Of course, life with Brown was not all sorrow. At either end of the trip there was respite and recreation. In St. Louis, at Pamela's there was likely to be company: Hannibal friends mostly, schoolmates—girls, of course. At New Orleans he visited friendly boats, especially the John J. Roe, where he was generously welcomed. One such visit on the Roe he never forgot. A young girl was among the boat's guests that trip—another Laura, fifteen, winning, delightful. They met, and were mutually attracted; in the life of each it was one of those bright spots which are likely to come in youth: one of those sudden, brief periods of romance, love—call it what you will the thing that leads to marriage, if pursued.
“I was not four inches from that girl's elbow during our waking hours for the next three days.”
Then came a sudden interruption: Zeb Leavenworth came flying aft shouting:
“The Pennsylvania is backing out.”
A flutter of emotion, a fleeting good-by, a flight across the decks, a flying leap from romance back to reality, and it was all over. He wrote her, but received no reply. He never saw her again, never heard from her for forty-eight years, when both were married, widowed, and old. She had not received his letter.
Even on the Pennsylvania life had its interests. A letter dated March 9, 1858, recounts a delightfully dangerous night-adventure in the steamer's yawl, hunting for soundings in the running ice.
Then the fun commenced. We made fast a line 20 fathoms long, to thebow of the yawl, and put the men (both crews) to it like horses onthe shore. Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow, with an oar, to keepher head out, and I took the tiller. We would start the men, andall would go well till the yawl would bring up on a heavy cake ofice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while Brownassumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat. After an hour'shard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars.Sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then George (GeorgeEaler, the other pilot) and myself took a double crew of fresh menand tried it again. This time we found the channel in less thanhalf an hour, and landed on an island till the Pennsylvania camealong and took us off. The next day was colder still. I was out inthe yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboatcame near running over us.... We sounded Hat Island, warped uparound a bar, and sounded again—but in order to understand oursituation you will have to read Dr. Kane. It would have beenimpossible to get back to the boat. But the Maria Denning wasaground at the head of the island—they hailed us—we ran alongside,and they hoisted us in and thawed us out. We had then been out inthe yawl from four o'clock in the morning till half past ninewithout being near a fire. There was a thick coating of ice overmen, and yawl, ropes and everything else, and we looked like rock-candy statuary.
This was the sort of thing he loved in those days. We feel the writer's evident joy and pride in it. In the same letter he says: “I can't correspond with the paper, because when one is learning the river he is not allowed to do or think about anything else.” Then he mentions his brother Henry, and we get the beginning of that tragic episode for which, though blameless, Samuel Clemens always held himself responsible.
Henry was doing little or nothing here (St. Louis), and I sent himto our clerk to work his way for a trip, measuring wood-piles,counting coal-boxes, and doing other clerkly duties, which heperformed satisfactorily. He may go down with us again.
Henry Clemens was about twenty at this time, a handsome, attractive boy of whom his brother was lavishly fond and proud. He did go on the next trip and continued to go regularly after that, as third clerk in line of promotion. It was a bright spot in those hard days with Brown to have Henry along. The boys spent a good deal of their leisure with the other pilot, George Ealer, who “was as kindhearted as Brown wasn't,” and quoted Shakespeare and Goldsmith, and played the flute to his fascinated and inspiring audience. These were things worth while. The young steersman could not guess that the shadow of a long sorrow was even then stretching across the path ahead.
Yet in due time he received a warning, a remarkable and impressive warning, though of a kind seldom heeded. One night, when the Pennsylvania lay in St. Louis, he slept at his sister's house and had this vivid dream:
He saw Henry, a corpse, lying in a metallic burial case in the sitting-room, supported on two chairs. On his breast lay a bouquet of flowers, white, with a single crimson bloom in the center.
