MORALS OF ENTERPRISE.
I got him the money he required; and we were about to set forth, when he
exclaimed abruptly:--
“Put money in thy own purse, Clifford. It may be necessary to practise a
little ruse de guerre. In playing my game, it may be important that you
should deem to play one also. You have no scruples to fling the dice or
flirt the cards for the nonce.”
“None! But I should like to know your plans. Tell me, in the first
place, your precise object.”
“Simply to detect certain knaves, and save certain fools. The knaves
have ruined me, and I make no lamentations; but there are others in
their clutches still, quite as ignorant as myself, who may be saved
before they are stripped entirely. The object is not a bad one; for the
rest, trust to me. I mean no harm; a little mischief only; and, at most,
a tweak of one proboscis or more. There's risk, of a certainty, as there
is in sucking an egg; but you are a man! Not like that d--d milksop, who
gives up his friend as soon as he gets poor, and proffers him a sermon
by way of telling him--precious information, truly--that he's in a fair
way to the devil. The toss of a copper for such friendship.”
The humor of Kingsley tallied somewhat with my own. It had in it a spice
of recklessness which pleased me. Perhaps, too, it tended somewhat to
relieve and qualify the intenseness of that excitement in my brain,
which sometimes rose to such a pitch as led me to apprehend madness.
That I was a monomaniac has been admitted, perhaps not a moment too soon
for the author's candor. The sagacity of the reader made him independent
of the admission.
“Your beggar,” said he, somewhat abruptly, “has the only true feeling
of independence. Absolutely, I never knew till now what it was to be
thoroughly indifferent to what might come to-morrow. I positively care
for nothing. I am the first prince Sans Souci. That shall be my
title when I get among the Cumanches. I will have a code of laws and
constitution to suit my particular humor, and my chief penalties shall
be inflicted upon your fellows who grunt. A sigh shall incur a week's
solitary confinement; a sour look, pillory; and for a groan, the
hypochondriac shall lose his head! My prime minister shall be the fellow
who can longest use his tongue without losing his temper; and the
man who can laugh and jest shall always have his plate at my table.
Good-humored people shall have peculiar privileges. It shall be a
certificate in one's favor, entitling him to so many acres, that he
takes the world kindly. Such a man shall have two wives, provided he can
keep them peacefully in the same house. His daughters shall have dowries
from government. The prince of Sans Souci will himself provide for
them.”
I made some answer, half jest, half earnest, in a mood of mocking
bitterness, which, perhaps, more truly accorded with the temper of both
of us. He did not perceive the bitterness, however.
“You jest, but mine is not altogether jest. Half-serious glimpses of
what I tell you float certainly before my eyes. Such things may happen
yet, and the southwest is the world in which you are yet to see many
wondrous things. The time must come when Texas shall stretch to Mexico.
These miserable slaves and reptiles--mongrel Spaniards and mongrel
Indians--can not very long bedevil that great country. It must fall into
other hands. It must be ours; and who, when that time comes, will carry
into the field more thorough claims than mine. Master of myself, fearing
nothing, caring for nothing; with a gallant steed that knows my voice,
and answers with whinny and pricked ears to my encouragement; with a
rifle that can clip a Mexican--dollar or man--at a hundred yards, and a
heart that can defy the devil over his own dish, and with but one spoon
between us--and who so likely to win his principality as myself? Look
to see it, Clifford, I shall be a prince in Mexico; and when you hear of
the prince Sans Souci be assured you know the man. Seek me then, and ask
what you will. You have CARTE BLANCHE from this moment.”
“I shall certainly keep it in mind, prince.”
“Do so: laugh as you please; it is only becoming that you should laugh
in the presence of Sans Souci; but do not laugh in token of irreverence.
You must not be too skeptical. It does not follow because I am a
dare-devil that I am a thoughtless one. I have been so, perhaps, but
from this moment I go to work! I shall be fettered by fortune no
longer. Thank Heaven, that is now done--gone--lost; I am free from its
incumbrance! I feel myself a prince, indeed; a man, every inch of me.
This night I devote as a fitting finish to my old lifeless existence.
