George Washington Cable

“ The commodore rose and the seven drifted out again, with their seven toothpicks, to the boiler deck. There men who had passed the salt to each other at table were giving each other cigars, some standing in knots, others taking chairs about the guards. Almost every one had related himself to some other one or more as somehow his or their guest and host combined, and had taken his turn or was watching his chance to recognize the captain as social and civil autocrat and guardian angel over all. The conspicuousness of the twins led to stories, in undertone, of the long Hayle-Courteney rivalry. ”

“ Even in outer sights and sounds there was solace and reassurance: in river and shore forever passing majestically up-stream through floods of moonlight; in the rhythmic flutter and rush of wheels and foam, and in the keen quiver of the Enchantress flying to New Orleans on the swiftest wings steam could give. Ramsey sent Phyllis up to bid Julian be at ease, and the maid, returning, announced that both the commodores had gone to rest but that madame was anxious to come back to the invalid the moment he would permit. She added, unasked, that Captain Hugh was in the captain's chair. ”

“ The girl would have flown to her arms but the doctor forbade, and for second choice she set up a dainty tripping to and fro athwartships; dipping, rising, skipping, swaying, bridling, like a mocking-bird on a garden wall. It made Ned and Watson themselves worth seeing. Professional dignity set their faces like granite though every vein seethed with a riot of laughter. But the laughter's chief cause was not Ramsey.
"Look at Hugh," muttered Watson, gently drawing down the wheel for the Votaress to sweep round into a northward reach at whose head Natchez Island would presently show itself. ”

“ Gilmore had been coaching them but was now momentarily out on the boiler deck. Through the extensive glass of the cabin's front they could see him standing before a knot of men: John the Baptist and the man with the eagle eye and the man with the eye of a stallion and the man who knew so slap-bang that the Hayles and Courteneys had all but locked horns when the Quakeress burned. They were the only exponents of unrest out there and only the actor wore an air both spirited and kind. No one in the office openly kept an eye on the outer group. In there the gossip lingered on Hugh. ”

“ How fashions change! There are styles even in death-bed scenes. This one was of the old fashion, bearing a strong tinge of fatalism; no hopeful make-believe to the dying that death was other than death; no covert, diligent, desperate economies of the vital spark; but a frank, helpless reception of the dread angel as a royal guest, and a pious, inert consent to let the dying die. Before either Hugh or Ramsey could come from the cabin the twins had reached the bedside and had been received with a final lighting up of the boy's spent powers, which his mother made no effort to restrain. ”

“ Basile was dying. Two of the Courteneys were plague stricken, and the third, for whom she felt a special, inexplicable accountability, was, with Gilmore and Watson, in constant mortal peril from her twin brothers, and the twins therefore from them. Before her eyes, so near she could have tossed a flower to her, was Phyllis, a spectre from an awful past, the destroyer of the Quakeress, liable herself, within any hour, should the truth be discovered, to be burned like a witch. ”

“ Turning east in the upper arm of Saint Francis Bend, with the mouth of Saint Francis River just swinging out of sight astern and Helena an hour's run behind, the Votaress faced the rising sun.
Before the eyes of Hugh and Ramsey it soared gloriously into a sky reddened not by presage of rain but by the smoke of the Antelope and Westwood. The intervening shore and waters glowed and quivered in exquisite tints that renewed the world's youth and quite ignored all human, especially all young human, troubles. ”

“ It entertained the players just to see how many things the happy lovers knew nothing about and to hear them state in some new form, each time they backed off a sand-bar of their own ignorance, that they had seen the world, sucked the orange, yet found no spot of earth so perfect to live in as New Carthage.
The briefest sittings at such entertainment had been enough for Hugh, too much for Ramsey, and had driven them back, twice and thrice, to that fairer world on high in the pilot-house, where they could study the river undistracted. ”

“ She noticed the presence of both pilots at once—Watson at the wheel, Ned on the bench. No wonder, with so awesome a charge; guiding a boat like this, teeming with human souls and driven pell-mell through such a war of elemental forces in desert darkness, with never a beacon light from point to point, from hour to hour; running every chute, with a chute behind nearly every point or island, and the vast bends looping on each other like the folds of a python and but little more to be trusted. ”

“ Under the next point a close turn led into a long northeastward reach, and as the Votaress bore due north across it the morning star, at one flash, blazed out on the dark world and down the flood. Through her stateroom's high window its silvery beam found Ramsey in the upper berth and opened her eyelids with a touch. Staring on the serene splendor, she would soon have slept again, but just then the many lights of a large steamer glided out of the next bend above and Ramsey sprang to an elbow to watch its swift approach and await her own boat's passing call and the other's reply. ”

“ No singed moth he! To prove it he offered Hugh a very blasé query: "What do women ever do with all the answers we men give 'em, hey?"
Hugh could not tell him. Yet to Hugh the riddle was at least as old as his acquaintance with Ramsey. He pondered it as he and Mrs. Gilmore conversed in undertone while gazing on the wonderful changes of the sky, and while Ramsey, near by, visibly studied the exhorter, whom she was cross-examining together with the actor on the lore of the river as they had known it in the days before steam. ”

“ And certainly, as even the Gilmores would have said, it is not when our spiritual vision sees things at their completest values that all the world's a stage and its men and women merely players. Nor is it at our best that we discern our own story, as a story, while it happens. It is a poor eye that sees itself. When Ramsey arrived at the table Hugh's gaze was so big with the reality, not the romance, of things on all the three decks that she had to laugh a little to keep her balance. ”

“ As the Votaress—or Gideon Hayle's Wild Girl—might, in full career, strike on hidden sands, so Ramsey struck on the thought—or call it the unformulated perception—that whoever would really live must, by clear choice and force of will, keep himself—herself—adjusted to this world as a whole; as one great multitudinous entity with a stronger, higher claim on each mere part's sympathy, service, sacrifice, than any mere part can ever hold on it. ”

“ Not until she entered the great bend of Vicksburg did she once come into contrast with anything that could in any degree diminish her regal supremacy. There, as day was breaking, she entered the deep shadow of the southernmost "Walnut Hill." The town on its crest was two hundred feet above her lower deck, and the stiff Yazoo squire, his kindly brother-in-law and sister and the Vicksburg merchant and his wife, waiting down there while she slowed up to the wharf-boat at its foot to let them and others off, were proud of the bluff and of the two miles of sister hills hid by it and the night. ”

“ They knew not of days when you must swarm with blue soldiers—including Marburg—sometimes hot and merry for battle, sometimes shot-torn, fever-wasted, yellow-eyed, a human rubbish of camp and siege, lighter part of the deadly price of conquered strongholds and fallen cities—Forts Henry and Donelson, Columbus, Island Ten, Fort Pillow, Port Hudson, Vicksburg, Memphis; or that, after all, in recovered decency, honored poverty, you should wear out a gentle old age as a wharf-boat to your unspeakable inferiors. ”

“ Breakfast, double-ranked, stoop-shouldered, mute: beefsteak and fried onions its solar centre, with hot rolls for planets; Hugh at the ladies' table, the first clerk at the gentlemen's. Then the boiler deck, toothpicks, cigars, breezes, armchairs, spittoons, the sad news of the two deaths up-stairs, the ugly news of the five passengers set ashore and the reason thereof. Men spat straight and hard as they heard or told the latter item, yet with tacit unanimity awaited the re-emergence of the still secluded senator, general, and twins. ”

“ Gilmore paled with anger. Ramsey's merriment, which had begun at the beginning, ceased for a breath and then, to the loathing of the twins, came on worse as she found herself very erect in one of Mrs. Gilmore's gentle arms. The eyes of both the wife and the girl were on the actor and their every nerve was unstrung. Beseechingly he waved them away.
"Come," the wife said, though without moving, "come on."
"Oh, not a step!" laughed Ramsey. "They—they need us! We must help!" She had turned her frank gaze to Hugh in mingled wonder, exultancy, and distress. ”

“ No, Luce, you can stay, I'll go alone—or with—thank you, general! Oh, senator, we are not blind, sir, though every time we overlook some insult they think we are. Good Lord! do you reckon we don't see that all this laugh is at us, got up at our expense, and has been at us since the first turn of this boat's wheels at Canal Street? We saw—and overlooked—that vile attempt to take our two ladies up the river without us, starting the instant they got aboard and leaving us at the water's edge a laughing-stock for passengers, crew, and pantry boys! ”

“ At different points three men stood up at once. In the front row appeared Julian. A few seats behind him loomed the exhorter. The third rose just at Ramsey's elbow, offering her his seat, yet counting it but courtesy still to keep his attention mainly on the play. It was the first clerk, he who had once been clerk on the Quakeress, where he had known Phyllis as Hugh's nurse, and whose scrutiny "Harriet" had until now somehow escaped. Whether in thanking him Ramsey accepted or declined she hardly knew, for just then the gaze he still bent on "Harriet" showed a gleam of recognition. ”

“ On the boiler deck they halted. The crowd filled the stair beneath and he marvelled once more as he gazed on the two young Hectors, who, true to their ideals and loathing the obliquities of a moral world that left them off deputations, blazed with self-approval in a plight whose shame burned through him, Hugh Courteney, by sheer radiation.
"And as sure," said Julian, "as sure as hell, sir, your life's blood or that of your kin shall one day pay for this! To-night we are helpless. What is your wish?" ”

“ In his roused imagination the long pageant of the rival steamers still moved on through the rudely thronging, ever-multiplying fleet of the boundless valley's yearly swelling commerce, ocean-distant from all disparaging contrasts of riper empires; moved, yeasting, ruffling, through forty years of a civilization's genesis, each new boat, Hayle or Courteney, more beautifully capable than her newest senior, and each, in her time and degree, as cloud-white by day, as luminous by night, and as rife with human purpose and human hazards as this incomparable Votaress. ”

“ So late in the season her passengers were few and she was not utterly smothered in a cargo of cotton bales, yet her freight deck showed a goodly brown mass of them, above which her snowy form gleamed against the verdant background of the forested island, as dainty as a swan, while her gliding stem raised on either side a silver ribbon of water that arched itself almost to her gunwales.
"Each to her own starboard," answered the Regent's mellow bell to the bell of the Votaress. ”

“ At the top of the steps he told the watchman sleeplessness had driven him up here for fresh air. It is but human to explain to a watchman.
But how was the captain? And how was the commodore?
The commodore was doing well enough, but the captain—the watchman shook his head with the wisdom of a doctor.
The seeker after fresh air, eager to move on, yet loath to imply that the air about a watchman was stale, said, with a glance at the stars, that here was quiet.
But the watchman begged to differ. Never by starlight had he seen so busy a hurricane-deck. ”

“ Stop!" The two were again in the pilot-house, but Watson, just then jingling his engine bells, was too busy to heed anything not "hove at him." His big bell had sounded for New Carthage, and John Courteney had appeared down forward of it, but neither Hugh nor Ramsey was enough diverted to answer the parting hail of the town's two residents joyfully going ashore. "I can't stand it!" she ran on. "I won't hear it!"
"But I must tell you," murmured Hugh.
"Why must you?"
"Because of what you have already heard and will hear and because you are you; who you are; what you are." ”

“ In a word, Hugh Courteney, baby elephant, born tyrant, egotist—or egoist, whichever it was—self-confessed egotist, stone-faced egoist—with his big-wig airs and big-fiddle voice—was nearer right than she would ever submit to confess to him: there were things stronger than kin, bigger every way; and other things bigger than those bigger things, and yet others still bigger than those, and so on and on to the world's circumference. Staggering discovery. Yet how infinitely old it looked the moment she clearly saw it: old, obvious, beautiful, and ugly as the man in the moon. ”

“ We stop thah fo' a load of emigrants!"
They fled back to the cab. Aboard the receding boat the ruthless engine bells jingled on; the broad waterside and the city behind it seemed, from her decks, to draw away into the western clouds, and the yellow river spread wide its shores in welcome to her swinging form. Now its mighty current seemed to quicken and quicken as she gradually overcame her down-stream drift, the ship-lined shores ceased to creep up-stream—began to creep down—and her black crew, standing close about the capstan, broke majestically into song:
"Oh, rock me, Julie, rock me." ”

“ I don't want to avert just the cholera, here to-day, gone to-morrow; I want to avert the lasting public misfortune of a Courteney-Hayle feud. There, sir! That's my hand! Cards right down on the table! Oh, I'm nothing if not outspoken, flat-footed! A lot of those signers don't see that bottom meaning. They don't need to. But, sir, you know—your grandfather's always known—that by every instinct the Hayles, even to the sons-in-law, are fighters. They don't know any way to succeed, in anything, but to fight. ”

“ So his father had just left him, leaving with him the thought, though without hint of it in word or tone, that some night, on some boat as deeply freighted with cares as this one, he must sit thus, her master. The wonder of it, with the wonder of the boat herself and all she carried, sounded a continuous stern alarum through his spirit like a long roll sounding through a camp: "Be a man! Make haste! See even those Hayle twins, with all their faults, and up! Make haste! Rise up and be a man!" Had the wonder-loving Ramsey been there she must have laughed again ”

“ Lucian, with his breath drawn to call up the empty stair, started forward but struck his knee-cap on a light, gilded chair left there by some child. Burning with rage and trembling with nervous exhaustion, he barely saved himself from lunging into two men of slight stature who had just come from a neighboring state-room: a slender old man leaning feebly on a thick-set youth, whom one flash of his eye identified as the commodore and Hugh, though as they passed toward the stair they betrayed no sign that they had observed him. ”

“ A cab whirled up furiously and two more youths, shapely, handsome, and fashionable, twins beyond cavil and noticeably older than their twenty years, visibly rich in fine qualities but as visibly reckless as to what they did with them, sprang out, flushed and imperious, to wave the Votaress. One of her guards was still rubbing along the steamer beside her, but before the pair could dash aboard this other boat and half across her deck, a gap had opened, impossible to leap. ”