Mark Twain A Biography Part 11

"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 amus.e.m.e.nt; 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 s.h.i.+p 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.

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, s.h.i.+fting 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; n.o.body 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 quant.i.ty 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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: