Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0141/01411.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 14KB | 248 lines

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

Chapter LI

Reminiscences

     We left for St. Louis in the City of Baton Rouge, on a delightfully hot
day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished. I had
hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen, but got so pleasantly
involved in the social life of the town that I got nothing more than mere
five-minute talks with a couple of dozen of the craft.

     I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and
"straightened up" for the start - the boat pausing for a "good ready," in the
old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys equally in
the old-fashioned way.  Then we began to gather momentum, and presently were
fairly under way and booming along.  It was all as natural and familiar - and
so were the shoreward sights - as if there had been no break in my river life.
There was a "cub," and I judged that he would take the wheel now; and he did.
Captain Bixby stepped into the pilot- house.  Presently the cub closed up on
the rank of steamships.  He made me nervous, for he allowed too much water to
show between our boat and the ships.  I knew quite well what was going to
happen, because I could date back in my own life and inspect the record.  The
captain looked on, during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself,
and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth of
the ships. It was exactly the favor which he had done me, about a quarter of a
century before, in that same spot, the first time I ever steamed out of the
port of New Orleans.  It was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see
the thing repeated - with somebody else as victim.

     We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half -
much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water.

     The next morning I came on with the four-o'clock watch, and saw Ritchie
successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance the
marked chart devised and patented by Bixby himself.  This sufficiently
evidenced the great value of the chart.

     By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the reflection
of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundred yards away,
was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself.  The faint, spectral
trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog, were very pretty things to
see.

     We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg, and still
another about fifty miles below Memphis.  They had an old-fashioned energy
which had long been unfamiliar to me.  This third storm was accompanied by a
raging wind.  We tied up to the bank when we saw the tempest coming, and
everybody left the pilot-house but me.  The wind bent the young trees down,
exposing the pale underside of the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in
quick succession, thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this
side and that, and creating swift waves of alternating green and white,
according to the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced
after each other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats.  No color
that was visible anywhere was quite natural - all tints were charged with a
leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank overhead.  The river was leaden, all
distances the same; and even the far-reaching ranks of combing whitecaps were
dully shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions
marched.  The thunder-peals were constant and deafening; explosion followed
explosion with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew
steadily sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the ear; the lightning
was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted the eye
and set electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension shivering along
every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession.  The rain poured down in
amazing volume; the ear-splitting thunder-peals broke nearer and nearer; the
wind increased in fury and began to wrench off boughs and tree-tops and send
them sailing away through space; the pilot- house fell to rocking and
straining and cracking and surging, and I went down in the hold to see what
time it was.

     People boast a good deal about Alpine thunderstorms; but the storms which
I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not the equals of some which I
have seen in the Mississippi valley.  I may not have seen the Alps do their
best, of course, and if they can beat the Mississippi, I don't wish to.

     On this up-trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long,
which had been formed during the past nineteen years.  Since there was so much
time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction
of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe
through in six days?  It is likely that if more time had been taken, in the
first place, the world would have been made right, and this ceaseless
improving and repairing would not be necessary now.  But if you hurry a world
or a house, you are nearly sure to find out by and by that you have left out a
towhead, or a broom-closet, or some other little convenience, here and there,
which has got to be supplied, no matter how much expense or vexation it may
cost.

     We had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was
observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees with the
intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always
produced; hundred of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining
green foliage, and went careering hither and thither through the white rays,
and often a song-bird tuned up and fell to singing.  We judged that they
mistook this superb artificial day for the genuine article.

     We had a delightful trip in that thoroughly well-ordered steamer, and
regretted that it was accomplished so speedily.  By means of diligence and
activity, we managed to hunt out nearly all the old friends.  One was missing,
however; he went to his reward, whatever it was, two years ago.  But I found
out all about him.  His case helped me to realize how lasting can be the
effect of a very trifling occurrence. When he was an apprentice-blacksmith in
our village, and I a school-boy, a couple of young Englishmen came to the town
and sojourned awhile; and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery
and did the Richard III. sword-fight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow,
in the presence of the village boys.  This blacksmith cub was there, and the
histrionic poison entered his bones.  This vast, lumbering, ignorant,
dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably.  He disappeared, and
presently turned up in St. Louis.  I ran across him there, by and by. He was
standing musing on a street-corner, with his right hand on his hip, the thumb
of his left supporting his chin, face bowed and frowning, slouch hat pulled
down over his forehead - imagining himself to be Othello or some such
character, and imagining that the passing crowd marked his tragic bearing and
were awe-struck.

