Mark Twain, A Biography Complete

A >> Albert Bigelow Paine >> Mark Twain, A Biography Complete


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.




XXIII

THE SUPREME SCIENCE

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 BEND

1/4 less 3--[Depth of water. One-quarter less than three
fathoms.]----run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in
willows 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 of
protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know
it had any particular shape. My gun-powdery chief went off with a
bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was
out of adjectives.... I waited. By and by he said:

"My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is
all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything is
blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the
night 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 the
shape of it. You can't see it."

"Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling
variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well
as I know the shape of the front hall at home?"

"On my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did
know 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 around
it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that, if you
didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away from
every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it
for a solid cape; and, you see, you would be getting scared to death
every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from
shore 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 exactly
where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are
coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a
very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a
starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and
mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines, only
you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems
to be a solid, straight wall (you know very well that in reality
there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for
you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's
one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any
particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of
the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of
moonlight 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 of
the river according to all these five hundred thousand different
ways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make
me stoop-shouldered."

"No! you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with
such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape
that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your
eyes."

"Very well, I'll try it; but, after I have learned it, can I depend
on 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, and
he said:

"Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's island, and all that
country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are
caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why,
you wouldn't know the point about 40. You can go up inside the old
sycamore snag now."

So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing
shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed
pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man
had 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 a
different way every twenty-four hours.

I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the
eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or
hands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp,
wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of
me and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and
just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction we would draw
up to it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and
fold back into the bank!

It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all
the different ways that could be thought of--upside down, wrong end
first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and "thort-ships,"--and then know
what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set
about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this
knotty 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. He
opened 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 that
tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do
you reckon I can remember such a mess as that?"

"My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember the
exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the
shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places
between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal
soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings
and 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 want
to 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 a
pilot; and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them
around, 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.




XXIV

THE RIVER CURRICULUM

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 familiarly
acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to
be found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well-
drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm
personal interest in him, for the reason that I have, known him
before--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 threw
business aside for pleasure and killed Brown. I killed Brown every
night for a month; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new
and picturesque ones--ways that were sometimes surprising for
freshness 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.




XXV

LOVE-MAKING AND ADVENTURE

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 the
bow of the yawl, and put the men (both crews) to it like horses on
the shore. Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow, with an oar, to keep
her head out, and I took the tiller. We would start the men, and
all would go well till the yawl would bring up on a heavy cake of
ice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while Brown
assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat. After an hour's
hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars.
Sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then George (George
Ealer, the other pilot) and myself took a double crew of fresh men
and tried it again. This time we found the channel in less than
half an hour, and landed on an island till the Pennsylvania came
along and took us off. The next day was colder still. I was out in
the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat
came near running over us.... We sounded Hat Island, warped up
around a bar, and sounded again--but in order to understand our
situation you will have to read Dr. Kane. It would have been
impossible to get back to the boat. But the Maria Denning was
aground 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 in
the yawl from four o'clock in the morning till half past nine
without being near a fire. There was a thick coating of ice over
men, 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 him
to our clerk to work his way for a trip, measuring wood-piles,
counting coal-boxes, and doing other clerkly duties, which he
performed 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: