Carline had discovered his wife in the excitement at Palura's, and with
the cunning of a drunken man had shadowed her. He followed her down to
Mousa Bayou, and saw her go on board her cabin-boat. He watched, with
more cunning, to see for whom she was waiting. He had in his pocket a
heavy automatic pistol with which to do murder.
He had seen killing done, and the thing was fascinating; some
consciousness that the policeman had done the right thing seemed now to
justify his own intention of killing a man, or somebody.
Disappointment lingered in his mind when the lights went out on board
Nelia's boat, and for a long time he meditated as to what he should do.
He saw skiffs, motorboats, shanty-boats pulling hastily down the slough
into the Mississippi. It was the Exodus of Sin. Mendova's rectitude had
asserted its strength and power, and now the exits of the city were
flickering with the shadows of departing hordes of the night and of the
dark, all of whom had two fears: one of daylight, the other of sudden
death.
Their departure before his eyes, with darkened boats, gave Carline
an idea at last. He wanted to get away off somewhere, where he could
be alone, without any interruption. Bitter anger surged in his
breast because his wife had shamed him, left him, led him this
any-thing-but-merry chase down the Mississippi. A proud Carline had
no call to be treated thataway by any woman, especially by the
daughter of an old ne'er-do-well whom he had condescended to marry.
He had always been a hunter and outdoor man, and it was no particular
trick for him to cast off the lines of Nelia's boat and push it out
into the sluggish current, and it was as easy for him to take his own
boat and drop down into the river. He brought the two boats quietly
together and lashed them fast with rope fenders to prevent rubbing and
bumping--did it with surprising skill.
The Mississippi carried them down the reach into the crossing, and
around a bend out of sight of even the glow of the Mendova lights. Here
was one of those lonesome stretches of the winding Mississippi, with
wooded bank, sandbar, sky-high and river-deep loneliness.
Carline, with alcoholic persistency, held to his scheme. He drank the
liquor which he had salvaged in the riotous night. He thought he knew
how to bring people to time, especially women. He had seen a big
policeman set the pace, and the sound of the club breaking skull bones
was still a shock in his brain, oft repeated.
The sudden dawn caught him by surprise, and he stared rather nonplussed
by the sunrise, but when he looked around and saw that he was in
mid-stream and miles from anywhere and from any one, he knew that there
was no better place in the world for taming one's wife, and extorting
from her the apologies which seemed to Carline appropriate, all things
considered, for the occasion.
The time had arrived for action. He rose with dignity and buttoned up
his waistcoat; he pulled down his coat and gave his cravat a hitch; he
rubbed a tentative hand on the lump where the pirates had bumped him; he
scrambled over the side onto the cabin-boat deck, and entered upon the
scene of his conquest.
He found himself confronted by Nelia in a white-faced, low-voiced fury
instead of in the mood he had expected. She wasn't sorry; she wasn't
apologetic; she wasn't even amiable or conciliatory.
"Gus Carline! Drunk, as usual. What do you mean by this?"
"S'all right!" he assured her, flapping his hands. "Y're m'wife; I'm
your husban'! S'all right!"
She drew her pistol and fired a bullet past him.
"Go!" she cried.
Before he knew what had happened he had backed out upon the bow deck,
and she bundled him up onto his own craft. She cast off the bow line and
ran to the stern to cast off the line there. As she did so, she
discovered Terabon's skiff around at the far side where Carline could
not see it.
Her husband was still shaking his fist in her direction, but the two
boats were well apart as she rowed away with her sweeps. He stood there,
undecided. He had not expected the sudden and effective resistance.
Before he knew it, she was lost in a whole fleet of little houseboats
which were, to his eyes, both in the sky, underwater, and scattered all
over the tip-tilting surfaces.
The current, under the impulse of her rowing, carried Nelia into an eddy
and she saw the cruiser rocking down a crossing into the mirage of the
distance. She sat on the bow deck while her boat made a long swing in
the eddy. Things did not happen down the river as she planned or
expected. She regarded the previous night's entertainment with less
indifference now; something about the calm of that broad river affected
her. She realized that watching the killing of Palura had given her a
shock so deep that now she was trembling with the weakness of horror.
She had seen Gus Carline stumble into her cabin, and with angry defiance
she had acted with the intention of doing to him what she had done to
Prebol--but she had missed deliberately when she shot. When she recalled
the matter, she saw that for weeks she had been living in a false frame
of mind; that she was desperate, and not contented; that she was
afraid--and that she hated fear.
