IN THE AIR.
At the noon hour my friend was relieved, and together we went down to
dinner. Miss Hatch and Culpepper fell to whispering as soon as I sat
down, opposite them. I knew that I was under a spiteful discussion, but,
with the appearance of paying no heed to them, I remarked to the pilot,
who sat beside me:
"You have often noticed, I suppose, that human nature by turns partakes
of the nature of all other animals, particularly of the black cat and
the yellow dog?"
"I don't know that I get you, exactly, but go ahead," he replied.
This afforded Miss Hatch and Culpepper an opportunity to titter. I did
not look at them, but addressed myself to the pilot.
"I confess that my meaning might have been clearer, but behind it lies a
sufficient cause for its utterance."
He put down his knife and looked at me helplessly, shook his head as if
puzzled, and fell to eating with this not very comforting observation:
"Jerk me out of bed any time of night, along here, and I can tell you
where I am, and I am pretty good at foreseeing a change in the channel,
but once in a while I strike a thing that I can't figger out, and I
reckon you've just handed me one."
Miss Hatch was now so occupied with feeding her dog that she had no time
to titter at my discomfiture, but I caught sight of Culpepper's hateful
and invidious smile.
The meal was finished in silence, and I thought that the pilot had
forgotten my clouded remark, but when he had resumed his place at the
wheel, he cut his sharp old eye at me and said:
"But there are a good many things I can see, and one of them is, that
you and them other show folks don't get along together very well."
"It's their fault," I replied.
"Of course," he rejoined, giving me a mere glimpse of his old eye, and
this time it was not merely shrewd--it was rascally.
"I have done my best to merit their friendship," I said, somewhat
sharply. "But they spurn me, they insinuate that I am an elephant on the
manager's hands, when you yourself have been kind enough to tell me that
my part of the performance was--"
"Good, first-rate," he broke in. "But in the play you almost have a set
of love jimjams on account of that woman, and let her reform you, and
all that sort of thing. It beats me," he added, shaking his head. "I
don't see how a man can love and cavort with a woman one minute, and
hate her the next. I pass, when it comes to that."
"The stage is a strange world," I replied.
"Yes, seems so. Hard way to earn money, hugging someone you don't like.
Why, I know a woman I wouldn't hug for a thousand dollars. You appear to
be a man of fair average sense. Why don't you go into some other
business--why don't you go to work?"
"Work!" I cried, and I laughed so loud that a half naked boy on the
shore tossed up his hat and shouted a salute to my merriment.
With his face hard set, and with his eyes sweeping the river, he waited
for my attention, and then he said: "Yes, work. Of course it's all right
for idle and shiftless fellows to go around this way, but it strikes
me--of course I don't know--but it strikes me that if you were to get
down to it, you might make something of yourself. It would be all right
if you could make a great actor out of yourself, for then it would be
worth your while, but always to be an under dog in the fight--"
"You are not a flatterer," I broke in.
"Well, I don't flatter men very much. Flattery, like feathers and
ribbons, was intended for women; but even they are getting too much
sense to swallow it. Come to think about it, they don't look for it as
much as men do."
We had turned a bend, and the pilot, pointing, directed my eye toward a
town. "There's old Bolanyo," he said. "One of the best towns on the
river, one way and another. I live there when I'm at home. And that's
where Senator Talcom lives, and that's where he had his fight with Lige
Patton. I'm going to hop off there to see my folks. House so plain up
there is the new city hall--must have cost forty-five thousand. Can't
see Talcom's house; it's off in the far edge of the town. It's almost a
farm, and I reckon he's got the finest magnolia garden in this whole
section. Old Bowie, father of the Bowie knife, fought a duel right over
yonder. Got his man. Stevens is coming up to relieve me now in a minute.
Coming now, I believe. Just step outside," he added, as his assistant
appeared at the door, "and I'll show you the places of interest, and
then trot down in time to hop off."
We stood near the pilot house, and, continuing to talk, he pointed out,
with the finger of local pride, a number of buildings which he believed
would be of interest to me, but his words fell without meaning. A
lulling essence was exhaled by the town. A spirit of rest and
contentment lay upon her lazy wharf. I heard the languid song of the
indolent "white trash," and the happy-go-lucky haw-haw of the trifling
negro. Through the lattice of a thin cloud the sun shot a glance, and
the gilded plow on the courthouse dome stood at the end of a furrow of
fire.
"Well, got to leave you."
He seized my hand, and at that moment I thought that I was jerked off my
feet, high in the air, and then came a thunder clap so loud, so
deafening that my senses were killed, conscious only that my body was a
dead weight and that my mind had been shattered and blown away. It
seemed that I was propelled through a long and vague interval of time,
and then a plunge and a chill, and my senses fluttered with painful
life. The sharp knowledge of an awful calamity shot through me--the boat
had exploded her boilers and I had been blown into the river.