“Hear me!” he continued; “you laugh again, Clifford--very good! Laugh
on, but hear me. You shall hear more of me in time to come. I fancy I
shall be a fellow of considerable importance, not in Texas simply, or
in Mexico, but here--here in your own self-opinionated United States.
Suppose a few things, and go along with me while I speak them. That
Texas must stretch to Mexico I hold to be certain. A very few years will
do that. It needs only thirty thousand more men from our southern and
southwestern States, and the brave old English tongue shall arouse the
best echoes in the city of Montezuma! That done, and floods of people
pour in from all quarters. It needs nothing but a feeling of security
and peace--a conviction that property will be tolerably safe, under
a tolerably stable government--in other words, an Anglo-Saxon
government--to tempt millions of discontented emigrants from all
quarters of the world. Will this result have no results of its own,
think you? Will the immense resources of Mexico and Texas, represented,
as they then will be, by a stern, pressing, performing people, have no
effect upon these states of yours? They will have the greatest; nay,
they will become essential to balance your own federal weight, and keep
you all in equilibrio. For look you, the first hubbub with Great Britain
gives you Canada, at the expense of some of your coast-towns, a few
millions of treasure, and the loss of fifty thousand men. A bad exchange
for the south; for Canada will make six ponderous states, the policy
and character of which will be New England all over. To balance this you
will have your Florida territory, [Footnote: Florida, since admitted,
but unhappily, as a single state.] of which two feeble states may be
made. Not enough for your purposes. But the same war with England will
render it necessary that your fleet should take possession of Cuba;
which, after a civil apology to Spain for taking such a liberty with her
possessions, and, perhaps, a few million by way of hush money, you
carve into two more states, and, in this manner, try to bolster up your
federal relations. How many of her West India islands Great Britain will
be able to keep after such a war, is another problem, the solution of
which will depend upon the relative strength of fleets and success of
seamanship. These islands, which should of right be ours, and without
which we can never be sure against any maritime power so great and so
arrogant as England, once conquered by our arms, find their natural,
moral, and social affinities in the southern states entirely; and, so
far, contribute to strengthen you in your congressional conflicts.
But these are not enough, for the simple reason that the population of
states, purely agricultural, never makes that progress which is made in
this respect by a commercial and manufacturing people. With the command
of the gulf, the possession of an independent fleet by the Texans, the
political characteristics of the states of Carolina, Georgia, Florida,
Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, must undergo certain
marked changes, which can only be neutralized by the adoption, on the
part of these states, of a new policy corresponding with their change of
interests. How far the cultivation of cotton by Texas will lead to its
abandonment in Carolina and Georgia, is a question which the next
ten years must solve. That they will be compelled to abandon it is
inevitable, unless they can succeed in raising the article at six cents;
a probability which no cotton-planter in either of these states will be
willing to contemplate now for an instant. Meanwhile, Texas is spreading
herself right and left. She conquers the Cumanches, subdues the native
mongrel Mexicans. Her Hoestons and Lamars are succeeded by other and
abler men, under whose control the evils of government, which followed
the sway of such small animals as the Guerreros, and the Bolivars, the
Bustamentes, and Sant' Annas, are very soon eradicated; and the country,
the noblest that God ever gave to man in the hands of men, becomes a
country!--a great and glorious country--stretching from the gulf to the
Pacific, and providing the natural balance, which, in a few years, the
southern state of this Union will inevitably need, by which alone your
great confederacy will be kept together. You see, therefore, why I speed
to Texas. Should I not, with my philosophy, my horse and my rifle--not
to speak of stout heart and hand--reasonably aspire to the principality
of Sans Souci? Laugh, if you please, but be not irreverent. You shall
have carte blanche then if you will have a becoming faith now, on the
word of a prince. I say it, It is written--Sans Souci.” [Footnote: All
these speculations were written in 1840-'41. I need not remark upon
those which have since been verified.]
“Altissimo, excellentissimo, serenissimo!”
“Bravissimo, you improve; you will make a courtier--but mum now about my
projects. We must suppress our dignities here. We are at the entrance of
our hell!”
We had reached the door of a low habitation in a secluded street.
