In the letter to Pamela he is clearly homesick.
“I only want to return to avoid night work, which is injuring my eyes,”
is the excuse, but in the next sentence he complains of the scarcity of
letters from home and those “not written as they should be.” “One only
has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an
absent friend,” he says, and in conclusion, “I don’t like our present
prospect for cold weather at all.”
He had been gone half a year, and the first attack of home-longing, for
a boy of his age, was due. The novelty of things had worn off; it was
coming on winter; changes had taken place among his home people and
friends; the life he had known best and longest was going on and he had
no part in it. Leaning over his case, he sometimes hummed:
“An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain.”
He weathered the attack and stuck it out for more than half a year
longer. In January, when the days were dark and he grew depressed, he
made a trip to Washington to see the sights of the capital. His stay
was comparatively brief, and he did not work there. He returned to
Philadelphia, working for a time on the Ledger and North American.
Finally he went back to New York. There are no letters of this period.
His second experience in New York appears not to have been recorded,
and in later years was only vaguely remembered. It was late in the
summer of 1854 when he finally set out on his return to the West. His
‘Wanderjahr’ had lasted nearly fifteen months.
He went directly to St. Louis, sitting up three days and nights in a
smoking-car to make the journey. He was worn out when he arrived, but
stopped there only a few hours to see Pamela. It was his mother he was
anxious for. He took the Keokuk Packet that night, and, flinging
himself on his berth, slept the clock three times around, scarcely
rousing or turning over, only waking at last at Muscatine. For a long
time that missing day confused his calculations.
When he reached Orion’s house the family sat at breakfast. He came in
carrying a gun. They had not been expecting him, and there was a
general outcry, and a rush in his direction. He warded them off,
holding the butt of the gun in front of him.
“You wouldn’t let me buy a gun,” he said, “so I bought one myself, and
I am going to use it, now, in self-defense.”
“You, Sam! You, Sam!” cried Jane Clemens. “Behave yourself,” for she
was wary of a gun.
Then he had had his joke and gave himself into his mother’s arms.
XX
KEOKUK DAYS
Orion wished his brother to remain with him in the Muscatine office,
but the young man declared he must go to St. Louis and earn some money
before he would be able to afford that luxury: He returned to his place
on the St. Louis Evening News, where he remained until late winter or
early spring of the following year.
He lived at this time with a Pavey family, probably one of the Hannibal
Paveys, rooming with a youth named Frank E. Burrough, a journeyman
chair-maker with a taste for Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Disraeli.
Burrough had really a fine literary appreciation for his years, and the
boys were comrades and close friends. Twenty-two years later Mark Twain
exchanged with Burrough some impressions of himself at that earlier
time. Clemens wrote:
MY DEAR BURROUGH,—As you describe me I can picture myself as I was 22
years ago. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown some; upon
my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a
self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at
his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling the world and is
entirely capable of doing it right…. That is what I was at 19–20.
Orion Clemens in the mean time had married and removed to Keokuk. He
had married during a visit to that city, in the casual, impulsive way
so characteristic of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in
the operation seemed at first to have escaped his inner consciousness.
He tells it himself; he says:
At sunrise on the next morning after the wedding we left in a stage for
Muscatine. We halted for dinner at Burlington. After despatching that
meal we stood on the pavement when the stage drove up, ready for
departure. I climbed in, gathered the buffalo robe around me, and
leaned back unconscious that I had anything further to do. A gentleman
standing on the pavement said to my wife, “Miss, do you go by this
stage?” I said, “Oh, I forgot!” and sprang out and helped her in. A
wife was a new kind of possession to which I had not yet become
accustomed; I had forgotten her.
Orion’s wife had been Mary Stotts; her mother a friend of Jane
Clemens’s girlhood. She proved a faithful helpmate to Orion; but in
those early days of marriage she may have found life with him rather
trying, and it was her homesickness that brought them to Keokuk.
Brother Sam came up from St. Louis, by and by, to visit them, and Orion
offered him five dollars a week and board to remain. He accepted. The
office at this time, or soon after, was located on the third floor of
52 Main Street, in the building at present occupied by the Paterson
Shoe Company. Henry Clemens, now seventeen, was also in Orion’s employ,
and a lad by the name of Dick Hingham. Henry and Sam slept in the
office, and Dick came in for social evenings. Also a young man named
Edward Brownell, who clerked in the book-store on the ground floor.
