You've got yourn, senator, we've noticed."
"I? No! I admire him. The way he runs this cabin----"
"Makes her keep up with the boat," they admitted.
"I never saw his like," laughed the statesman.
"Wouldn't want to, would you?"
"N-no, he makes big mistakes. But--he's got a future!"
"So mind his heels," said one of the pair. They were enjoying their
politician. He saw that by their gravity. In their world men looked
gravest when amused, and saved their smiles for emergencies. While he
offered, and they accepted, cigars he spoke absently:
"The young gentleman's making a mistake right now that he ought to be
saved from."
"Another?" they dryly asked as they used his cigar for a light. So far
had he fallen in the general esteem.
He chose not to hear. "I wish," he insisted, "we could save him from
it."
"Why, yes!--wish you could. But 'we' ain't us. We sporting men, we're
mighty bashful, you know."
"Naturally," admitted the senator.
"Yes, glass, with care. But there's another mistake maker we wish you
wished you could save. We ev'm might help."
"Aha!" thought the senator. He was right, after all. He had felt
confident that these men, treated by Hugh as they had been, would
privately "have it in for him"; that they would be glad of any safe
chance to "get away with him"--not so utterly as to imperil their necks,
yet not too lightly for their spiritual comfort the rest of their
days--and that they saw their chance just where he saw his.
"Ye-es?" He mused. They let him muse. The exhorter, he reflected, having
picked up the trail and opened the cry--trail which the headlong twins
had so witlessly overrun--these older dogs were on it hot; trail of the
Gilmores and "Harriet." Somewhere on that trail the captain's son would
show up, and when the game should be treed they would be able, in the
general mix-up, to "go and see Hugh" and "cook his goose."
The musing ceased. "You mean the actor?"
The pair warmed up. "Yes, sir-ee, him. _That_ fellow's making a mistake
we might help you to handle. God! sir, he's a nigger-stealer. His wife
has got a stolen nigger wench with her now. Had her these ten years.
Save _him_. Save _them_."
"Our friend John the Baptist suggests that," began the senator.
"Adzac'ly!" was the facetious affirmation. "Smelt 'em out at the show.
That's how come the mate has locked him up."
The senator stiffened. "Oh, you must be mistaken!"
"Want to bet? Pull out. Go you a thousand they've jugged him and them
two Arkansas killers. Yes, sir, to stay jugged till they leave us, at
Helena."
"Who!--have done that?"
"Same as you're thinking; they; them; him; that believes he's bossing
the boat--which maybe he is."
"Where is he?"
"Up on the roof, with a select few, both sexes."
"Gentlemen, he must let them go at once!"
"Senator, not with money, but just on your word, you sort o' bail 'em
out. If they cut up, nobody'll blame you."
"I'll do it! We don't want an owner of the finest boat on Southern
waters to have any part in _that sort_ of mistake, whatever his youth."
"Youth!" (Profanity.) "That boy's forty year' old. Oh, he's all right;
if he thinks he'd ought to protect every galoot on his boat, why, maybe
he'd ought. What you know is that that white nigger's _got_ to be took
away from them two barnstormers instanter and restored back to her own
Hayle folks. That's a mistake you ain't never got to ask nobody's leaves
to save nobody from."
"You don't mean to-night?" Capital disguise for eagerness--the cigar.
The senator puffed. The pair puffed.
"We mean now; when the right men can be woke up and the others--and the
ladies--sleep on. Now, straightaway, while the shouter's still
aboard--and the two shooters. If we wa'n't sporting men we'd like to sit
into that game ourselves. Maybe we can if it's kept--dignified."
"Even if there's resistance?"
"Who'll resist? The boat's people? Only thing they dassen't resist.
Couldn't never run another trip on this river. Resist! Couldn't ever
resist, any time; but now? Look at their fix. Sweet time to set
everybody a-kicking like steers. Bishop dead, chief Dutch woman ditto,
that nice young Hayle boy that they took away from us when he wanted to
stay like a man, ditto----"
"Oh, not dead? My God! I hadn't heard that."