“Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-potato vine,Turkey came along and yanked him from behind.”
The main point in the lesson was in giving to the word “yanked” the proper expression and emphasis, accompanied by a sweep of the fingers across the strings. With serious face and deep earnestness Fritz in his broken English would attempt these lines, while his teacher would bend over and hold his sides with laughter at each ridiculous effort. Without intending it, Fritz had his revenge. One day his tormentor's hand was caught in the press when the German boy was turning the wheel. Sam called to him to stop, but the boy's mind was slow to grasp the situation. The hand was badly wounded, though no bones were broken. In due time it recovered, its power and dexterity, but the trace of the scars remained.
Orion's printing-office was not a prosperous one; he had not the gift of prosperity in any form. When he found it difficult to pay his brother's wages, he took him into partnership, which meant that Sam got no wages at all, barely a living, for the office could not keep its head above water.
The junior partner was not disturbed, however. He cared little for money in those days, beyond his actual needs, and these were modest enough. His mother, now with Pamela, was amply provided for. Orion himself tells how his business dwindled away. He printed a Keokuk directory, but it did not pay largely. He was always too eager for the work; too low in his bid for it. Samuel Clemens in this directory is set down as “an antiquarian” a joke, of course, though the point of it is now lost.
Only two of his Keokuk letters have been preserved. The first indicates the general disorder of the office and a growing dissatisfaction. It is addressed to his mother and sister and bears date of June 10, 1856.
I don't like to work at too many things at once. They take Henryand Dick away from me, too. Before we commenced the Directory,—[Orion printed two editions of the directory. This was probablythe second one.]—I could tell before breakfast just how much workcould be done during the day, and manage accordingly—but now, theythrow all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from theirwork.... I am not getting along well with the job-work. I can'twork blindly—without system. I gave Dick a job yesterday, which Icalculated he could set in two hours and I could work off on thepress in three, and therefore just finish it by supper-time, but hewas transferred to the Directory, and the job, promised thismorning, remains untouched. Through all the great pressure of job-work lately, I never before failed in a promise of the kind...
The other letter is dated two months later, August 5th. It was written to Henry, who was visiting in St. Louis or Hannibal at the time, and introduces the first mention of the South American fever, which now possessed the writer. Lynch and Herndon had completed their survey of the upper Amazon, and Lieutenant Herndon's account of the exploration was being widely read. Poring over the book nights, young Clemens had been seized with a desire to go to the headwaters of the South American river, there to collect coca and make a fortune. All his life he was subject to such impulses as that, and ways and means were not always considered. It did not occur to him that it would be difficult to get to the Amazon and still more difficult to ascend the river. It was his nature to see results with a dazzling largeness that blinded him to the detail of their achievement. In the “Turning-point” article already mentioned he refers to this. He says:
That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperamenthas not changed by even a shade. I have been punished many and manya time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, butthese tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thingcommanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward.Always violently. When I am reflecting on these occasions, evendeaf persons can hear me think.
In the letter to Henry we see that his resolve was already made, his plans matured; also that Orion had not as yet been taken into full confidence.
Ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it fromOrion. She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St.Louis and went to New York—I can start for New York and go to SouthAmerica.
He adds that Orion had promised him fifty or one hundred dollars, but that he does not depend upon it, and will make other arrangements. He fears obstacles may be put in his way, and he will bring various influences to bear.
I shall take care that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied withSouth American books: They have Herndon's report now. Ward and theDr. and myself will hold a grand consultation to-night at theoffice. We have agreed that no more shall be admitted into ourcompany.
He had enlisted those two adventurers in his enterprise: a Doctor Martin and the young man, Ward. They were very much in earnest, but the start was not made as planned, most likely for want of means.
Young Clemens, however, did not give up the idea. He made up his mind to work in the direction of his desire, following his trade and laying by money for the venture. But Fate or Providence or Accident—whatever we may choose to call the unaccountable—stepped in just then, and laid before him the means of turning another sharp corner in his career. One of those things happened which we refuse to accept in fiction as possible; but fact has a smaller regard for the credibilities.
As in the case of the Joan of Arc episode (and this adds to its marvel), it was the wind that brought the talismanic gift. It was a day in early November—bleak, bitter, and gusty, with curling snow; most persons were indoors. Samuel Clemens, going down Main Street, saw a flying bit of paper pass him and lodge against the side of a building. Something about it attracted him and he captured it. It was a fifty-dollar bill. He had never seen one before, but he recognized it. He thought he must be having a pleasant dream.
The temptation came to pocket his good-fortune and say nothing. His need of money was urgent, but he had also an urgent and troublesome conscience; in the end he advertised his find.
“I didn't describe it very particularly, and I waited in daily fear that the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. By and by I couldn't stand it any longer. My conscience had gotten all that was coming to it. I felt that I must take that money out of danger.”
In the “Turning-point” article he says: “I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day,” a statement which we may accept with a literary discount.
As a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for the money. It may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the wind from some counting-room table. It may have materialized out of the unseen—who knows? At all events it carried him the first stage of a journey, the end of which he little dreamed.
He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to New York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points), but first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a far journey and along absence in view. Jane Clemens made him renew his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. He had expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea—a literary idea—came to him, and he returned to Keokuk. The Saturday Post, a Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary airs. He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of his travels to the Post—for, a consideration. He may have had a still larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have been in his consciousness. Rees agreed to take letters from him at five dollars each—good payment for that time and place. The young traveler, jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis according to his first letter in the Post.—[Supplied by Thomas Rees, of the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son of George Rees named.]
This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a promising literary production. It was written in the exaggerated dialect then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between. The genius that a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered feebly enough at twenty-one. The letter is a burlesque account of the trip to Cincinnati. A brief extract from it, as characteristic as any, will serve.
I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close ontothe Laclede House, and bought about a quire o' yaller paper, cut upinto tickets—one for each railroad in the United States, I thought,but I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Linewas left out—and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down tothe boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin' it open andshakin' out the contents, consisting of “guides” to Chicago, and“guides” to Cincinnati, and travelers' guides, and all kinds of sichbooks, not excepting a “guide to heaven,” which last aint much useto a Teller in Chicago, I kin tell you. Finally, that fast packetquit ringing her bell, and started down the river—but she hadn'tgone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, wharshe stuck till plum one o'clock, spite of the Captain's swearin'—and they had to set the whole crew to cussin' at last afore theygot her off.
This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a little later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward. Only careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain. The letters were signed “Snodgrass,” and there are but two of them. The second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a baby left on his hands.
From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. At all events, the second concluded the series. They are mainly important in that they are the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first for which he received a cash return.
He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857. That winter in Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable association—one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens's general interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain views and philosophies which he never forgot.
He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace people, with one exception. This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly unlike him—without humor or any comprehension of it. Yet meeting on the common plane of intellect, the two became friends. Clemens spent his evenings in Macfarlane's room until the clock struck ten; then Macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in Philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended.
Macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary. He had studied these and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. He never talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out that would betray Macfarlane's trade; but this never happened.
What he did learn was that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher besides. He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word in the English dictionary, and he made it good. The younger man tried repeatedly to discover a word that Macfarlane could not define.
Perhaps Macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for he never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his companion never tired of listening. This Scotch philosopher did not always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and strikingly on his own account. That was a good while before Darwin and Wallace gave out—their conclusions on the Descent of Man; yet Macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy. He went even further: Life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a few microscopic seed-germs—from one, perhaps, planted by the Creator in the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on an ascending scale had finally produced man. Macfarlane said that the scheme had stopped there, and failed; that man had retrograded; that man's heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom: that man was the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness—almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness. He said that man's intellect was a depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him in a rank far below the other beasts, though it enabled him to keep them in servitude and captivity, along with many members of his own race.
They were long, fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens listened to that winter in Macfarlane's room, and those who knew the real Mark Twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings left their impress upon him for life.
When spring came, with budding life and quickening impulses; when the trees in the parks began to show a hint of green, the Amazonian idea developed afresh, and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his expedition. He had saved a little money—enough to take him to New Orleans—and he decided to begin his long trip with a peaceful journey down the Mississippi, for once, at least, to give himself up to that indolent luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large a part of his early dreams.
The Ohio River steamers were not the most sumptuous craft afloat, but they were slow and hospitable. The winter had been bleak and hard. “Spring fever” and a large love of indolence had combined in that drowsy condition which makes one willing to take his time.
Mark Twain tells us in Life on the Mississippi that he “ran away,” vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory. This is a literary statement. The pilot ambition had never entirely died; but it was coca and the Amazon that were uppermost in his head when he engaged passage on the Paul Jones for New Orleans, and so conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. He bade good-by to Macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew, the gang-plank was hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was to continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years—four marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that followed them.
In the Mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then a boy of perhaps seventeen. Writing from that standpoint he records incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others. He was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one years old, for it was in April, 1857, that he went aboard the Paul Jones; and he was fairly familiar with steamboats and the general requirements of piloting. He had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots; he had heard the talk of their trade. One at least of the Bowen boys was already on the river while Sam Clemens was still a boy in Hannibal, and had often been home to air his grandeur and dilate on the marvel of his work. That learning the river was no light task Sam Clemens very well knew. Nevertheless, as the little boat made its drowsy way down the river into lands that grew ever pleasanter with advancing spring, the old “permanent ambition” of boyhood stirred again, and the call of the far-away Amazon, with its coca and its variegated zoology, grew faint.
Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, then a man of thirty-two, still living (1910) and at the wheel,—[The writer of this memoir interviewed Mr. Bixby personally, and has followed his phrasing throughout.]—was looking out over the bow at the head of Island No. 35 when he heard a slow, pleasant voice say:
“Good morning.”
Bixby was a clean-cut, direct, courteous man.
“Good morning, sir,” he said, briskly, without looking around.
As a rule Mr. Bixby did not care for visitors in the pilot-house. This one presently came up and stood a little behind him.
“How would you like a young man to learn the river?” he said.
The pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender, loose-limbed young fellow with a fair, girlish complexion and a great tangle of auburn hair.
“I wouldn't like it. Cub pilots are more trouble than they're worth. A great deal more trouble than profit.”
The applicant was not discouraged.
“I am a printer by trade,” he went on, in his easy, deliberate way. “It doesn't agree with me. I thought I'd go to South America.”
Bixby kept his eye on the river; but a note of interest crept into his voice.
“What makes you pull your words that way?” (“pulling” being the river term for drawling), he asked.
The young man had taken a seat on the visitors' bench.
“You'll have to ask my mother,” he said, more slowly than ever. “She pulls hers, too.”
Pilot Bixby woke up and laughed; he had a keen sense of humor, and the manner of the reply amused him. His guest made another advance.
“Do you know the Bowen boys?” he asked—“pilots in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade?”
“I know them well—all three of them. William Bowen did his first steering for me; a mighty good boy, too. Had a Testament in his pocket when he came aboard; in a week's time he had swapped it for a pack of cards. I know Sam, too, and Bart.”
“Old schoolmates of mine in Hannibal. Sam and Will especially were my chums.”
“Come over and stand by the side of me,” he said. “What is your name?”
The applicant told him, and the two stood looking at the sunlit water.
“Do you drink?”
“No.”
“Do you gamble?”
“No, Sir.”
“Do you swear?”
“Not for amusement; only under pressure.”
“Do you chew?”
“No, sir, never; but I must smoke.”
“Did you ever do any steering?” was Bixby's next question.
“I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess.”
“Very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. Keep her as she is—toward that lower cottonwood, snag.”
Bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. He sat down on the bench and kept a careful eye on the course. By and by he said:
“There is just one way that I would take a young man to learn the river: that is, for money.”
“What do you charge?”
“Five hundred dollars, and I to be at no expense whatever.”
In those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or “cub,” board free. Mr. Bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port, or for incidentals. His terms looked rather discouraging.
“I haven't got five hundred dollars in money,” Sam said; “I've got a lot of Tennessee land worth twenty-five cents an acre; I'll give you two thousand acres of that.”
Bixby dissented.
“No; I don't want any unimproved real estate. I have too much already.”
Sam reflected upon the amount he could probably borrow from Pamela's husband without straining his credit.
“Well, then, I'll give you one hundred dollars cash and the rest when I earn it.”
Something about this young man had won Horace Bixby's heart. His slow, pleasant speech; his unhurried, quiet manner with the wheel, his evident sincerity of purpose—these were externals, but beneath them the pilot felt something of that quality of mind or heart which later made the world love Mark Twain. The terms proposed were agreed upon. The deferred payments were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and was receiving pilot's wages. During Mr. Bixby's daylight watches his pupil was often at the wheel, that trip, while the pilot sat directing him and nursing his sore foot. Any literary ambitions Samuel Clemens may have had grew dim; by the time they had reached New Orleans he had almost forgotten he had been a printer, and when he learned that no ship would be sailing to the Amazon for an indefinite period the feeling grew that a directing hand had taken charge of his affairs.
From New Orleans his chief did not return to Cincinnati, but went to St. Louis, taking with him his new cub, who thought it fine, indeed, to come steaming up to that great city with its thronging water-front; its levee fairly packed with trucks, drays, and piles of freight, the whole flanked with a solid mile of steamboats lying side by side, bow a little up-stream, their belching stacks reared high against the blue—a towering front of trade. It was glorious to nose one's way to a place in that stately line, to become a unit, however small, of that imposing fleet. At St. Louis Sam borrowed from Mr. Moffett the funds necessary to make up his first payment, and so concluded his contract. Then, when he suddenly found himself on a fine big boat, in a pilot-house so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain—a “sumptuous temple”—his happiness seemed complete.
In his Mississippi book Mark Twain has given us a marvelous exposition of the science of river-piloting, and of the colossal task of acquiring and keeping a knowledge requisite for that work. He has not exaggerated this part of the story of developments in any detail; he has set down a simple confession.
Serenely enough he undertook the task of learning twelve hundred miles of the great changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features. As already suggested, he had at least an inkling of what that undertaking meant. His statement that he “supposed all that a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river” is not to be accepted literally. Still he could hardly have realized the full majesty of his task; nobody could do that—not until afterward.
Horace Bixby was a “lightning” pilot with a method of instruction as direct and forcible as it was effective. He was a small man, hot and quick-firing, though kindly, too, and gentle when he had blown off. After one rather pyrotechnic misunderstanding as to the manner of imparting and acquiring information he said:
“My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing put it down right away. There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.”
So Sam Clemens got the little book, and presently it “fairly bristled” with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, and reaches, but it made his heart ache to think that he had only half of the river set down; for, as the “watches” were four hours off and four hours on, there were long gaps during which he had slept.
The little note-book still exists—thin and faded, with black water-proof covers—its neat, tiny, penciled notes still, telling, the story of that first trip. Most of them are cryptographic abbreviations, not readily deciphered now. Here and there is an easier line:
MERIWEATHER'S BEND1/4 less 3—[Depth of water. One-quarter less than threefathoms.]——run shape of upper bar and go into the low place inwillows about 200(ft.) lower down than last year.
One simple little note out of hundreds far more complicated. It would take days for the average mind to remember even a single page of such statistics. And those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep, they are still there, and somehow, after more than fifty years, the old heart-ache is still in them. He got a new book, maybe, for the next trip, and laid this one away.
There is but one way to account for the fact that the man whom the world knew as Mark Twain—dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details—ever persisted in acquiring knowledge like that—in the vast, the absolutely limitless quantity necessary to Mississippi piloting. It lies in the fact that he loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and not only the river, but a steam boat; and still more, perhaps, the freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige. Wherever he has written of the river—and in one way or another he was always writing of it we feel the claim of the old captivity and that it still holds him. In the Huckleberry Finn book, during those nights and days with Huck and Nigger Jim on the raft—whether in stormlit blackness, still noontide, or the lifting mists of morning—we can fairly “smell” the river, as Huck himself would say, and we know that it is because the writer loved it with his heart of hearts and literally drank in its environment and atmosphere during those halcyon pilot days.
So, in his love lay the secret of his marvelous learning, and it is recorded (not by himself, but by his teacher) that he was an apt pupil. Horace Bixby has more than once declared:
“Sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river. He had a fine memory and never forgot anything I told him.”