These were likely to be lively evenings. A music dealer and teacher,
Professor Isbell, occupied the floor just below, and did not care for
their diversions. He objected, but hardly in the right way. Had he gone
to Samuel Clemens gently, he undoubtedly would have found him willing
to make any concessions. Instead, he assailed him roughly, and the next
evening the boys set up a lot of empty wine-bottles, which they had
found in a barrel in a closet, and, with stones for balls, played
tenpins on the office floor. This was Dick and Sam; Henry declined to
join the game. Isbell rushed up-stairs and battered on the door, but
they paid no attention. Next morning he waited for the young men and
denounced them wildly. They merely ignored him, and that night
organized a military company, made up of themselves and a new German
apprentice-boy, and drilled up and down over the singing-class. Dick
Hingham led these military manoeuvers. He was a girlish sort of a
fellow, but he had a natural taste for soldiering. The others used to
laugh at him. They called him a disguised girl, and declared he would
run if a gun were really pointed in his direction. They were mistaken;
seven years later Dick died at Fort Donelson with a bullet in his
forehead: this, by the way.
Isbell now adopted new tactics. He came up very pleasantly and said:
“I like your military practice better than your tenpin exercise, but on
the whole it seems to disturb the young ladies. You see how it is
yourself. You couldn’t possibly teach music with a company of raw
recruits drilling overhead—now, could you? Won’t you please stop it? It
bothers my pupils.”
Sam Clemens regarded him with mild surprise.
“Does it?” he said, very deliberately. “Why didn’t you mention it
before? To be sure we don’t want to disturb the young ladies.”
They gave up the horse-play, and not only stopped the disturbance, but
joined one of the singing—classes. Samuel Clemens had a pretty good
voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar.
He did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most
popular member of the singing-class.
They liked his frank nature, his jokes, and his humor; his slow, quaint
fashion of speech. The young ladies called him openly and fondly a
“fool”—a term of endearment, as they applied it meaning only that he
kept them in a more or less constant state of wonder and merriment; and
indeed it would have been hard for them to say whether he was really
light-minded and frivolous or the wisest of them all. He was twenty now
and at the age for love-making; yet he remained, as in Hannibal, a beau
rather than a suitor, good friend and comrade to all, wooer of none.
Ella Creel, a cousin on the Lampton side, a great belle; also Ella
Patterson (related through Orion’s wife and generally known as “Ick”),
and Belle Stotts were perhaps his favorite companions, but there were
many more. He was always ready to stop and be merry with them, full of
his pranks and pleasantries; though they noticed that he quite often
carried a book under his arm—a history or a volume of Dickens or the
tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
He read at odd moments; at night voluminously—until very late,
sometimes. Already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed,
and he had made him an Oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety,
because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular
short pipe of daytime use.
But it had its disadvantages. Sometimes it would go out, and that would
mean sitting up and reaching for a match and leaning over to light the
bowl which stood on the floor. Young Brownell from below was passing
upstairs to his room on the fourth floor one night when he heard Sam
Clemens call. The two were great chums by this time, and Brownell poked
his head in at the door.
“What will you have, Sam?” he asked.
“Come in, Ed; Henry’s asleep, and I am in trouble. I want somebody to
light my pipe.”
“Why don’t you get up and light it yourself?” Brownell asked.
“I would, only I knew you’d be along in a few minutes and would do it
for me.”
Brownell scratched the necessary match, stooped down, and applied it.
“What are you reading, Sam?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing much—a so-called funny book—one of these days I’ll write a
funnier book than that, myself.”
Brownell laughed.
“No, you won’t, Sam,” he said. “You are too lazy ever to write a book.”
A good many years later when the name “Mark Twain” had begun to stand
for American humor the owner of it gave his “Sandwich Island” lecture
in Keokuk. Speaking of the unreliability of the islanders, he said:
“The king is, I believe, one of the greatest liars on the face of the
earth, except one; and I am very sorry to locate that one right here in
the city of Keokuk, in the person of Ed Brownell.”
The Keokuk episode in Mark Twain’s life was neither very long nor very
actively important. It extended over a period of less than two years
—two vital years, no doubt, if all the bearings could be known—but they
were not years of startling occurrence.
