Terabon's notebooks held tens of thousands of words describing the
Mississippi River and the people he had met. He had drifted down long,
lonely bends, and he had surprised a flock of wild geese under a little
bluff on an island sandbar just above Kaskaskia, in the big cut-off
there. Until this day the Mississippi had been growing more and more
into his consciousness; not people, not industries, not corn, wheat, or
cotton had become interesting and important, but the yellow flood
itself.
His thought had been, when he left St. Louis, to stop in towns and
gather those things which minds not of the newspaper profession lump
under the term of "histories," but now, after his hundreds of miles of
association with the river, his thought took but brief note of those
trifling and inconspicuous appearances known as "river towns." He had
passed by many places with hardly a glance, so entrancing had been the
prospect of endless miles of earth-bound flood!--bound but wearing away
its bonds.
Now, in one of the most picturesque of all the scenes he had witnessed,
in the historic double bend above New Madrid, he found himself with a
young and attractive woman. He realized that, in some way, the
Mississippi River "spirit"--as he always quoted it in his calm and
dispassionate remarks and dissertations and descriptions--had
encompassed him about, and, without giving him any choice, had tied him
down to what in all the societies he had ever known would have been
called a "compromising position."
That morning he had left the husband of this pretty girl lying in a
drunken stupor, and now in the late evening the fugitive wife was
taking it for granted that he would dine with her on her boat--and he
had himself entered upon a partnership with her for that meal which
could not by any possibility be called prosaic or commonplace. He had a
vivid recollection of having visited a girl back home--he thought the
phrase with difficulty--and he remembered the word "chaperon" as from a
foreign language, or at least from an obsolete and forgotten age.
His familiarity with newspaper work did not relieve him of a feeling of
uncertainty. In fact, it emphasized the questionableness of the
occasion. "I'll show you I'm a dandy cook," she had said, and while he
followed her on board the boat, with the two big black ducks to help
prepare, he wondered and remembered and, in spite of his life-long
avoidance of all appearance of evil, submitted to this irresistible
circumstance, wherever it might lead.
So he built the fire in her kitchen stove. She mixed up dressing and
seasoned the birds, made biscuit batter for hot-bread, brought out
stacks and stores of things to eat, or to eat with, and they set the
table, ground the coffee, and got the oven hot for the roasting and
baking.
One thing took the curse off their position: They had to have all the
windows and doors wide open so that they seemed fairly to be cooking on
an open sandbar at the edge of the river. Terabon took an inward
satisfaction in that fact. It is not possible to feel exceedingly wicked
or depraved when there is a mile-wide Mississippi on the one hand and a
mile-wide sandbar on the other side, and the sun is shining calmly upon
the bright and innocent waters.
As the ducks were young and tender, their cooking took but an hour, or a
little more, and the interim was occupied in the countless things that
must be done to prepare even a shanty-boat feast. He stirred some
cranberry sauce, and she had to baste the ducks, get the flour stirred
with water, and condensed cream for gravy, besides setting the table and
raising the biscuits, to have them ready for the ducks. She must needs
wonder if she'd forgotten the salt, and for ten minutes she was almost
in a panic at the thought, while he watched her in breathless
wonderment, and took covert glances up the Mississippi River, fearful
of, and yet almost wishing to see, that pursuing motorboat come into
view.
When at last the smoking viands were on the ample table and they sat
with their knees under it, and he began to carve the ducks and dish out
the unblessed meal, he glanced up stream through the cabin window on his
right. He caught a glimpse of a window pane flashing miles distant in
the light of the setting sun--the whiskey boat without doubt. He saw a
flock of ducks coming like a great serpent just above the river surface,
then a shadow lifted as out of the river, swept up the trees in the lost
section of Kentucky opposite, and from spattering gold the scene turned
to blue which rapidly became purple, darkening visibly.
Through the open doors and windows swept the chill of twilight, and
while she lighted the big lamp he did her bidding and closed the doors
and windows. Those shelves of books, classics and famous, time-tried
fiction, leered at him from their racks. The gold of titles, the blues
and reds and greens of covers fairly mocked him, and he saw himself
struggling with the menace of sin; he saw an honourable career and
carefully nurtured ambition fading from view, for did not all those
master minds warn the young against evil?
But they talked over the ducks of what a pity it was that all towns
could not engage themselves in thought the way Athens used to do, and
they wondered to each other when the hurrying passion of greed and its
varying phenomena would become reconciled to a modest competence and the
simplicity which they, for example, were enjoying down the Mississippi.
When he looked up from his meat sometimes he caught her eyes looking at
him. He recognized her superiority of experience and position; she made
him feel like a boy, but a boy of whom she was really quite fond, or at
least in whom she was interested. For that feeling he was grateful,
though there was something in her smile which led him to doubt his own
success in veiling or hiding the doubts or qualms which had, unbidden,
risen in his thoughts at the equivocal nature of their position.
Having dined on the best meal he had had since leaving home, they talked
a little while over the remains of the sumptuous repast. But their mood
grew silent, and they kept up the conversation with difficulty.
"I think I'd better put up my canvas top," he blurted out, and she
assented.
"And then you must come back and help me wash this awful pile of
dishes," she added.
"Oh, of course!" he exclaimed.
"I'll help with the canvas," she said, and he dared not look at her.
By the light of his lantern they put up the canvas to protect the boat
from dew. Then they looked around at the night; stars overhead, the
strange haze from the countless grains of sand which wavered over the
bar, and the river in the dark, running by.
They looked at the river together, and they felt its majesty, its power,
its resistlessness.
"It's overwhelming," he whispered. "When you can't see it you hear it,
or you feel it!"
