THE FATE OF THE IMMIGRANT
It was just a fortnight after the ball, that one Joseph Frowenfeld
opened his eyes upon Louisiana. He was an American by birth, rearing and
sentiment, yet German enough through his parents, and the only son in a
family consisting of father, mother, self, and two sisters, new-blown
flowers of womanhood. It was an October dawn, when, long wearied of the
ocean, and with bright anticipations of verdure, and fragrance, and
tropical gorgeousness, this simple-hearted family awoke to find the bark
that had borne them from their far northern home already entering upon
the ascent of the Mississippi.
We may easily imagine the grave group, as they came up one by one from
below, that morning of first disappointment, and stood (with a whirligig
of jubilant mosquitoes spinning about each head) looking out across the
waste, seeing the sky and the marsh meet in the east, the north, and the
west, and receiving with patient silence the father's suggestion that
the hills would, no doubt, rise into view after a while.
"My children, we may turn this disappointment into a lesson; if the good
people of this country could speak to us now, they might well ask us not
to judge them or their land upon one or two hasty glances, or by the
experiences of a few short days or weeks."
But no hills rose. However, by and by they found solace in the
appearance of distant forest, and in the afternoon they entered a
land--but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic
cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.
"The captain told father, when we went to engage passage, that New
Orleans was on high land," said the younger daughter, with a tremor in
the voice, and ignoring the remonstrative touch of her sister.
"On high land?" said the captain, turning from the pilot; "well, so it
is--higher than the swamp, but not higher than the river," and he
checked a broadening smile.
But the Frowenfelds were not a family to complain. It was characteristic
of them to recognize the bright as well as the solemn virtues, and to
keep each other reminded of the duty of cheerfulness. A smile, starting
from the quiet elder sister, went around the group, directed against the
abstracted and somewhat rueful countenance of Joseph, whereat he turned
with a better face and said that what the Creator had pronounced very
good they could hardly feel free to condemn. The old father was still
more stout of heart.
"These mosquitoes, children, are thought by some to keep the air pure,"
he said.
"Better keep out of it after sunset," put in the captain.
After that day and night, the prospect grew less repellent. A gradually
matured conviction that New Orleans would not be found standing on
stilts in the quagmire enabled the eye to become educated to a better
appreciation of the solemn landscape. Nor was the landscape always
solemn. There were long openings, now and then, to right and left, of
emerald-green savannah, with the dazzling blue of the Gulf far beyond,
waving a thousand white-handed good-byes as the funereal swamps slowly
shut out again the horizon. How sweet the soft breezes off the moist
prairies! How weird, how very near, the crimson and green and black and
yellow sunsets! How dream-like the land and the great, whispering river!
The profound stillness and breath reminded the old German, so he said,
of that early time when the evenings and mornings were the first days of
the half-built world. The barking of a dog in Fort Plaquemines seemed to
come before its turn in the panorama of creation--before the earth was
ready for the dog's master.
But he was assured that to live in those swamps was not entirely
impossible to man--"if one may call a negro a man." Runaway slaves were
not so rare in them as one--a lost hunter, for example--might wish. His
informant was a new passenger, taken aboard at the fort. He
spoke English.
"Yes, sir! Didn' I had to run from Bras-Coupé in de haidge of de swamp
be'ine de 'abitation of my cousin Honoré, one time? You can hask 'oo you
like!" (A Creole always provides against incredulity.) At this point he
digressed a moment: "You know my cousin, Honoré Grandissime, w'at give
two hund' fifty dolla' to de 'ospill laz mont'? An' juz because my
cousin Honoré give it, somebody helse give de semm. Fo' w'y don't he
give his nemm?"
The reason (which this person did not know) was that the second donor
was the first one over again, resolved that the little unknown Monk
should not know whom she had baffled.
"Who was Bras-Coupé?" the good German asked in French.
The stranger sat upon the capstan, and, in the shadow of the cypress
forest, where the vessel lay moored for a change of wind, told in a
_patois_ difficult, but not impossible, to understand, the story of a
man who chose rather to be hunted like a wild beast among those awful
labyrinths, than to be yoked and beaten like a tame one. Joseph, drawing
near as the story was coming to a close, overheard the following
English:
"Friend, if you dislike heated discussion, do not tell that to my son."
The nights were strangely beautiful. The immigrants almost consumed them
on deck, the mother and daughters attending in silent delight while the
father and son, facing south, rejoiced in learned recognition of stars
and constellations hitherto known to them only on globes and charts.
"Yes, my dear son," said the father, in a moment of ecstatic admiration,
"wherever man may go, around this globe--however uninviting his lateral
surroundings may be, the heavens are ever over his head, and I am glad
to find the stars your favorite objects of study."
So passed the time as the vessel, hour by hour, now slowly pushed by the
wind against the turbid current, now warping along the fragrant
precincts of orange or magnolia groves or fields of sugar-cane, or
moored by night in the deep shade of mighty willow-jungles, patiently
crept toward the end of their pilgrimage; and in the length of time
which would at present be consumed in making the whole journey from
their Northern home to their Southern goal, accomplished the distance of
ninety-eight miles, and found themselves before the little, hybrid city
of "Nouvelle Orléans." There was the cathedral, and standing beside it,
like Sancho beside Don Quixote, the squat hall of the Cabildo with the
calabozo in the rear. There were the forts, the military bakery, the
hospitals, the plaza, the Almonaster stores, and the busy rue Toulouse;
and, for the rest of the town, a pleasant confusion of green tree-tops,
red and gray roofs, and glimpses of white or yellow wall, spreading back
a few hundred yards behind the cathedral, and tapering into a single
rank of gardened and belvedered villas, that studded either horn of the
river's crescent with a style of home than which there is probably
nothing in the world more maternally homelike.