Yet he made at least one beginning there: at a printers’ banquet he
delivered his first after-dinner speech; a hilarious speech—its humor
of a primitive kind. Whatever its shortcomings, it delighted his
audience, and raised him many points in the public regard. He had
entered a field of entertainment in which he would one day have no
rival. They impressed him into a debating society after that, and there
was generally a stir of attention when Sam Clemens was about to take
the floor.
Orion Clemens records how his brother undertook to teach the German
apprentice music.
“There was an old guitar in the office and Sam taught Fritz a song
beginning:
“Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-potato vine,
Turkey came along and yanked him from behind.”
The main point in the lesson was in giving to the word “yanked” the
proper expression and emphasis, accompanied by a sweep of the fingers
across the strings. With serious face and deep earnestness Fritz in his
broken English would attempt these lines, while his teacher would bend
over and hold his sides with laughter at each ridiculous effort.
Without intending it, Fritz had his revenge. One day his tormentor’s
hand was caught in the press when the German boy was turning the wheel.
Sam called to him to stop, but the boy’s mind was slow to grasp the
situation. The hand was badly wounded, though no bones were broken. In
due time it recovered, its power and dexterity, but the trace of the
scars remained.
Orion’s printing-office was not a prosperous one; he had not the gift
of prosperity in any form. When he found it difficult to pay his
brother’s wages, he took him into partnership, which meant that Sam got
no wages at all, barely a living, for the office could not keep its
head above water.
The junior partner was not disturbed, however. He cared little for
money in those days, beyond his actual needs, and these were modest
enough. His mother, now with Pamela, was amply provided for. Orion
himself tells how his business dwindled away. He printed a Keokuk
directory, but it did not pay largely. He was always too eager for the
work; too low in his bid for it. Samuel Clemens in this directory is
set down as “an antiquarian” a joke, of course, though the point of it
is now lost.
Only two of his Keokuk letters have been preserved. The first indicates
the general disorder of the office and a growing dissatisfaction. It is
addressed to his mother and sister and bears date of June 10, 1856.
I don’t like to work at too many things at once. They take Henry and
Dick away from me, too. Before we commenced the Directory, I could tell
before breakfast just how much work could be done during the day, and
manage accordingly—but now, they throw all my plans into disorder by
taking my hands away from their work…. I am not getting along well with
the job-work. I can’t work blindly—without system. I gave Dick a job
yesterday, which I calculated he could set in two hours and I could
work off on the press in three, and therefore just finish it by
supper-time, but he was transferred to the Directory,* and the job,
promised this morning, remains untouched. Through all the great
pressure of job-work lately, I never before failed in a promise of the
kind . . .
* Orion printed two editions of the directory. This was probably the
second one.
The other letter is dated two months later, August 5th. It was written
to Henry, who was visiting in St. Louis or Hannibal at the time, and
introduces the first mention of the South American fever, which now
possessed the writer. Lynch and Herndon had completed their survey of
the upper Amazon, and Lieutenant Herndon’s account of the exploration
was being widely read. Poring over the book nights, young Clemens had
been seized with a desire to go to the headwaters of the South American
river, there to collect coca and make a fortune. All his life he was
subject to such impulses as that, and ways and means were not always
considered. It did not occur to him that it would be difficult to get
to the Amazon and still more difficult to ascend the river. It was his
nature to see results with a dazzling largeness that blinded him to the
detail of their achievement. In the “Turning-point” article already
mentioned he refers to this. He says:
That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament has
not changed by even a shade. I have been punished many and many a time,
and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but these
tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thing commanded by
Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward. Always violently.
When I am reflecting on these occasions, even deaf persons can hear me
think.
In the letter to Henry we see that his resolve was already made, his
plans matured; also that Orion had not as yet been taken into full
confidence.
Ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from
Orion. She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St.
Louis and went to New York—I can start for New York and go to South
America.
He adds that Orion had promised him fifty or one hundred dollars, but
that he does not depend upon it, and will make other arrangements. He
fears obstacles may be put in his way, and he will bring various
influences to bear.
I shall take care that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied with South
American books: They have Herndon’s report now. Ward and the Dr. and
myself will hold a grand consultation to-night at the office. We have
agreed that no more shall be admitted into our company.