Mark Twain himself records a different opinion of his memory, with the size of its appalling task. It can only be presented in his own words. In the pages quoted he had mastered somewhat of the problem, and had begun to take on airs. His chief was a constant menace at such moments:
One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler:“What is the shape of Walnut Bend?”He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion ofprotoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't knowit had any particular shape. My gun-powdery chief went off with abang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he wasout of adjectives.... I waited. By and by he said:“My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It isall there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything isblotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in thenight that it has in the daytime.”“How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?”“How do you follow a hall at home in the dark? Because you know theshape of it. You can't see it.”“Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million triflingvariations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as wellas I know the shape of the front hall at home?”“On my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever didknow the shapes of the halls in his own house.”“I wish I was dead!”“Now, I don't want to discourage you, but——”“Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.”“You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting aroundit. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that, if youdidn't know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away fromevery bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of itfor a solid cape; and, you see, you would be getting scared to deathevery fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards fromshore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it.You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactlywhere it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you arecoming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is avery different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on astarlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, andmighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines, onlyyou know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seemsto be a solid, straight wall (you know very well that in realitythere is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way foryou. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there'sone of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't anyparticular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head ofthe oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds ofmoonlight change the shape of the river in different ways.You see——”“Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape ofthe river according to all these five hundred thousand differentways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would makeme stoop-shouldered.”“No! you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it withsuch absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shapethat's in your head, and never mind the one that's before youreyes.”“Very well, I'll try it; but, after I have learned it, can I dependon it? Will it keep the same form, and not go fooling around?”Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W. came in to take the watch, andhe said:“Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's island, and all thatcountry clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks arecaving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why,you wouldn't know the point about 40. You can go up inside the oldsycamore snag now.”So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changingshape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemedpretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a manhad got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know;and the other was that he must learn it all over again in adifferent way every twenty-four hours.I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all theeluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind orhands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp,wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead ofme and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; andjust as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction we would drawup to it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away andfold back into the bank!It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in allthe different ways that could be thought of—upside down, wrong endfirst, inside out, fore-and-aft, and “thort-ships,”—and then knowwhat to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I setabout it. In the course of time I began to get the best of thisknotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more.Mr. Bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again. Heopened on me after this fashion:“How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-The-Wall, trip before last?”I considered this an outrage. I said:“Every trip down and up the leadsmen are singing through thattangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How doyou reckon I can remember such a mess as that?”“My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember theexact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had theshoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal placesbetween St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoalsoundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundingsand marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike.You must keep them separate.”When I came to myself again, I said:“When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead,and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I wantto retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush;I'm only fit for a roustabout. I haven't got brains enough to be apilot; and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry themaround, unless I went on crutches.”“Now drop that! When I say I'll learn a man the river I mean it.And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him.”
We have quoted at length from this chapter because it seems of very positive importance here. It is one of the most luminous in the book so far as the mastery of the science of piloting is concerned, and shows better than could any other combination of words something of what is required of the learner. It does not cover the whole problem, by any means—Mark Twain himself could not present that; and even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade, it is still incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles.
He acquired other kinds of knowledge. As the streets of Hannibal in those early days, and the printing-offices of several cities, had taught him human nature in various unvarnished aspects, so the river furnished an added course to that vigorous education. Morally, its atmosphere could not be said to be an improvement on the others. Navigation in the West had begun with crafts of the flat-boat type—their navigators rude, hardy men, heavy drinkers, reckless fighters, barbaric in their sports, coarse in their wit, profane in everything. Steam-boatmen were the natural successors of these pioneers—a shade less coarse, a thought less profane, a veneer less barbaric. But these things were mainly “above stairs.” You had but to scratch lightly a mate or a deck-hand to find the old keel-boatman savagery. Captains were overlords, and pilots kings in this estate; but they were not angels. In Life on the Mississippi Clemens refers to his chief's explosive vocabulary and tells us how he envied the mate's manner of giving an order. It was easier to acquire those things than piloting, and, on the whole, quicker. One could improve upon them, too, with imagination and wit and a natural gift for terms. That Samuel Clemens maintained his promise as to drink and cards during those apprentice days is something worth remembering; and if he did not always restrict his profanity to moments of severe pressure or sift the quality of his wit, we may also remember that he was an extreme example of a human being, in that formative stage which gathers all as grist, later to refine it for the uses and delights of men.
He acquired a vast knowledge of human character. He says:
In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarlyacquainted with all the different types of human nature that are tobe found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warmpersonal interest in him, for the reason that I have, known himbefore—met him on the river.
Undoubtedly the river was a great school for the study of life's broader philosophies and humors: philosophies that avoid vague circumlocution and aim at direct and sure results; humors of the rugged and vigorous sort that in Europe are known as “American” and in America are known as “Western.” Let us be thankful that Mark Twain's school was no less than it was—and no more.