The house was of wood--an ordinary hovel of two stories. A cluster
of similar fabrics surrounded it, most of which I afterward
discovered--though this fact could not be conjectured by an observer
from the street--were connected by blind alleys, inner courts, and
chambers and passages running along the ground floors. We stopped an
instant, Kingsley having his hand upon the little iron knocker, a single
black ring, that worked against an ordinary iron knob.
“Before I knock,” said he, in a whisper, “before I knock, Clifford, let
me say that if you have any reluctance--”
“None! none! knock!”
“You will meet with some dirty rascals, and you must not only meet them
with seeming civility, but as if you shared in their tastes--sought the
same objects only--the getting of money--the only object which alone is
clearly comprehensible by their understanding.”
“Go ahead! I will see you through.”
“A word more! Get yourself in play at a different table from me. You
will find rogues enough around, ready to relieve you of your Mexicans.
Leave me to my particular enemy; you will soon see whose shield I
touch--but keep an occasional eye upon us; and all that I ask farther at
your hands, should you see us by the ears, is to keep other fingers from
taking hold of mine.”
A heavy stroke of the knocker, followed by three light ones and a second
heavy stroke, produced us an answer from within. The door unclosed, and
by the light of a dim lamp, I discovered before me, as a sort of warden,
a little yellow, weather-beaten, skin-dried Frenchman, whom I had
frequently before seen at a fruit-shop in another part of the city. He
looked at me, however, without any sign of recognition--with a blank,
dull, indifferent countenance; motioned us forward in silence, and
reclosing the door, sunk into a chair immediately behind it. I followed
my companion through a passage which was unfathomably dark, up a flight
of stairs, which led us into a sort of refreshment room. Tables were
spread, with decanters, glasses, and tumblers upon them, that appeared
to be in continual use. In a recess, stood that evil convenience of
most American establishments, whether on land or sea, a liquor bar; its
shelves crowded with bottles, all of which seemed amply full, and ready
to complete the overthrow of the victim, which the other appliances of
such a dwelling must already have actively begun.
“Here you may take in the Dutch courage, Clifford, should you lack the
native. This, I know, is not the case with you, and yet the novelty of
one's situation frequently overcomes a sensitive mind like fear. Perhaps
a julep may be of use.”
“None for me. I need no farther stimulant than the mere sense of
movement. I take fire, like a wheel, by my own progress.”
“Pretty much the same case with myself. But I have been in the habit
of drinking here, of late, and too deeply. To-night, however, as I said
before, ends all these habits. If there is honey in the carcass, and
strength from the sleep, there is wisdom from the folly, and virtue
from the vice. There is a moral as well as a physical recoil, that most
certainly follows the overcharge; and really, speaking according to my
sincere conviction I never felt myself to be a better man, than just at
this moment when I am about to do that which my own sense of morality
fails altogether to justify. I do not know that I make you understand my
feelings; I scarcely understand them myself; but of this sort they are,
and I am really persuaded that I never felt in a better disposition to
be a good man and a working man than just at the close of a career which
has been equally profligate and idle.”
I think my companion can be understood. There seems, in fact very little
mystery in his moral progress. I understood him, but did not answer. I
was not anxious to keep up the ball of conversation which he had begun
with a spirit so mixed up of contradictions--so earnest yet so playful.
A deep sense of shame unquestionably lurked beneath his levity; and yet
I make no question that he felt in truth, and for the first time, that
degree of mental hardihood of which he boasted.
He advanced through the refreshment-room, to a door which led to an
apartment in an adjoining tenement. It was closed, but unfastened. The
sound of voices, an occasional buzz, or a slight murmur, came to our
ears from within; that of rattling dice and rolling balls was more
regular and more intelligible. Kingsley laid his hand upon the latch,
and looked round to me. His eye was kindled with a playful sort of
malicious light. A smile of pleasant bitterness was on his lips. He said
to me in a whisper:--
“Stake your money slowly. A Mexican is the lowest stake. Keep to that,
and lose as little as possible. You will soon see me sufficiently
busy, and I will endeavor to urge my labors forward, so as to make your
purgatory a short one. I shall only wait till I feel myself cheated in
the game, to begin that which I came for. See that I have fair play in
THAT, MON AMI, and I care very little about the other.”
He lifted the latch as he concluded, and I followed him into the
apartment.