When he awoke, it was morning, but the dream was so vivid that he believed it real. Perhaps something of the old hypnotic condition was upon him, for he rose and dressed, thinking he would go in and look at his dead brother. Instead, he went out on the street in the early morning and had walked to the middle of the block before it suddenly flashed upon him that it was only a dream. He bounded back, rushed to the sitting-room, and felt a great trembling revulsion of joy when he found it really empty. He told Pamela the dream, then put it out of his mind as quickly as he could. The Pennsylvania sailed from St. Louis as usual, and made a safe trip to New Orleans.
A safe trip, but an eventful one; on it occurred that last interview with Brown, already mentioned. It is recorded in the Mississippi book, but cannot be omitted here. Somewhere down the river (it was in Eagle Bend) Henry appeared on the hurricane deck to bring an order from the captain for a landing to be made a little lower down. Brown was somewhat deaf, but would never confess it. He may not have understood the order; at all events he gave no sign of having heard it, and went straight ahead. He disliked Henry as he disliked everybody of finer grain than himself, and in any case was too arrogant to ask for a repetition. They were passing the landing when Captain Klinefelter appeared on deck and called to him to let the boat come around, adding:
“Didn't Henry tell you to land here?”
“No, sir.”
Captain. Klinefelter turned to Sam:
“Didn't you hear him?”
“Yes, sir.”
Brown said: “Shut your mouth! You never heard anything of the kind.”
By and by Henry came into the pilot-house, unaware of any trouble. Brown set upon him in his ugliest manner.
“Here, why didn't you tell me we had got to land at that plantation?” he demanded.
Henry was always polite, always gentle.
“I did tell you, Mr. Brown.”
“It's a lie.”
Sam Clemens could stand Brown's abuse of himself, but not of Henry. He said: “You lie yourself. He did tell you.”
Brown was dazed for a moment and then he shouted:
“I'll attend to your case in half a minute!” and ordered Henry out of the pilot-house.
The boy had started, when Brown suddenly seized him by the collar and struck him in the face.—[In the Mississippi book the writer states that Brown started to strike Henry with a large piece of coal; but, in a letter written soon after the occurrence to Mrs. Orion Clemens, he says: “Henry started out of the pilot-house-Brown jumped up and collared him—turned him half-way around and struck him in the face!-and him nearly six feet high-struck my little brother. I was wild from that moment. I left the boat to steer herself, and avenged the insult—and the captain said I was right.”]—Instantly Sam was upon Brown, with a heavy stool, and stretched him on the floor. Then all the bitterness and indignation that had been smoldering for months flamed up, and, leaping upon Brown and holding him with his knees, he pounded him with his fists until strength and fury gave out. Brown struggled free, then, and with pilot instinct sprang to the wheel, for the vessel had been drifting and might have got into trouble. Seeing there was no further danger, he seized a spy-glass as a weapon.
“Get out of this here pilot-house,” he raged.
But his subordinate was not afraid of him now.
“You should leave out the 'here,'” he drawled, critically. “It is understood, and not considered good English form.”
“Don't you give me none of your airs,” yelled Brown. “I ain't going to stand nothing more from you.”
“You should say, 'Don't give me any of your airs,'” Sam said, sweetly, “and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction.”
A group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck forward, applauded the victor.
Brown turned to the wheel, raging and growling. Clemens went below, where he expected Captain Klinefelter to put him in irons, perhaps, for it was thought to be felony to strike a pilot. The officer took him into his private room and closed the door. At first he looked at the culprit thoughtfully, then he made some inquiries:
“Did you strike him first?” Captain Klinefelter asked.“Yes, sir.”“What with?”“A stool, sir.”“Hard?”“Middling, sir.”“Did it knock him down?”“He—he fell, sir.”“Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?”“Yes, sir.”“What did you do?”“Pounded him, sir.”“Pounded him?”“Yes, sir.”“Did you pound him much—that is, severely?”“One might call it that, sir, maybe.”“I am deuced glad of it! Hark ye, never mention that I said that.You have been guilty of a great crime; and don't ever be guilty ofit again on this boat, but—lay for him ashore! Give him a goodsound thrashing; do you hear? I'll pay the expenses.”—[“Life onthe Mississippi.”]