The demands of the Missouri River trade took Horace Bixby away from the Mississippi, somewhat later, and he consigned his pupil, according to custom, to another pilot—it is not certain, now, to just which pilot, but probably to Zeb Leavenworth or Beck Jolly, of the John J. Roe. The Roe was a freight-boat, “as slow as an island and as comfortable as a farm.” In fact, the Roe was owned and conducted by farmers, and Sam Clemens thought if John Quarles's farm could be set afloat it would greatly resemble that craft in the matter of good-fellowship, hospitality, and speed. It was said of her that up-stream she could even beat an island, though down-stream she could never quite overtake the current, but was a “love of a steamboat” nevertheless. The Roe was not licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a dozen “family guests” aboard, and there was a big boiler-deck for dancing and moonlight frolics, also a piano in the cabin. The young pilot sometimes played on the piano and sang to his music songs relating to the “grasshopper on the sweet-potato vine,” or to an old horse by the name of Methusalem:
Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,A long time ago.
There were forty-eight stanzas about this ancient horse, all pretty much alike; but the assembled company was not likely to be critical, and his efforts won him laurels. He had a heavenly time on the John J. Roe, and then came what seemed inferno by contrast. Bixby returned, made a trip or two, then left and transferred him again, this time to a man named Brown. Brown had a berth on the fine new steamer Pennsylvania, one of the handsomest boats on the river, and young Clemens had become a fine steersman, so it is not unlikely that both men at first were gratified by the arrangement.
But Brown was a fault-finding, tyrannical chief, ignorant, vulgar, and malicious. In the Mississippi book the author gives his first interview with Brown, also his last one. For good reasons these occasions were burned into his memory, and they may be accepted as substantially correct. Brown had an offensive manner. His first greeting was a surly question.
“Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?”
“Bixby” was usually pronounced “Bigsby” on the river, but Brown made it especially obnoxious and followed it up with questions and comments and orders still more odious. His subordinate soon learned to detest him thoroughly. It was necessary, however, to maintain a respectable deportment—custom, discipline, even the law, required that—but it must have been a hard winter and spring the young steersman put in during those early months of 1858, restraining himself from the gratification of slaying Brown. Time would bring revenge—a tragic revenge and at a fearful cost; but he could not guess that, and he put in his spare time planning punishments of his own.
I could imagine myself killing Brown; there was no law against that,and that was the thing I always used to do the moment I was abed.Instead of going over my river in my mind, as was my duty, I threwbusiness aside for pleasure and killed Brown. I killed Brown everynight for a month; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in newand picturesque ones—ways that were sometimes surprising forfreshness of design and ghastly for situation and environment.
Once when Brown had been more insulting than usual his subordinate went to bed and killed him in “seventeen different ways—all of them new.”
He had made an effort at first to please Brown, but it was no use. Brown was the sort of a man that refused to be pleased; no matter how carefully his subordinate steered, he as always at him.
“Here,” he would shout, “where are you going now? Pull her down! Pull her down! Don't you hear me? Dod-derned mud-cat!”
His assistant lost all desire to be obliging to such a person and even took occasion now and then to stir him up. One day they were steaming up the river when Brown noticed that the boat seemed to be heading toward some unusual point.
“Here, where are you heading for now?” he yelled. “What in nation are you steerin' at, anyway? Deyned numskull!”
“Why,” said Sam, in unruffled deliberation, “I didn't see much else I could steer for, and I was heading for that white heifer on the bank.”
“Get away from that wheel! and get outen this pilothouse!” yelled Brown. “You ain't fit to become no pilot!”
Which was what Sam wanted. Any temporary relief from the carping tyranny of Brown was welcome.
He had been on the river nearly a year now, and, though universally liked and accounted a fine steersman, he was receiving no wages. There had been small need of money for a while, for he had no board to pay; but clothes wear out at last, and there were certain incidentals. The Pennsylvania made a round trip in about thirty-five days, with a day or two of idle time at either end. The young pilot found that he could get night employment, watching freight on the New Orleans levee, and thus earn from two and a half to three dollars for each night's watch. Sometimes there would be two nights, and with a capital of five or six dollars he accounted himself rich.
“It was a desolate experience,” he said, long afterward, “watching there in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir. But it was not a profitless one: I used to have inspirations as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another.”
Many of the curious tales in the latter half of the Mississippi book came out of those long night-watches. It was a good time to think of such things.