Her pistol was sign of her bravado, and her shots were the indication of
her desperation. The memory of the wan face of Prebol brought down by
her bullet was now an accusation, not a pride.
Old Mississip' had received her gently in her most furious mood, but now
that immense, active calm of vast power was working on the untamed soul
which she owned. The river swept along, and its majesty no longer gave
her the feeling that nothing mattered. Far from it! Though she rebelled
against the idea, her mind knew that she was in rebellion, that she was
going against the current. And the river's mood was dangerous, now, to
the wanton feelings to which she had desperately yielded but
unsuccessfully.
The old, familiar, sharp division between right and wrong was presented
to her gaze as if the river itself were calling her attention to it. She
could not escape the necessity of a choice, with evil so persuasive and
delightful and virtue so depressing and necessary.
She investigated Terabon's outfit with curiosity and questioning. His
typewriter, his maps, his few books, his stack of notes neatly compiled
in loose-leaf files, were the materials which caught and held her fancy.
She took them on board her shanty-boat and read the record which he had
made, from day to day, from his inspection of Commission records at St.
Louis to the purchase of his boat in shanty-boat town, and his departure
down the river.
His words were intimate and revealing:
Oct. 5; In mid-stream among a lot of islands; rafts of ducks; a
dull, blue day, still those great limestone hills, with hollows
through which the wind comes when opposite--coolies?----; in the far
distance a rowboat. On the Missouri side, the hills; on the other
the flats, with landing sheds. Ducks in great flocks--look like sea
serpents when flying close to the water; like islands on it--wary
birds.
That was above the part of the river which she knew; she turned to
Kaskaskia, and read facts familiar to her:
I met Crele, an old hunter-trapper, in a slough below St. Genevieve.
He was talkative, and said he had the prettiest girl on a hundred
miles of river. She had married a man of the name of Carline, real
rich and a big bug. "But my gal's got the looks, yes, indeed!" If I
find her, I must be sure and tell her to write to her folks--river
romance!
Nelia's face warmed as she read those phrases as well it might. She
wondered what other things he had written in his book of notes, and her
eye caught a page:
House boatmen are a bad lot. Once a young man came to work for a
farmer back on the hills. He'd been there a month, when one night he
disappeared; a set of double harness went with him. Another man hung
around a week, and raided a grocery store, filling washtubs with
groceries, cloth, and shoes--went away in a skiff.
She turned to where he travelled down the Mississippi with her husband
and read the description of Gus Carline's whiskey skiff man, his
purchase of a gallon of whiskey; the result, which her imagination
needed but few words to visualize; then Terabon's drifting away down
stream, leaving the sot to his own insensibilities.
Breathlessly she read his snatching sentences from bend to shoal, from
reach to reach, until he described her red-hull, white cabin-boat,
described the "young river woman" who occupied it; and then, page after
page of memoranda, telling almost her own words, and his own words, as
he had remembered them. What he wrote here had not been intended for her
eyes.
She's dropping down this river all alone; pirates nor scoundrels nor
river storms nor jeopardies seem to disturb her in the least. She
even welcomes me, as an interesting sort of intellectual specimen,
who can talk about books and birds and a multitude of things. She
may well rest assured that none of us river rats have any designs,
whatever, on a lady who shoots quick, shoots straight, and dropped
Prebol at thirty yards off-hand with an automatic!
She read the paragraph with interest and then with care; she did not
know whether to be pleased or not by that brutally frank statement that
he was afraid of her--suppose he hadn't been afraid? Then, of what was
he really afraid--not of her pistol! She read on through the pages of
notes. The description of the walk with her up the sandbar and back,
there at Island No. 10, thrilled her, for it told the apparently
trifling details--the different kinds of sands, the sounds, the night
gloom, the quick sense of the river presence, the glow of distant New
Madrid. He had lived it, and he wrote it in terms that she realized were
the words she might have used to describe her own observations and
sensations.
She searched through his notes in vain for any suggestion of the
emotions which she had felt. She shrugged her shoulders, because he had
not written anything to indicate that he had discovered her allurement.
He had written in bald words the fact of her sending him on the errand
of rescue, to save her husband--and she was obliged to digest in her
mind the bare but significant phrase:
And, because she has sent me, I am glad to go!
His notes made her understand him better, but they did not reveal all
his own feelings. He wrote her down as an object of curiosity, as he
spoke of the sour face and similitude of good humour in the whiskey
boater's expression. In the same painstaking way he described her own
friendliness for a passing skiff boater. The impersonality of his
remarks about himself surprised while it perplexed her.