Captain Klinefelter told him to clear out, then, and the culprit heard him enjoying himself as the door closed behind him. Brown, of course, forbade him the pilothouse after that, and he spent the rest of the trip “an emancipated slave” listening to George Ealer's flute and his readings from Goldsmith and Shakespeare; playing chess with him sometimes, and learning a trick which he would use himself in the long after-years—that of taking back the last move and running out the game differently when he saw defeat.
Brown swore that he would leave the boat at New Orleans if Sam Clemens remained on it, and Captain Klinefelter told Brown to go. Then when another pilot could not be obtained to fill his place, the captain offered to let Clemens himself run the daylight watches, thus showing his confidence in the knowledge of the young steersman, who had been only a little more than a year at the wheel. But Clemens himself had less confidence and advised the captain to keep Brown back to St. Louis. He would follow up the river by another boat and resume his place as steersman when Brown was gone. Without knowing it, he may have saved his life by that decision.
It is doubtful if he remembered his recent disturbing dream, though some foreboding would seem to have hung over him the night before the Pennsylvania sailed. Henry liked to join in the night-watches on the levee when he had finished his duties, and the brothers often walked the round chatting together. On this particular night the elder spoke of disaster on the river. Finally he said:
“In case of accident, whatever you do, don't lose your head—the passengers will do that. Rush for the hurricane deck and to the life-boat, and obey the mate's orders. When the boat is launched, help the women and children into it. Don't get in yourself. The river is only a mile wide. You can swim ashore easily enough.”
It was good manly advice, but it yielded a long harvest of sorrow.
Captain Klinefelter obtained his steersman a pass on the A. T. Lacey, which left two days behind the Pennsylvania. This was pleasant, for Bart Bowen had become captain of that fine boat. The Lacey touched at Greenville, Mississippi, and a voice from the landing shouted:
“The Pennsylvania is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island! One hundred and fifty lives lost!”
Nothing further could be learned there, but that evening at Napoleon a Memphis extra reported some of the particulars. Henry Clemens's name was mentioned as one of those, who had escaped injury. Still farther up the river they got a later extra. Henry was again mentioned; this time as being scalded beyond recovery. By the time they reached Memphis they knew most of the details: At six o'clock that warm mid-June morning, while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below Memphis, four out of eight of the Pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded with fearful results. All the forward end of the boat had been blown out. Many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded and crippled and would die. It was one of those hopeless, wholesale steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the Mississippi a river of death and tears.
Samuel Clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor of an improvised hospital—a public hall—surrounded by more than thirty others more or less desperately injured. He was told that Henry had inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded. His case was considered hopeless.
Henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the explosion. He had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself unhurt, he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others. What he did after that could not be clearly learned. The vessel had taken fire; the rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still attached to the wreck. The fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all who could be saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut adrift and landed. There the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun many hours until help could come. Henry was among those who were insensible by that time. Perhaps he had really been uninjured at first and had been scalded in his work of rescue; it will never be known.
His brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony and remorse. He held himself to blame for everything; for Henry's presence on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for his own absence when he might have been there to help and protect the boy. He wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come, but the doctors persuaded him to wait—just why, he never knew. He sent word of the disaster to Orion, who by this time had sold out in Keokuk and was in East Tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all but hopeless task of trying to bring Henry back to life. Many Memphis ladies were acting as nurses, and one, a Miss Wood, attracted by the boy's youth and striking features, joined in the desperate effort. Some medical students had come to assist the doctors, and one of these also took special interest in Henry's case. Dr. Peyton, an old Memphis practitioner, declared that with such care the boy might pull through.
But on the fourth night he was considered to be dying. Half delirious with grief and the strain of watching, Samuel Clemens wrote to his mother and to his sister-in-law in Tennessee. The letter to Orion Clemens's wife has been preserved.