He had enlisted those two adventurers in his enterprise: a Doctor
Martin and the young man, Ward. They were very much in earnest, but the
start was not made as planned, most likely for want of means.
Young Clemens, however, did not give up the idea. He made up his mind
to work in the direction of his desire, following his trade and laying
by money for the venture. But Fate or Providence or Accident—whatever
we may choose to call the unaccountable—stepped in just then, and laid
before him the means of turning another sharp corner in his career. One
of those things happened which we refuse to accept in fiction as
possible; but fact has a smaller regard for the credibilities.
As in the case of the Joan of Arc episode (and this adds to its
marvel), it was the wind that brought the talismanic gift. It was a day
in early November—bleak, bitter, and gusty, with curling snow; most
persons were indoors. Samuel Clemens, going down Main Street, saw a
flying bit of paper pass him and lodge against the side of a building.
Something about it attracted him and he captured it. It was a
fifty-dollar bill. He had never seen one before, but he recognized it.
He thought he must be having a pleasant dream.
The temptation came to pocket his good-fortune and say nothing. His
need of money was urgent, but he had also an urgent and troublesome
conscience; in the end he advertised his find.
“I didn’t describe it very particularly, and I waited in daily fear
that the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. By and by I
couldn’t stand it any longer. My conscience had gotten all that was
coming to it. I felt that I must take that money out of danger.”
In the “Turning-point” article he says: “I advertised the find and left
for the Amazon the same day,” a statement which we may accept with a
literary discount.
As a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for
the money. It may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the
wind from some counting-room table. It may have materialized out of the
unseen—who knows? At all events it carried him the first stage of a
journey, the end of which he little dreamed.
XXI
SCOTCHMAN NAMED MACFARLANE
He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to
New York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points),
but first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a
far journey and a long absence in view. Jane Clemens made him renew his
promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. He had
expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea—a literary
idea—came to him, and he returned to Keokuk. The Saturday Post, a
Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary
airs. He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was the
head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of his
travels to the Post—for, a consideration. He may have had a still
larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have been
in his consciousness. Rees agreed to take letters from him at five
dollars each—good payment for that time and place. The young traveler,
jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made
another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis
according to his first letter in the Post.*
* Supplied by Thomas Rees, of the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son
of George Rees named.
This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a
promising literary production. It was written in the exaggerated
dialect then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes
of the undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between. The
genius that a little more than ten years later would delight the world
flickered feebly enough at twenty-one. The letter is a burlesque
account of the trip to Cincinnati. A brief extract from it, as
characteristic as any, will serve.
I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto
the Laclede House, and bought about a quire o’ yaller paper, cut up
into tickets—one for each railroad in the United States, I thought, but
I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Line was left
out—and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to the boat,
where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin’ it open and shakin’ out
the contents, consisting of “guides” to Chicago, and “guides” to
Cincinnati, and travelers’ guides, and all kinds of sich books, not
excepting a “guide to heaven,” which last aint much use to a Teller in
Chicago, I kin tell you. Finally, that fast packet quit ringing her
bell, and started down the river—but she hadn’t gone morn a mile, till
she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar she stuck till plum one
o’clock, spite of the Captain’s swearin’ —and they had to set the whole
crew to cussin’ at last afore they got her off.
This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a
little later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward. Only
careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain. The
letters were signed “Snodgrass,” and there are but two of them. The
second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same
assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of
coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a
baby left on his hands.
From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them
hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. At all events, the
second concluded the series. They are mainly important in that they are
the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first
for which he received a cash return.
He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of
Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857. That winter in
Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable
association—one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens’s general
interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain
views and philosophies which he never forgot.
He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace
people, with one exception. This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling
Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly
unlike him—without humor or any comprehension of it. Yet meeting on the
common plane of intellect, the two became friends. Clemens spent his
evenings in Macfarlane’s room until the clock struck ten; then
Macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in
Philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended.
Macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and
scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary. He had studied these
and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. He never
talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his
knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a
mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the
same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of
toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He
would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out
that would betray Macfarlane’s trade; but this never happened.
What he did learn was that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of
abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher
besides. He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word
in the English dictionary, and he made it good. The younger man tried
repeatedly to discover a word that Macfarlane could not define.