"And now," said the "captain," bidding the immigrants good-by, "keep out
of the sun and stay in after dark; you're not 'acclimated,' as they
call it, you know, and the city is full of the fever."
Such were the Frowenfelds. Out of such a mold and into such a place came
the young Américain, whom even Agricola Fusilier, as we shall see, by
and by thought worthy to be made an exception of, and honored with his
recognition.
The family rented a two-story brick house in the rue Bienville, No. 17,
it seems. The third day after, at daybreak, Joseph called his father to
his bedside to say that he had had a chill, and was suffering such pains
in his head and back that he would like to lie quiet until they passed
off. The gentle father replied that it was undoubtedly best to do so,
and preserved an outward calm. He looked at his son's eyes; their pupils
were contracted to tiny beads. He felt his pulse and his brow; there was
no room for doubt; it was the dreaded scourge--the fever. We say,
sometimes, of hearts that they sink like lead; it does not express
the agony.
On the second day, while the unsated fever was running through every
vein and artery, like soldiery through the streets of a burning city,
and far down in the caverns of the body the poison was ransacking every
palpitating corner, the poor immigrant fell into a moment's sleep. But
what of that? The enemy that moment had mounted to the brain. And then
there happened to Joseph an experience rare to the sufferer by this
disease, but not entirely unknown,--a delirium of mingled pleasures and
distresses. He seemed to awake somewhere between heaven and earth,
reclining in a gorgeous barge, which was draped in curtains of
interwoven silver and silk, cushioned with rich stuffs of every
beautiful dye, and perfumed _ad nauseam_ with orange-leaf tea. The crew
was a single old negress, whose head was wound about with a blue Madras
handkerchief, and who stood at the prow, and by a singular rotary
motion, rowed the barge with a teaspoon. He could not get his head out
of the hot sun; and the barge went continually round and round with a
heavy, throbbing motion, in the regular beat of which certain spirits of
the air--one of whom appeared to be a beautiful girl and another a
small, red-haired man,--confronted each other with the continual call
and response:
"Keep the bedclothes on him and the room shut tight, keep the bedclothes
on him and the room shut tight,"--"An' don' give 'im some watta, an'
don' give 'im some watta."
During what lapse of time--whether moments or days--this lasted, Joseph
could not then know; but at last these things faded away, and there came
to him a positive knowledge that he was on a sick-bed, where unless
something could be done for him he should be dead in an hour. Then a
spoon touched his lips, and a taste of brandy and water went all through
him; and when he fell into sweet slumber and awoke, and found the
teaspoon ready at his lips again, he had to lift a little the two hands
lying before him on the coverlet to know that they were his--they were
so wasted and yellow. He turned his eyes, and through the white gauze of
the mosquito-bar saw, for an instant, a strange and beautiful young
face; but the lids fell over his eyes, and when he raised them again the
blue-turbaned black nurse was tucking the covering about his feet.
"Sister!"
No answer.
"Where is my mother?"
The negress shook her head.
He was too weak to speak again, but asked with his eyes so persistently,
and so pleadingly, that by and by she gave him an audible answer. He
tried hard to understand it, but could not, it being in these words:
"_Li pa' oulé vini 'ci--li pas capabe_."
Thrice a day, for three days more, came a little man with a large head
surrounded by short, red curls and with small freckles in a fine skin,
and sat down by the bed with a word of good cheer and the air of a
commander. At length they had something like an extended conversation.
"So you concluded not to die, eh? Yes, I'm the doctor--Doctor Keene. A
young lady? What young lady? No, sir, there has been no young lady here.
You're mistaken. Vagary of your fever. There has been no one here but
this black girl and me. No, my dear fellow, your father and mother can't
see you yet; you don't want them to catch the fever, do you? Good-bye.
Do as your nurse tells you, and next week you may raise your head and
shoulders a little; but if you don't mind her you'll have a backset, and
the devil himself wouldn't engage to cure you."
The patient had been sitting up a little at a time for several days,
when at length the doctor came to pay a final call, "as a matter of
form;" but, after a few pleasantries, he drew his chair up gravely, and,
in a tender tone--need we say it? He had come to tell Joseph that his
father, mother, sisters, all, were gone on a second--a longer--voyage,
to shores where there could be no disappointments and no
fevers, forever.
"And, Frowenfeld," he said, at the end of their long and painful talk,
"if there is any blame attached to not letting you go with them, I think
I can take part of it; but if you ever want a friend,--one who is
courteous to strangers and ill-mannered only to those he likes,--you can
call for Charlie Keene. I'll drop in to see you, anyhow, from time to
time, till you get stronger. I have taken a heap of trouble to keep you
alive, and if you should relapse now and give us the slip, it would be a
deal of good physic wasted; so keep in the house."
The polite neighbors who lifted their cocked hats to Joseph, as he spent
a slow convalescence just within his open door, were not bound to know
how or when he might have suffered. There were no "Howards" or
"Y.M.C.A.'s" in those days; no "Peabody Reliefs." Even had the neighbors
chosen to take cognizance of those bereavements, they were not so
unusual as to fix upon him any extraordinary interests an object of
sight; and he was beginning most distressfully to realize that "great
solitude" which the philosopher attributes to towns, when matters took a
decided turn.