MEMPHIS, TENN., Friday, June 18, 1858.DEAR SISTER MOLLIE,—Long before this reaches you my poor Henry—mydarling, my pride, my glory, my all will have finished his blamelesscareer, and the light of my life will have gone out in utterdarkness. The horrors of three days have swept over me—they haveblasted my youth and left me an old man before my time. Mollie,there are gray hairs in my head to-night. For forty-eight hours Ilabored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised butuncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out andleft me in the gloom of despair. Men take me by the hand andcongratulate me, and call me “lucky” because I was not on thePennsylvania when she blew up! May God forgive them, for they knownot what they say.I was on the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left N. Orleans,and I must tell you the truth, Mollie—three hundred human beingsperished by that fearful disaster. But may God bless Memphis, thenoblest city on the face of the earth. She has done her duty bythese poor afflicted creatures—especially Henry, for he has hadfive—aye, ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention thatany one else has had. Dr. Peyton, the best physician in Memphis (heis exactly like the portraits of Webster), sat by him for 36 hours.There are 32 scalded men in that room, and you would know Dr.Peyton better than I can describe him if you could follow him aroundand hear each man murmur as he passes, “May the God of Heaven blessyou, Doctor!” The ladies have done well, too. Our second mate, ahandsome, noble-hearted young fellow, will die. Yesterday abeautiful girl of 15 stooped timidly down by his side and handed hima pretty bouquet. The poor suffering boy's eyes kindled, his lipsquivered out a gentle “God bless you, Miss,” and he burst intotears. He made them write her name on a card for him, that he mightnot forget it.Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother.Your unfortunate brother,SAML. L. CLEMENS.P. S.—I got here two days after Henry.
But, alas, this was not all, nor the worst. It would seem that Samuel Clemens's cup of remorse must be always overfull. The final draft that would embitter his years was added the sixth night after the accident—the night that Henry died. He could never bring himself to write it. He was never known to speak of it but twice.
Henry had rallied soon after the foregoing letter had been mailed, and improved slowly that day and the next: Dr. Peyton came around about eleven o'clock on the sixth night and made careful examination. He said:
“I believe he is out of danger and will get well. He is likely to be restless during the night; the groans and fretting of the others will disturb him. If he cannot rest without it, tell the physician in charge to give him one-eighth of a grain of morphine.”
The boy did wake during the night, and was disturbed by the complaining of the other sufferers. His brother told the young medical student in charge what the doctor had said about the morphine. But morphine was a new drug then; the student hesitated, saying:
“I have no way of measuring. I don't know how much an eighth of a grain would be.”
Henry grew rapidly worse—more and more restless. His brother was half beside himself with the torture of it. He went to the medical student.
“If you have studied drugs,” he said, “you ought to be able to judge an eighth of a grain of morphine.”
The young man's courage was over-swayed. He yielded and ladled out in the old-fashioned way, on the point of a knife-blade, what he believed to be the right amount. Henry immediately sank into a heavy sleep. He died before morning. His chance of life had been infinitesimal, and his death was not necessarily due to the drug, but Samuel Clemens, unsparing in his self-blame, all his days carried the burden of it.
He saw the boy taken to the dead room, then the long strain of grief, the days and nights without sleep, the ghastly realization of the end overcame him. A citizen of Memphis took him away in a kind of daze and gave him a bed in his house, where he fell into a stupor of fatigue and surrender. It was many hours before he woke; when he did, at last, he dressed and went to where Henry lay. The coffin provided for the dead were of unpainted wood, but the youth and striking face of Henry Clemens had aroused a special interest. The ladies of Memphis had made up a fund of sixty dollars and bought for him a metallic case. Samuel Clemens entering, saw his brother lying exactly as he had seen him in his dream, lacking only the bouquet of white flowers with its crimson center—a detail made complete while he stood there, for at that moment an elderly lady came in with a large white bouquet, and in the center of it was a single red rose.