"And it makes everything else seem so small, so unimportant, so
perfectly negligible," she added, consciously, and then with vivacity:
"I'll not make you wipe those dishes, after all. But you must take me
for a walk up this sandbar!"
"Gladly," he laughed, "but I'll help with the dishes as well!"
She put on a jacket, pinned on a cap, and together, in merry mood, they
romped up the sandbar. It was all sand; there was not a log of timber,
not a drift barrel, not a stick of wood anywhere as far as they could
see. But as they walked along every foot of the sandbar was different,
wind-rifts, covering long, water-shaped reefs; or rising knolls, like
hills, and long depressions which held shadows darker by far than the
gloom of the night. They walked along, sometimes yards apart, sometimes
side by side. They forgot Ruskin and Carlyle--they remembered Thoreau's
"Cape Cod" and talked of the musical sands which they could hear now
under their own feet. In the silence they heard river voices; murmurings
and tones and rhythms and harmonies; and Terabon, who had accumulated a
vast store of information from the shanty-boaters, told her some of the
simple superstitions with which the river people beguile themselves and
add to the interest and difficulties of their lives.
"An old river man can look at the river and tell when a headrise is
coming," he told her. "He knows by the looks of the water when the river
is due to fall again. When he dreams, he says he knows what is going to
happen, and where to find buried treasure, and if there is going to be
an earthquake or a bad storm."
"They get queer living alone!" she said, thoughtfully. "Lots of them
used to stop in at our slough on Kaw River. I was afraid of them!"
"You afraid of anything!" he exclaimed. "Of any one!"
"Oh, that was a long time ago--ages ago!" She laughed, and then gave
voice to that most tragic riverside thought. "But now--nothing at all
matters now!"
She said it with an intonation which was almost relief and laughing,
that Terabon, whose mind had grappled for years with one of Ruskin's
most touching phrases, understood how it could be that the heart of a
human being could become so used to sorrows that no misery could bring
tears.
He knew in that very moment, as by revelation, that he had caught from
her lips one of the bitterest phrases which the human mind is capable of
forming. He was glad of the favour which fate had bestowed upon him, and
he thrilled, while he regretted, that in that hour he could not forget
that he was a seeker of facts, a gatherer of information.
To match her mood was beyond his own power. By a simple statement of
fact she had given herself a place in his thought comparable to--he went
at making ideas again, despite himself--comparable to one of those
wonderful widows which are the delight, while they rend to tatters the
ambitions of delvers into the mysteries of Olympian lore. This bright,
pretty, vivacious young woman had suffered till she had arrived at a
Helen's recklessness--nothing mattered!
There was a pause.
"I think you are in a fair way to become unforgetable in connection with
the Mississippi River," he suggested, with even voice.
"What do you mean?" she demanded, quickly.
"Well, I'll tell you," with the semblance of perfect frankness. "I've
been wondering which one of the Grecian goddesses you would have been
if you had lived, say, in Homer's time."
"Which one of them I resemble?" she asked, amused.
"Exactly that," he declared.
"Oh, that's such a pretty compliment," she cried. "It fits so well into
the things I've been thinking. The river grows and grows on me, and I
feel as though I grew with it! You don't know--you could never
know--you're a man--masculine! For the first time in my life I'm
free--and--and I don't--I don't care a damn!"
"But the future!" he protested, feebly.
"That's it!" she retorted. "For a river goddess there is no future. It's
all in the present for her, because she is eternal."
They had walked clear up to the southernmost tip of the sandbar point.
They could hear someone, perhaps a chorus of voices, singing on the
whiskey boat at the Upper Landing. They could see the light of the
boat's windows. There they turned and started back down the sandbar,
reaching the two boats moored side by side in the deadwater.
"Shall I help with those dishes to-night?" he asked.
"No, we'll do them in the morning," she replied without emphasis and as
a matter of course, which left him unassisted in his obvious
predicament.
"Well," he drawled, after a time, "it's about midnight. I must say a
river goddess is--is beyond my most vivid dreams. I wonder----"
"What do you wonder?"
"If you'll let me kiss you good-night now?"
"Yes," she answered.
The stars twinkled as he put his arm around her and took the kiss which
her lips gave--smiling.
"I'll help with those dishes in the morning," he said, helping her up
the gang plank of her boat. "Good-night!"
"Good-night," she answered, and entered the cabin, the dim light of her
turned-down lamp flashing across the sandbar and revealing his face for
a moment. Then the door closed between them.
He went to his skiff, raised the cover, and crawled into his canvas
hammock which was swung from both sides of his boat. Before going to
sleep he looked under the canvas at the river, at the stars, at the dark
cabin-boat forty feet distant in the eddy.
At the same moment he saw a face against a window pane in the cabin.
"What does it mean?" he asked himself, but there was no answer. The
river, when asked, seldom answers. Just as he was about to go to sleep,
he started up, wide awake.
For the first time on the river, he had forgotten to post up his notes.
He felt that he had come that day, as never before, to the forks in the
road--when he must choose between the present and the future. He lighted
his lantern, sat up in his cot, and reached for his typewriter.
He wrote steadily, at full speed, for an hour. When he had those
wonderful and fleeting thoughts and observations nailed down and safe,
he again put out his lantern, and turned in once more.
Then he heard a light, gay laugh, clear and distinct-a river voice
beyond question--full of raillery, and yet beneath the mocking note was
something else which he could neither identify nor analyze, which he
hoped was not scorn or mere derision, which he wished might be
understanding and sympathy--till he thought of his making those notes.
Then he despised himself, which was really good for his soul. His
conscience, instead of rejoicing, rebuked him as a cad. He swore under
his breath.