The mass of material which he had gathered for making articles and
stories amazed her. The stack of pages, closely typewritten, was more
than two inches thick. A few pages disclosed consecutive paragraphs with
subjects, predicates, and complete sense, but other pages showed only
disjointed phrases, words, and flashes of ideas.
The changing notes, the questioning, the observations, the minute
recording were fascinating to her. It revealed a phase of writers' lives
of which she had known nothing--the gathering of myriads of details, in
order to free the mind for accurate rendering of pictures and
conditions. She wished she could see some of the finished product of
Terabon's use of these notes, and the wish revealed a chasm, an abyss
that confronted her. She felt deserted, as though she had need of
Terabon to give her a view of his own life, that she might be diverted
into something not sordid, and decidedly not according to Augustus
Carline's ideals!
After a time, seeing that Carline's boat had disappeared down river, she
threw over her anchor, and rested in the eddy. It was on the west side,
with a chute entrance through a sandbar and willow-grown island points
opposite. She brought out her map book to see if she could learn where
she was anchored, but the printed map, with the bright red lines of
recent surveys, helped her not at all. She turned from sheet to sheet
down to Memphis, without finding what she wanted to know.
She saw some shanty-boats down the river; she saw some up the river; but
there was none near her till just before dark a motor skiff came down in
the day's gray gloom, and passed within a few yards of her. When she
looked at the two men in the boats she learned to know what fear
is--river terror--horror of mankind in its last extremities of depravity
and heartlessness.
She saw men stooped and slinking, whose glance was sidelong and whose
expression was venomous, casting covert looks toward her as they passed
by into the gray mist of falling night. They entered a narrow waterway
among the sandbars, and left behind the feeling that along that waterway
was the abiding place of lost souls. She wanted to take up the anchor
and flee out onto the river, but when she looked into the darkening
breadths, she felt the menace of the miles, of the mists, of the wooded
shores. Foreboding was in her tired soul.
She examined her pistol, to make sure that it was ready to use; she
locked the stern door, and drew the curtains; she went to the bow and
looked carefully at the anchor-line fastenings. With no light on board
to blind her gaze, she scrutinized all the surroundings, to make sure of
her locality. In that blank gloom she was dubious but brave. Not a thing
visible, not a sound audible, nothing but her remote and little
understood sensation of premonitory dread explained her perturbation.
She entered the cabin, locked the door, set the window catches and
sticks, lighted the lamp, and sat down to--think. Her bookshelves were
empty, and she was glad that she had emptied them in a good cause. It
occurred to her that she ought to make up another list for her own
service, and with pencil and paper she began that most fascinating
work, the compilation of one's own library. As she made her selections,
she forgot the menace which she had observed.
In the stillness she thought her own ears were ringing and paid no
attention to the humming that increased in volume moment by moment. It
was a flash of lightning without thunder that stirred her senses. She
looked up from her absorption.
She heard a distant rumble, a near-by stirring. The wavelets along the
side of the boat were noisy; they rattled like paper. Something fell
clattering on the roof of the cabin, and a tearing, ripping, crashing
struck the boat and fairly tossed it skipping along the surface of the
water. The lamp blew out as a window pane broke, and the woman was
thrown to the floor in a confusion of chairs, table, and other loose
objects. Happily, the stove was screwed fast to the floor. The anchor
line broke with a loud twang, and the black confusion was lighted with
flares and flashes of gray-blue glaring.
The river had made Nelia Crele believe that she was in jeopardy from
man; but it was a little hurricane, or, as the river people call them,
cyclones, that menaced. Dire as was the confusion and imminent as was
the peril, Nelia felt a sense of relief from what would have been harder
to bear--an attack by men. She had searched the map for information, but
it was the river which inspired her to understand that the hurricane was
her deliverance rather than her assailant.
She did not know whether she would live or die during those seconds when
the gale crashed like maul blows and wind and rain poured and whistled
in at the broken window pane. She laughed at her predicament, tumbling
in dishevelment around the bouncing cabin floor, and when the suck and
send of the storm crater passed by, leaving a driving wind, she stepped
out on the bows, and caught up her sweeps to ride the waves and face the
gale that set steadily in from the north.
It was gray, impenetrable black--that night. She could see nothing,
neither the waves nor the sky nor the river banks; but singing aloud,
she steadied the boat, bow to the wind, holding it to the gale by
dipping the sweeps deep and strong.
Beaten steadily back, unable to know how far or in what direction, she
found her soul, serenely above the mere physical danger, loving that
vast torrent more than ever.
The Mississippi trains its own to be brave.