Perhaps Macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for he
never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his
companion never tired of listening. This Scotch philosopher did not
always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and
strikingly on his own account. That was a good while before Darwin and
Wallace gave out—their conclusions on the Descent of Man; yet
Macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy. He went even
further: Life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a
few microscopic seed-germs—from one, perhaps, planted by the Creator in
the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on an
ascending scale had finally produced man. Macfarlane said that the
scheme had stopped there, and failed; that man had retrograded; that
man’s heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom: that man was
the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness—almost
the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness. He said that
man’s intellect was a depraving addition to him which, in the end,
placed him in a rank far below the other beasts, though it enabled him
to keep them in servitude and captivity, along with many members of his
own race.
They were long, fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens
listened to that winter in Macfarlane’s room, and those who knew the
real Mark Twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings
left their impress upon him for life.
XXII
THE OLD CALL OF THE RIVER
When spring came, with budding life and quickening impulses; when the
trees in the parks began to show a hint of green, the Amazonian idea
developed afresh, and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his
expedition. He had saved a little money—enough to take him to New
Orleans—and he decided to begin his long trip with a peaceful journey
down the Mississippi, for once, at least, to give himself up to that
indolent luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large a part of
his early dreams.
The Ohio River steamers were not the most sumptuous craft afloat, but
they were slow and hospitable. The winter had been bleak and hard.
“Spring fever” and a large love of indolence had combined in that
drowsy condition which makes one willing to take his time.
Mark Twain tells us in Life on the Mississippi that he “ran away,”
vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding
glory. This is a literary statement. The pilot ambition had never
entirely died; but it was coca and the Amazon that were uppermost in
his head when he engaged passage on the Paul Jones for New Orleans, and
so conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. He bade good-by
to Macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew,
the gang-plank was hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was
to continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years—four
marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that
followed them.
In the Mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then
a boy of perhaps seventeen. Writing from that standpoint he records
incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others.
He was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one years old, for it
was in April, 1857, that he went aboard the Paul Jones; and he was
fairly familiar with steamboats and the general requirements of
piloting. He had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots; he
had heard the talk of their trade. One at least of the Bowen boys was
already on the river while Sam Clemens was still a boy in Hannibal, and
had often been home to air his grandeur and dilate on the marvel of his
work. That learning the river was no light task Sam Clemens very well
knew. Nevertheless, as the little boat made its drowsy way down the
river into lands that grew ever pleasanter with advancing spring, the
old “permanent ambition” of boyhood stirred again, and the call of the
far-away Amazon, with its coca and its variegated zoology, grew faint.
Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, then a man of thirty-two, still
living (1910) and at the wheel,* was looking out over the bow at the
head of Island No. 35 when he heard a slow, pleasant voice say:
“Good morning.”
* The writer of this memoir interviewed Mr. Bixby personally, and has
followed his phrasing throughout.
Bixby was a clean-cut, direct, courteous man.
“Good morning, sir,” he said, briskly, without looking around.
As a rule Mr. Bixby did not care for visitors in the pilot-house. This
one presently came up and stood a little behind him.
“How would you like a young man to learn the river?” he said.
The pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender,
loose-limbed young fellow with a fair, girlish complexion and a great
tangle of auburn hair.
“I wouldn’t like it. Cub pilots are more trouble than they’re worth. A
great deal more trouble than profit.”
The applicant was not discouraged.
“I am a printer by trade,” he went on, in his easy, deliberate way. “It
doesn’t agree with me. I thought I’d go to South America.”
Bixby kept his eye on the river; but a note of interest crept into his
voice.
“What makes you pull your words that way?” (“pulling” being the river
term for drawling), he asked.
The young man had taken a seat on the visitors’ bench.
“You’ll have to ask my mother,” he said, more slowly than ever. “She
pulls hers, too.”
Pilot Bixby woke up and laughed; he had a keen sense of humor, and the
manner of the reply amused him. His guest made another advance.
“Do you know the Bowen boys?” he asked—“pilots in the St. Louis and New
Orleans trade?”
“I know them well—all three of them. William Bowen did his first
steering for me; a mighty good boy, too. Had a Testament in his pocket
when he came aboard; in a week’s time he had swapped it for a pack of
cards. I know Sam, too, and Bart.”
“Old schoolmates of mine in Hannibal. Sam and Will especially were my
chums.”