Orion arrived from Tennessee, and the brothers took their sorrowful burden to St. Louis, subsequently to Hannibal, his old home. The death of this lovely boy was a heavy sorrow to the community where he was known, for he had been a favorite with all.—[For a fine characterization of Henry Clemens the reader is referred to a letter written by Orion Clemens to Miss Wood. See Appendix A, at the end of the last volume.]
From Hannibal the family returned to Pamela's home in St. Louis. There one night Orion heard his brother moaning and grieving and walking the floor of his room. By and by Sam came in to where Orion was. He could endure it no longer, he said; he must, “tell somebody.”
Then he poured all the story of that last tragic night. It has been set down here because it accounts for much in his after-life. It magnified his natural compassion for the weakness and blunders of humanity, while it increased the poor opinion implanted by the Scotchman Macfarlane of the human being as a divine invention. Two of Mark Twain's chief characteristics were—consideration for the human species, and contempt for it.
In many ways he never overcame the tragedy of Henry's death. He never really looked young again. Gray hairs had come, as he said, and they did not disappear. His face took on the serious, pathetic look which from that time it always had in repose. At twenty-three he looked thirty. At thirty he looked nearer forty. After that the discrepancy in age and looks became less notable. In vigor, complexion, and temperament he was regarded in later life as young for his years, but never in looks.
The young pilot returned to the river as steersman for George Ealer, whom he loved, and in September of that year obtained a full license as Mississippi River pilot.—[In Life on the Mississippi he gives his period of learning at from two to two and a half years; but documentary evidence as well as Mr. Bixby's testimony places the apprenticeship at eighteen months]—Bixby had returned by this time, and they were again together, first on the Crescent City, later on a fine new boat called the New Falls City. Clemens was still a steersman when Bixby returned; but as soon as his license was granted (September 9, 1858) his old chief took him as full partner.
He was a pilot at last. In eighteen months he had packed away in his head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river sovereign. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all those endless miles between St. Louis and New Orleans, every cut-off and current, every depth of water—the whole story—by night and by day. He could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the water as an open page. At twenty-three he had acquired a profession which surpassed all others for absolute sovereignty and yielded an income equal to that then earned by the Vice-President of the United States. Boys generally finish college at about that age, but it is not likely that any boy ever finished college with the mass of practical information and training that was stored away in Samuel Clemens's head, or with his knowledge of human nature, his preparation for battle with the world.
“Not only was he a pilot, but a good one.” These are Horace Bixby's words, and he added:
“It is the fashion to-day to disparage Sam's piloting. Men who were born since he was on the river and never saw him will tell you that Sam was never much of a pilot. Most of them will tell you that he was never a pilot at all. As a matter of fact, Sam was a fine pilot, and in a day when piloting on the Mississippi required a great deal more brains and skill and application than it does now. There were no signal-lights along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of snags and shifting sand—bars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty.”
He had plenty of money now. He could help his mother with a liberal hand, and he did it. He helped Orion, too, with money and with advice. From a letter written toward the end of the year, we gather the new conditions. Orion would seem to have been lamenting over prospects, and the young pilot, strong and exalted in his new estate, urges him to renewed consistent effort:
What is a government without energy?—[he says]—. And what is aman without energy? Nothing—nothing at all. What is the grandestthing in “Paradise Lost”—the Arch-Fiend's terrible energy! Whatwas the greatest feature in Napoleon's character? His unconquerableenergy! Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give ourgreatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, if I were aheathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and worshipit!I want a man to—I want you to—take up a line of action, and followit out, in spite of the very devil.
Orion and his wife had returned to Keokuk by this time, waiting for something in the way of a business opportunity.
His pilot brother, wrote him more than once letters of encouragement and council. Here and there he refers to the tragedy of Henry's death, and the shadow it has cast upon his life; but he was young, he was successful, his spirits were naturally exuberant. In the exhilaration of youth and health and success he finds vent at times in that natural human outlet, self-approval. He not only exhibits this weakness, but confesses it with characteristic freedom.
Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky thanotherwise—a notion which I was slow to take up. The other night Iwas about to “round to” for a storm, but concluded that I could finda smoother bank somewhere. I landed five miles below. The stormcame, passed away and did not injure us. Coming up, day beforeyesterday, I looked at the spot I first chose, and half the trees onthe bank were torn to shreds. We couldn't have lived 5 minutes insuch a tornado. And I am also lucky in having a berth, while allthe other young pilots are idle. This is the luckiest circumstancethat ever befell me. Not on account of the wages—for that is asecondary consideration-but from the fact that the City of Memphisis the largest boat in the trade, and the hardest to pilot, andconsequently I can get a reputation on her, which is a thing I nevercould accomplish on a transient boat. I can “bank” in theneighborhood of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me forthe present (principally because the other youngsters are suckingtheir fingers). Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!—andwhat vast respect Prosperity commands! Why, six months ago, I couldenter the “Rooms,” and receive only the customary fraternal greetingnow they say, “Why, how are you, old fellow—when did you get in?”And the young pilots who use to tell me, patronizingly, that I couldnever learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of theirchagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. Permit me to “blow myhorn,” for I derive a living pleasure from these things, and I mustconfess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let thed—-d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred-dollar bill peeping outfrom amongst notes of smaller dimensions whose face I do notexhibit! You will despise this egotism, but I tell you there is a“stern joy” in it.
We are dwelling on this period of Mark Twain's life, for it was a period that perhaps more than any other influenced his future years. He became completely saturated with the river its terms, its memories, its influence remained a definite factor in his personality to the end of his days. Moreover, it was his first period of great triumph. Where before he had been a subaltern not always even a wage-earner—now all in a moment he had been transformed into a high chief. The fullest ambition of his childhood had been realized—more than realized, for in that day he had never dreamed of a boat or of an income of such stately proportions. Of great personal popularity, and regarded as a safe pilot, he had been given one of the largest, most difficult of boats. Single-handed and alone he had fought his way into the company of kings.
And we may pardon his vanity. He could hardly fail to feel his glory and revel in it and wear it as a halo, perhaps, a little now and then in the Association Rooms. To this day he is remembered as a figure there, though we may believe, regardless of his own statement, that it was not entirely because of his success. As the boys of Hannibal had gathered around to listen when Sam Clemens began to speak, so we may be certain that the pilots at St. Louis and New Orleans laid aside other things when he had an observation to make or a tale to tell.
He was much given to spinning yarns—[writes one associate of thosedays]—so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all thetime his own face was perfectly sober. If he laughed at all, itmust have been inside. It would have killed his hearers to do that.Occasionally some of his droll yarns would get into the papers. Hemay have written them himself.
Another riverman of those days has recalled a story he heard Sam Clemens tell:
We were speaking of presence of mind in accidents—we were alwaystalking of such things; then he said:“Boys, I had great presence of mind once. It was at a fire. An oldman leaned out of a four-story building calling for help. Everybodyin the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. The laddersweren't long enough. Nobody had any presence of mind—nobody butme. I came to the rescue. I yelled for a rope. When it came Ithrew the old man the end of it. He caught it and I told him to tieit around his waist. He did so, and I pulled him down.”
This was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far. Perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for Horace Bixby remembers that “Sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel.”
But if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge it later—with one exception. The exception was not intended for publication, either. It was a burlesque written for the amusement of his immediate friends. He has told the story himself, more than once, but it belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the best-known in the hemispheres the name Mark Twain.
That terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by an old pilot named Isaiah Sellers—a sort of “oldest inhabitant” of the river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity of his reminiscent knowledge. He contributed paragraphs of general information and Nestorian opinions to the New Orleans Picayune, and signed them “Mark Twain.” They were quaintly egotistical in tone, usually beginning: “My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans,” and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as 1811.
Captain Sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young pilots, who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general attitude of speech. But Clemens went further; he wrote at considerable length a broadly burlesque imitation signed “Sergeant Fathom,” with an introduction which referred to the said Fathom as “one of the oldest cub pilots on the river.” The letter that followed related a perfectly impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763 by the steamer “the old first Jubilee” with a “Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew.” It is a gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full today.—[See Appendix B, at the end of the last volume.]
The burlesque delighted Bart Bowen, who was Clemens's pilot partner on the Edward J. Gay at the time. He insisted on showing it to others and finally upon printing it. Clemens was reluctant, but consented. It appeared in the True Delta (May 8 or 9, 1859), and was widely and boisterously enjoyed.
It broke Captain Sellers's literary heart. He never contributed another paragraph. Mark Twain always regretted the whole matter deeply, and his own revival of the name was a sort of tribute to the old man he had thoughtlessly wounded. If Captain Sellers has knowledge of material matters now, he is probably satisfied; for these things brought to him, and to the name he had chosen, what he could never himself have achieved—immortality.
Those who knew Samuel Clemens best in those days say that he was a slender, fine-looking man, well dressed—even dandified—given to patent leathers, blue serge, white duck, and fancy striped shirts. Old for his years, he heightened his appearance at times by wearing his beard in the atrocious mutton-chop fashion, then popular, but becoming to no one, least of all to him. The pilots regarded him as a great reader—a student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences—a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know. When not at the wheel, he was likely to be reading or telling yarns in the Association Rooms.
He began the study of French one day when he passed a school of languages, where three tongues, French, German, and Italian, were taught, one in each of three rooms. The price was twenty-five dollars for one language, or three for fifty dollars. The student was provided with a set of cards for each room and supposed to walk from one apartment to another, changing tongues at each threshold. With his unusual enthusiasm and prodigality, the young pilot decided to take all three languages, but after the first two or three round trips concluded that for the present French would do. He did not return to the school, but kept his cards and bought text-books. He must have studied pretty faithfully when he was off watch and in port, for his river note-book contains a French exercise, all neatly written, and it is from the Dialogues of Voltaire.
This old note-book is interesting for other things. The notes are no longer timid, hesitating memoranda, but vigorous records made with the dash of assurance that comes from confidence and knowledge, and with the authority of one in supreme command. Under the head of “2d high-water trip—Jan., 1861—Alonzo Child,” we have the story of a rising river with its overflowing banks, its blind passages and cut-offs—all the circumstance and uncertainty of change.
Good deal of water all over Coles Creek Chute, 12 or 15 ft. bank—could have gone up shore above General Taylor's—too much drift....Night—didn't run either 77 or 76 towheads—8 ft. bank on main shoreOzark Chute....
And so on page after page of cryptographic memoranda. It means little enough to the lay reader, yet one gets an impression somehow of the swirling, turbulent water and a lonely figure in that high glassed-in place peering into the dark for blind land-marks and possible dangers, picking his way up the dim, hungry river of which he must know every foot as well as a man knows the hall of his own home. All the qualifications must come into play, then memory, judgment, courage, and the high art of steering. “Steering is a very high, art,” he says; “one must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat's stern if he wants to get up the river fast.”
He had an example of the perfection of this art one misty night on the Alonzo Child. Nearly fifty years later, sitting on his veranda in the dark, he recalled it. He said:
“There was a pilot in those days by the name of Jack Leonard who was a perfectly wonderful creature. I do not know that Jack knew anymore about the river than most of us and perhaps could not read the water any better, but he had a knack of steering away ahead of our ability, and I think he must have had an eye that could see farther into the darkness.
