IN WHICH THE POWERFUL EFFECT OF NATURAL SCENERY IS EVINCED IN THE CASE
OF THE MISSOURIAN, WHO, IN VIEW OF THE REGION ROUND-ABOUT CAIRO, HAS A
RETURN OF HIS CHILLY FIT.
At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up
its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack--his hand
at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus
Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three
undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.
In the dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with
fire-flies, the boat now lies before Cairo. She has landed certain
passengers, and tarries for the coming of expected ones. Leaning over
the rail on the inshore side, the Missourian eyes through the dubious
medium that swampy and squalid domain; and over it audibly mumbles his
cynical mind to himself, as Apermantus' dog may have mumbled his bone.
He bethinks him that the man with the brass-plate was to land on this
villainous bank, and for that cause, if no other, begins to suspect him.
Like one beginning to rouse himself from a dose of chloroform
treacherously given, he half divines, too, that he, the philosopher,
had unwittingly been betrayed into being an unphilosophical dupe. To
what vicissitudes of light and shade is man subject! He ponders the
mystery of human subjectivity in general. He thinks he perceives with
Crossbones, his favorite author, that, as one may wake up well in the
morning, very well, indeed, and brisk as a buck, I thank you, but ere
bed-time get under the weather, there is no telling how--so one may wake
up wise, and slow of assent, very wise and very slow, I assure you, and
for all that, before night, by like trick in the atmosphere, be left in
the lurch a ninny. Health and wisdom equally precious, and equally
little as unfluctuating possessions to be relied on.
But where was slipped in the entering wedge? Philosophy, knowledge,
experience--were those trusty knights of the castle recreant? No, but
unbeknown to them, the enemy stole on the castle's south side, its
genial one, where Suspicion, the warder, parleyed. In fine, his too
indulgent, too artless and companionable nature betrayed him. Admonished
by which, he thinks he must be a little splenetic in his intercourse
henceforth.
He revolves the crafty process of sociable chat, by which, as he
fancies, the man with the brass-plate wormed into him, and made such a
fool of him as insensibly to persuade him to waive, in his exceptional
case, that general law of distrust systematically applied to the race.
He revolves, but cannot comprehend, the operation, still less the
operator. Was the man a trickster, it must be more for the love than the
lucre. Two or three dirty dollars the motive to so many nice wiles? And
yet how full of mean needs his seeming. Before his mental vision the
person of that threadbare Talleyrand, that impoverished Machiavelli,
that seedy Rosicrucian--for something of all these he vaguely deems
him--passes now in puzzled review. Fain, in his disfavor, would he make
out a logical case. The doctrine of analogies recurs. Fallacious enough
doctrine when wielded against one's prejudices, but in corroboration of
cherished suspicions not without likelihood. Analogically, he couples
the slanting cut of the equivocator's coat-tails with the sinister cast
in his eye; he weighs slyboot's sleek speech in the light imparted by
the oblique import of the smooth slope of his worn boot-heels; the
insinuator's undulating flunkyisms dovetail into those of the flunky
beast that windeth his way on his belly.
From these uncordial reveries he is roused by a cordial slap on the
shoulder, accompanied by a spicy volume of tobacco-smoke, out of which
came a voice, sweet as a seraph's:
"A penny for your thoughts, my fine fellow."