Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0136/01365.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 9KB | 150 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01365}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter V}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{mate
new
now
way

}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter V

I Want To Be A Cub-Pilot

     Months afterward the hope within me struggled to a reluctant death, and I
found myself without an ambition.  But I was ashamed to go home.  I was in
Cincinnati, and I set to work to map out a new career.  I had been reading
about the recent exploration of the river Amazon by an expedition sent out by
our government.  It was said that the expedition, owing to difficulties, had
not thoroughly explored a part of the country lying about the headwaters, some
four thousand miles from the mouth of the river.  It was only about fifteen
hundred miles from Cincinnati to New Orleans, where I could doubtless get a
ship.  I had thirty dollars left; I would go and complete the exploration of
the Amazon.  This was all the thought I gave to the subject.  I never was
great in matters of detail. I packed my valise, and took passage on an ancient
tub called the Paul Jones, for New Orleans.  For the sum of sixteen dollars I
had the scarred and tarnished splendors of "her" main saloon principally to
myself, for she was not a creature to attract the eye of wiser travelers.

     When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad Ohio, I
became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration.  I was a traveler!
A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before.  I had an exultant sense
of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which I never have felt
in so uplifting a degree since.  I was in such a glorified condition that all
ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the
untraveled with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it.
Still, when we stopped at villages and wood-yards, I could not help lolling
carelessly upon the railings of the boiler-deck to enjoy the envy of the
country boys on the bank.  If they did not seem to discover me, I presently
sneezed to attract their attention, or moved to a position where they could
not help seeing me. And as soon as I knew they saw me I gaped and stretched,
and gave other signs of being mightily bored with traveling.

     I kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the wind and the sun
could strike me, because I wanted to get the bronzed and weather- beaten look
of an old traveler.  Before the second day was half gone I experienced a joy
which filled me with the purest gratitude; for I saw that the skin had begun
to blister and peel off my face and neck.  I wished that the boys and girls at
home could see me now.

     We reached Louisville in time - at least the neighborhood of it.  We
stuck hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river, and lay there
four days.  I was now beginning to feel a strong sense of being a part of the
boat's family, a sort of infant son to the captain and younger brother to the
officers.  There is no estimating the pride I took in this grandeur, or the
affection that began to swell and grow in me for those people.  I could not
know how the lordly steamboatman scorns that sort of presumption in a mere
landsman.  I particularly longed to acquire the least trifle of notice from
the big stormy mate, and I was on the alert for an opportunity to do him a
service to that end.  It came at last.  The riotous pow-wow of setting a spar
was going on down on the forecastle, and I went down there and stood around in
the way - or mostly skipping out of it - till the mate suddenly roared a
general order for somebody to bring him a capstan bar.  I sprang to his side
and said: "Tell me where it is - I'll fetch it!"

     If a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the Emperor of
Russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than the mate was.  He
even stopped swearing.  He stood and stared down at me. It took him ten
seconds to scrape his disjointed remains together again. Then he said
impressively: "Well, if this don't beat h - l!" and turned to his work with
the air of a man who had been confronted with a problem too abstruse for
solution.

     I crept away, and courted solitude for the rest of the day.  I did not go
to dinner; I stayed away from supper until everybody else had finished.  I did
not feel so much like a member of the boat's family now as before.  However,
my spirits returned, in instalments, as we pursued our way down the river.  I
was sorry I hated the mate so, because it was not in (young) human nature not
to admire him.  He was huge and muscular, his face was bearded and whiskered
all over; he had a red woman and a blue woman tattooed on his right arm - one
on each side of a blue anchor with a red rope to it; and in the matter of
profanity he was sublime. When he was getting out cargo at a landing, I was
always where I could see and hear.  He felt all the majesty of his great
position, and made the world feel it, too.  When he gave even the simplest
order, he discharged it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long,
reverberating peal of profanity thundering after it.  I could not help
contrasting the way in which the average landsman would give an order with the
mate's way of doing it.  If the landsman should wish the gang-plank moved a
foot farther forward, he would probably say: "James, or William, one of you
push that plank forward, please"; but put the mate in his place, and he would
roar out: "Here, now, start that gang-plank for'ard!  Lively, now! What're you
about!  Snatch it!  snatch it!  There!  there!  Aft again! aft again!  Don't
you hear me?  Dash it to dash!  are you going to sleep over it!  'Vast
heaving.  'Vast heaving, I tell you!  Going to heave it clear astern?  Where
're you going with that barrel!  for'ard with it 'fore I make you swallow it,
you dash-dash-dash-dashed split between a tired mud-turtle and a crippled
hearse-horse!"

     I wished I could talk like that.

     When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn off, I
began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected with the boat -
the night watchman.  He snubbed my advances at first, but I presently ventured
to offer him a new chalk pipe, and that softened him. So he allowed me to sit
with him by the big bell on the hurricane-deck, and in time he melted into
conversation.  He could not well have helped it, I hung with such homage on
his words and so plainly showed that I felt honored by his notice.  He told me
the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glided by them in the
solemnity of the night, under the winking stars, and by and by got to talking
about himself.  He seemed over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six
dollars a week - or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I.
But I drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might have moved
mountains if it had been applied judiciously.  What was it to me that he was
soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin?  What was it to me that his grammar
was bad, his construction worse, and his profanity so void of art that it was
an element of weakness rather than strength in his conversation?  He was a
wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me. As he
mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped upon the lantern in his
lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy.  He said he was the son of an English
nobleman - either an earl or an alderman, he could not remember which, but
believed was both; his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated
him from the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent to
"one of them old, ancient colleges" - he couldn't remember which; and by and
by his father died and his mother seized the property and "shook" him, as he
phrased it.  After his mother shook him, members of the nobility with whom he
was acquainted used their influence to get him the position of "loblolly-boy
in a ship"; and from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date and
locality and branched out into a narrative that bristled all along with
incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed, and so
crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and unconscious
personal villainies, that I sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering,
worshipping.

     It was a sore blight to find out afterward that he was a low, vulgar,
ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds
of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels,
until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into this yarn, and then
gone on telling it to fledglings like me, until he had come to believe it
himself.