“Come over and stand by the side of me,” he said. “What is your name?”
The applicant told him, and the two stood looking at the sunlit water.
“Do you drink?”
“No.”
“Do you gamble?”
“No, Sir.”
“Do you swear?”
“Not for amusement; only under pressure.”
“Do you chew?”
“No, sir, never; but I must smoke.”
“Did you ever do any steering?” was Bixby’s next question.
“I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess.”
“Very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat.
Keep her as she is—toward that lower cottonwood, snag.”
Bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. He sat down on
the bench and kept a careful eye on the course. By and by he said:
“There is just one way that I would take a young man to learn the
river: that is, for money.”
“What do you charge?”
“Five hundred dollars, and I to be at no expense whatever.”
In those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or “cub,” board
free. Mr. Bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port, or for
incidentals. His terms looked rather discouraging.
“I haven’t got five hundred dollars in money,” Sam said; “I’ve got a
lot of Tennessee land worth twenty-five cents an acre; I’ll give you
two thousand acres of that.”
Bixby dissented.
“No; I don’t want any unimproved real estate. I have too much already.”
Sam reflected upon the amount he could probably borrow from Pamela’s
husband without straining his credit.
“Well, then, I’ll give you one hundred dollars cash and the rest when I
earn it.”
Something about this young man had won Horace Bixby’s heart. His slow,
pleasant speech; his unhurried, quiet manner with the wheel, his
evident sincerity of purpose—these were externals, but beneath them the
pilot felt something of that quality of mind or heart which later made
the world love Mark Twain. The terms proposed were agreed upon. The
deferred payments were to begin when the pupil had learned the river
and was receiving pilot’s wages. During Mr. Bixby’s daylight watches
his pupil was often at the wheel, that trip, while the pilot sat
directing him and nursing his sore foot. Any literary ambitions Samuel
Clemens may have had grew dim; by the time they had reached New Orleans
he had almost forgotten he had been a printer, and when he learned that
no ship would be sailing to the Amazon for an indefinite period the
feeling grew that a directing hand had taken charge of his affairs.
From New Orleans his chief did not return to Cincinnati, but went to
St. Louis, taking with him his new cub, who thought it fine, indeed, to
come steaming up to that great city with its thronging water-front; its
levee fairly packed with trucks, drays, and piles of freight, the whole
flanked with a solid mile of steamboats lying side by side, bow a
little up-stream, their belching stacks reared high against the blue—a
towering front of trade. It was glorious to nose one’s way to a place
in that stately line, to become a unit, however small, of that imposing
fleet. At St. Louis Sam borrowed from Mr. Moffett the funds necessary
to make up his first payment, and so concluded his contract. Then, when
he suddenly found himself on a fine big boat, in a pilot-house so far
above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain—a “sumptuous
temple”—his happiness seemed complete.
XXIII
THE SUPREME SCIENCE
In his Mississippi book Mark Twain has given us a marvelous exposition
of the science of river-piloting, and of the colossal task of acquiring
and keeping a knowledge requisite for that work. He has not exaggerated
this part of the story of developments in any detail; he has set down a
simple confession.
Serenely enough he undertook the task of learning twelve hundred miles
of the great changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by
daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features. As
already suggested, he had at least an inkling of what that undertaking
meant. His statement that he “supposed all that a pilot had to do was
to keep his boat in the river” is not to be accepted literally. Still
he could hardly have realized the full majesty of his task; nobody
could do that —not until afterward.
Horace Bixby was a “lightning” pilot with a method of instruction as
direct and forcible as it was effective. He was a small man, hot and
quick-firing, though kindly, too, and gentle when he had blown off.
After one rather pyrotechnic misunderstanding as to the manner of
imparting and acquiring information he said:
“My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell
you a thing put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot,
and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just
like A B C.”
So Sam Clemens got the little book, and presently it “fairly bristled”
with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, and reaches, but
it made his heart ache to think that he had only half of the river set
down; for, as the “watches” were four hours off and four hours on,
there were long gaps during which he had slept.
The little note-book still exists—thin and faded, with black
water-proof covers—its neat, tiny, penciled notes still, telling, the
story of that first trip. Most of them are cryptographic abbreviations,
not readily deciphered now. Here and there is an easier line: