Frogs, in the swamp, and as a side-dish--Negroids of the swamp
age--Something like a mouth--Honour in your own country--The Land
Of Promise--Civilization again.
ARKANSAS remains on the mind (and the traveller's notebook) as a
vast forest of fine timber standing in swamps. There are no doubt
exceptions, but they do not suffice to affect the general impression.
And if I owned Arkansas I think I should rent it to some one else to
live in; especially to some one fond of frogs. For myself, I feel no
tenderness towards the monotonous batrachian. Even in a bill of fare
the tenderness is all on the frog's side. But on the whole, I like him
best when he is cooked. In the water with his "damnable iteration" of
Yank! yank! yank! I detest him--legs and all. But served "a cresson,"
with a clear brown gravy, I find no aggressiveness in him. It gets
cooked out of him: he becomes the gentlest eating possible. Butter
would not melt in his mouth, though it does on his legs. There is
none of the valiant mouse-impaling "mud-compeller" about him when you
foregather with him as a side dish. Aristophanes would not recognize
him, and the "nibbler of cheese rind" might then triumph easily over
him. Yet to think how once he shuddered the earth, and shook Olympus!
The goddess that leans upon a spear wept for him, and Aphrodite among
her roses trembled.
But here in Arkansas, on a hot night in "the Moon of Strawberries,"
what a multitudinous horror they are these "tuneful natives of the
reedy lake!" Like the laughter of the sea, beyond arithmetic. Like
the laughter of the sea, beyond arithmetic. Like the complainings of
the plagued usurers in Hell, beyond compassion. I cannot venture my
pen upon it. It is like launching out upon "the tenth wave," for an
infinite natation upon cycles of floods. It is endless; snakes with
tails in their mouths; trying to correct the grammar of a Mexican's
English.
But, seriously; was ever air so full of sound as these Arkansas swamps
"upon a night in June!" It fairly vibrates with Yank! yank! yank! And
yet over, and under, and through, all this metallic din, there shrills
supreme the voice of strident cicadas, without number and without
shame, and countless katydids that scream out their confidences to all
the stars. It is really astonishing; a tour de force in Nature; a noisy
miracle. I wonder Moses did not think of it, for such a plague might
have done him credit, I think. At all events, the ancestors of Arabi
Pasha would have been egregiously inconvenienced by such a hubbub. It
is no use trying to talk; yank--Katy did--yank--yank. That is all you
hear. So you may just as well sit and smoke quietly, and watch the
moon-lit swamps and wonderful dark forests go by, with their perpetual
flicker of restless fire-flies, twinkling in and out among the
brushwood. If they would only combine into one central electric light!
All the world would go to see them--the new "Brush-light." But there is
very little sense of utility among fire-flies. They flicker about for
their own amusement, and are of a frivolous, flighty kind; perpetually
striking matches as if to look for something, and then blowing them out
again. They strike only on their own box.
But here comes a station--"Hope." We are soon past Hope; and then
comes another swamp, with its pools, that have festered all day long
in the sun, emitting the odours of a Zanzibar bazaar, and standing in
the middle of them apparently are some clearings already filled with
crops, and a hut or two cowering, as if they were wild beasts, just on
the edge of the timber where the shadows fall the darkest. What kind
of people are they that live in this terraqueous land? No race that is
fit to rule can do it. No, nor even fit to vote. Some day, no doubt,
the wise men of the world will dig up tufts of wool, and skulls with
prognathous jaws, and label them "Negroids of the swamp age." Or they
may fall into the error of supposing that the wool grew all over their
bodies equally, and some Owen of the future discourse wisely of "the
great extinct anthropoids of Arkansas." For in those wonderful days
that are coming--when men will know all about the wind-currents, and
steer through ocean-billows by chart, when doctors will understand the
smallpox, and everybody have the same language, currency, religion,
and customs duties, and when every newspaper offce will be fitted with
patent reflectors, showing on a table in the editor's room all that
is going on all over the world, and special correspondents will be as
extinct as dodos, and when many other delightful means of saving time
and trouble will have come to pass--then, no doubt, as the Mormons say,
all the world will have become a "white and a delightsome people," and
the commentators will explain away the passages in the ancient English
which seem to point to the early existence of a race that was as black
as coals, and lived on pumpkins in a swamp.
And still we sit up, long past midnight, for never again in our lives
probably shall we have such an experience as this, so unearthly in
its surroundings--forests that crowded in upon the rails and hung
threateningly over the cars, pools that lay glistening in the moonlight
round the foot of the trees, the air as thick as porridge with the
yanking of brazen-throated frogs, and the screaming of tinlunged
cicadas, yet all the time alive with lantern-tailed insects--just
as if the clamour of frogs and cicadas struck fireflies out of each
other in the same way that flint and steel strike flashes, or as if
their recriminations caught fire like Acestes' arrows as they flew,
and peopled the inflammable air with phosphorescent tips of flame--a
battery of din perpetually grinding out showers of electric sparks.
And to make us remember this night the cars bumped abominably over
the dislocated sleepers and the sunken rails, as the Spanish father
whipped his son that he might never forget the day on which he saw a
live salamander; and the engine flew a streamer of sparks and ink-black
smoke, till it felt as if we were riding to Hades on a three-legged
dragon. But it came to sleep at last, and we went to bed, leaving the
moonlit country to the vagaries of the fireflies and the infinite
exultations of the frogs.
Awaking in the morning with "the grey wolf's tail" still in the sky,
what a wonderful change had settled on the scene! The same swamped
forests on either side of us: the same gloomy trees and the same
sulky-looking pools; but a dull leaden Silence supreme! Where were
the creatures that had crowded the moonlight? You might live a whole
month of mornings without suspecting that there were any such things in
Arkansas as frogs or katydids or fireflies!
I should have gone to sleep again if I had not caught sight of our new
porter, or brakeman. He happened to be laughing, and the corners of
his mouth, so it seemed to me, must have met behind. I need hardly say
he was a negro. But at first I thought he was a practical joke. I took
the earliest opportunity of looking at the back of his neck, to see
what kept his head together when he laughed. But I only saw a brass
button. I should not have thought that was enough to keep a man's skull
together, if I had not seen it. And he was always laughing, so that
there was nearly as much expression on the back of his head as on the
front. He laughed all round.
I felt inclined to advise him to get his mouth mended, or to tell him
about "a stitch in time." But he seemed so happy I did not think it
worth while.
Is it worth while saying that the swamp forest continued? I think not.
So please understand it, and think of the country as a flooded forest,
with wonderful brown waterways stretching through the trees, just as
glades of grass do elsewhere, with here and there, every now and again,
a broad river-like bayou of coffee stretching to right and left, and
winding out of sight round the trees, and every now and again a group
of wooden cabins, most picturesquely squalid, and inhabited by coloured
folk.
Does anybody know anything of these people? Are they cannibals,
or polygamous, or polyandrous, or amphibious? Surely a decade of
unrestricted freedom and abundant food in such solitudes as these, must
have developed some extraordinary social features? At all events, it is
very difficult to believe that they are ordinary mortals.
The hamlets are few and far between, and it is only once or twice
during the day that we strike a village nomine dignus. Looking at a
garden in one of these larger hamlets, I notice that the hollyhock and
pink and petunia are favourite flowers; and it is worth remarking that
it is with flowers as with everything else--the imported articles are
held in highest esteem. Writing once upon tobacco cultivation in the
East, I remember noting that each province between Persia and Bengal
imported its tobacco from its next neighbour on the west, and exported
its own eastward. It struck me as a curious illustration of the
universal fancy for "foreign" goods. So with flowers. It is very seldom
that the wild plants of a locality arrive at the dignity of a garden.
In England we sow larkspurs; in Utah they weed them out. In England we
prize the passion-flower and the verbena; in Arkansas they carefully
leave them outside their garden fences. And what splendid flowers these
people scorn, simply because they grow wild! Some day, I expect, it
will occur to some enterprising settler that there is a market abroad
for his "weeds;" and that lily-bulbs and creeper-roots are not such
rubbish as others think.
Then Poplar Bluff, a crazy-looking place, with many of its houses built
on piles, and a saloon that calls itself "the XIOU8 saloon." I tried
to pronounce the name. Perhaps some one else can do it. Then the swamp
reasserts itself, and the forest of oak and walnut, sycamore and plane.
But the settlements are singularly devoid of trees, whether for fruit
or shade. The people, I suppose, think there are too many about already.
And now we are in Missouri--the Mormons' 'land of promise,' and the
scene of their greatest persecutions. It is a beautiful State, as
Nature made it; but it almost deserves to be Jesse-Jamesed for ever for
its barbarities towards the Mormons. No wonder the Saints cherish a
hatred against the people, and look forward to the day when they shall
come back and repossess their land. For it is an article of absolute
belief among the Mormons, that some day or other they are going back to
Jackson County, and numbers of them still preserve the title-deeds to
the lands from which they were driven with such murderous cruelty.
It was here that I saw men working a deposit of that "white earth"
which has done as much to bring American trade-enterprise into
disrepute as glucose and oleomargerine put together. In itself a
harmless, useless substance, it is used in immense quantities for
"weighting" other articles and for general adulteration; and I
could not help thinking that the man who owns the deposit must feel
uncomfortably mean at times. But it is a paying concern, for the world
is full of rascals ready to buy the stuff.
And, after all, one half the world lives by poisoning the other.
A thunderstorm broke over the country as we were passing through it,
and I could not help admiring the sincerity of the Missouri rain.
There was no reservation whatever about it, for it came down with a
determined ferocity that made one think the clouds had a spite against
the earth. Moss Ferry, a ragged, desolate hamlet, looked as if it was
being drowned for its sins; and I sympathized with pretty Piedmont
in the deluge that threatened to wash it away. But we soon ran out
of the storm, and rattling past Gadshill, the scene of one of Jesse
James' train-robbing exploits, and sped along through lovely scenery of
infinite variety, and almost unbroken cultivation, to Arcadia.
But this is "civilization." In a few hours more I find myself back
again at the Mississippi, the Indus of the West, and speeding along its
bank with the Columbia bottom-lands lying rich and low on the other
side of the prodigious river, and reminding me exactly of the great
flat islands that you see lying in the Hooghly as you steam up to
Calcutta--past the new parks which St. Louis is building for itself,
and so, through the hideous adjuncts of a prosperous manufacturing
town, into St. Louis itself.
Out of deference to St. Louis, I hide my Texan hat, and disguise myself
as a respectable traveller. For I have done now with the wilds and the
West, and am conscious in the midst of this thriving city that I have
returned to a tyrannical civilization.
And I take a parting cocktail with the Western friend who has been my
companion for the last three thousand miles.
"Wheat," says he, with his little finger in the air.
And I reply, "Here's How."
THE END.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY GILDERT AND RIVINGTON, LIMITED, ST. JOHN'S SQUARE.