     I joined him, and tried to get him down out of the clouds, but did not
succeed.  However, he casually informed me, presently, that he was a member of
the Walnut Street Theater company - and he tried to say it with indifference,
but the indifference was thin, and a mighty exultation showed through it.  He
said he was cast for a part in "Julius Caesar," for that night, and if I
should come I would see him.  If I should come! I said I wouldn't miss it if I
were dead.

     I went away stupefied with astonishment, and saying to myself, "How
strange it is!  we always thought this fellow a fool; yet the moment he comes
to a great city, where intelligence and appreciation abound, the talent
concealed in this shabby napkin is at once discovered, and promptly welcomed
and honored."

     But I came away from the theater that night disappointed and offended;
for I had had no glimpse of my hero, and his name was not in the bills.  I met
him on the street the next morning, and before I could speak, he asked:

     "Did you see me?"

     "No, you weren't there."

     He looked surprised and disappointed.  He said:

     "Yes, I was.  Indeed, I was.  I was a Roman soldier."

     "Which one?"

     "Why, didn't you see them Roman soldiers that stood back there in a rank,
and sometimes marched in procession around the stage?"

     "Do you mean the Roman army? - those six sandaled roustabouts in
nightshirts, with tin shields and helmets, that marched around treading on
each other's heels, in charge of a spider-legged consumptive dressed like
themselves?"

     "That's it!  that's it!  I was one of them Roman soldiers.  I was the
next to the last one.  A half a year ago I used to always be the last one; but
I've been promoted."

     Well, they told me that that poor fellow remained a Roman soldier to the
last - a matter of thirty-four years.  Sometimes they cast him for a "speaking
part," but not an elaborate one.  He could be trusted to go and say, "My lord,
the carriage waits," but if they ventured to add a sentence or two to this,
his memory felt the strain and he was likely to miss fire.  Yet, poor devil,
he had been patiently studying the part of Hamlet for more than thirty years,
and he lived and died in the belief that some day he would be invited to play
it!

     And this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young Englishmen to
our village such ages and ages ago!  What noble horseshoes this man might have
made, but for those Englishmen; and what an inadequate Roman soldier he did
make!

     A day or two after we reached St. Louis, I was walking along Fourth
Street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me, then
stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow, and finally
said with deep asperity:

     "Look here, have you got that drink yet?"

     A maniac, I judged, at first.  But all in a flash I recognized him. I
made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me, and answered as
sweetly and winningly as ever I knew how:

     "Been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place
where they keep it.  Come in and help!"

     He softened, and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was agreeable.
He said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all his affairs aside
and turned out, resolved to find me or die; and make me answer that question
satisfactorily, or kill me; though the most of his late asperity had been
rather counterfeit than otherwise.

     This meeting brought back to me the St. Louis riots of about thirty years
ago.  I spent a week there, at that time, in a boarding-house, and had this
young fellow for a neighbor across the hall.  We saw some of the fightings and
killings; and by and by we went one night to an armory where two hundred young
men had met, upon call, to be armed and go forth against the rioters, under
command of a military man.  We drilled till about ten o'clock at night; then
news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town, and
were sweeping everything before them.  Our column moved at once.  It was a
very hot night, and my musket was very heavy.  We marched and marched; and the
nearer we approached the seat of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I
got.  I was behind my friend; so finally, I asked him to hold my musket while
I dropped out and got a drink.  Then I branched off and went home.  I was not
feeling any solicitude about him of course, because I knew he was so well
armed now that he could take care of himself without any trouble.  If I had
had any doubts about that, I would have borrowed another musket for him.  I
left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this grizzled man had not
happened to encounter my name in the papers the other day in St. Louis, and
felt moved to seek me out, I should have carried to my grave a heart-
torturing uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or
not.  I ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; I know that. And I would
have inquired, if I had had the muskets; but, in the circumstances, he seemed
better fixed to conduct the investigations than I was.

     One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis, the Globe- Democrat
came out with a couple of pages of Sunday statistics, whereby it appeared that
119,448 St. Louis people attended the morning and evening church services the
day before, and 23,102 children attended Sunday- school.  Thus 142,550
persons, out of the city's total of 400,000 population, respected the day
religiouswise.  I found these statistics, in a condensed form, in a telegram
of the Associated Press, and preserved them.  They made it apparent that St.
Louis was in a higher state of grace than she could have claimed to be in my
time.  But now that I canvass the figures narrowly, I suspect that the
telegraph mutilated them.  It cannot be that there are more than 150,000
Catholics in the town; the other 250,000 must be classified as Protestants.
Out of these 250,000, according to this questionable telegram, only 26,362
attended church and Sunday-school, while out of the 150,000 Catholics, 116,188
went to church and Sunday-school.