“I had never seen Leonard steer, but I had heard a good deal about it. I had heard it said that the crankiest old tub afloat—one that would kill any other man to handle—would obey and be as docile as a child when Jack Leonard took the wheel. I had a chance one night to verify that for myself. We were going up the river, and it was one of the nastiest nights I ever saw. Besides that, the boat was loaded in such a way that she steered very hard, and I was half blind and crazy trying to locate the safe channel, and was pulling my arms out to keep her in it. It was one of those nights when everything looks the same whichever way you look: just two long lines where the sky comes down to the trees and where the trees meet the water with all the trees precisely the same height—all planted on the same day, as one of the boys used to put it—and not a thing to steer by except the knowledge in your head of the real shape of the river. Some of the boats had what they call a 'night hawk' on the jackstaff, a thing which you could see when it was in the right position against the sky or the water, though it seldom was in the right position and was generally pretty useless.
“I was in a bad way that night and wondering how I could ever get through it, when the pilot-house door opened, and Jack Leonard walked in. He was a passenger that trip, and I had forgotten he was aboard. I was just about in the worst place and was pulling the boat first one way, then another, running the wheel backward and forward, and climbing it like a squirrel.
“'Sam,' he said, 'let me take the wheel. Maybe I have been over this place since you have.'
“I didn't argue the question. Jack took the wheel, gave it a little turn one way, then a little turn the other; that old boat settled down as quietly as a lamb—went right along as if it had been broad daylight in a river without snags, bars, bottom, or banks, or anything that one could possibly hit. I never saw anything so beautiful. He stayed my watch out for me, and I hope I was decently grateful. I have never forgotten it.”
The old note-book contained the record of many such nights as that; but there were other nights, too, when the stars were blazing out, or when the moon on the water made the river a wide mysterious way of speculative dreams. He was always speculating; the planets and the remote suns were always a marvel to him. A love of astronomy—the romance of it, its vast distances, and its possibilities—began with those lonely river-watches and never waned to his last day. For a time a great comet blazed in the heavens, a “wonderful sheaf of light” that glorified his lonely watch. Night after night he watched it as it developed and then grew dim, and he read eagerly all the comet literature that came to his hand, then or afterward. He speculated of many things: of life, death, the reason of existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny. It was a fruitful time for such meditation; out of such vigils grew those larger philosophies that would find expression later, when the years had conferred the magic gift of phrase.
Life lay all ahead of him then, and during those still watches he must have revolved many theories of how the future should be met and mastered. In the old notebook there still remains a well-worn clipping, the words of some unknown writer, which he had preserved and may have consulted as a sort of creed. It is an interesting little document—a prophetic one, the reader may concede:
HOW TO TAKE LIFE.—Take it just as though it was—as it is—anearnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you wereborn to the task of performing a merry part in it—as though theworld had awaited for your coming. Take it as though it was a grandopportunity to do and achieve, to carry forward great and goodschemes; to help and cheer a suffering, weary, it may beheartbroken, brother. Now and then a man stands aside from thecrowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightwaybecomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort.The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates whatothers may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. Themiracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to be found in theirindustry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of abrave, determined spirit.
The old note-book contains no record of disasters. Horace Bixby, who should know, has declared:
“Sam Clemens never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot, except once when he got aground for a few hours in the bagasse (cane) smoke, with no damage to anybody though of course there was some good luck in that too, for the best pilots do not escape trouble, now and then.”
Bixby and Clemens were together that winter on the Alonzo Child, and a letter to Orion contains an account of great feasting which the two enjoyed at a “French restaurant” in New Orleans—“dissipating on a ten-dollar dinner—tell it not to Ma!”—where they had sheepshead fish, oysters, birds, mushrooms, and what not, “after which the day was too far gone to do anything.” So it appears that he was not always reading Macaulay or studying French and astronomy, but sometimes went frivoling with his old chief, now his chum, always his dear friend.
Another letter records a visit with Pamela to a picture-gallery in St. Louis where was being exhibited Church's “Heart of the Andes.” He describes the picture in detail and with vast enthusiasm.
“I have seen it several times,” he concludes, “but it is always a new picture—totally new—you seem to see nothing the second time that you saw the first.”
Further along he tells of having taken his mother and the girls—his cousin Ella Creel and another—for a trip down the river to New Orleans.