23. CHAPTER XXIII.
IN WHICH THE POWERFUL EFFECT OF NATURAL SCENERY IS EVINCED
IN THE CASE OF THE MISSOURIAN, WHO, IN VIEW OF THE REGION ROUNDABOUT
CAIRO, HAS A RETURN OF HIS CHILLY FIT.
At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is
still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole
grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and
spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus
Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson
and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the
mephitic breeze with zest.
In the dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and
sparkling with fire-flies, the boat now lies before Cairo.
She has landed certain passengers, and tarries for the
coming of expected ones. Leaning over the rail on the
inshore side, the Missourian eyes through the dubious
medium that swampy and squalid domain; and over it
audibly mumbles his cynical mind to himself, as Apemantus'
dog may have mumbled his bone. He bethinks
him that the man with the brass-plate was to land on
this villainous bank, and for that cause, if no other, begins
to suspect him. Like one beginning to rouse himself
from a dose of chloroform treacherously given, he
half divines, too, that he, the philosopher, had unwittingly
been betrayed into being an unphilosophical dupe.
To what vicissitudes of light and shade is man subject!
He ponders the mystery of human subjectivity in general.
He thinks he perceives with Crossbones, his favorite
author, that, as one may wake up well in the morning,
very well, indeed, and brisk as a buck, I thank you, but
ere bed-time get under the weather, there is no telling
how—so one may wake up wise, and slow of assent,
very wise and very slow, I assure you, and for all that,
before night, by like trick in the atmosphere, be left in
the lurch a ninny. Health and wisdom equally precious,
and equally little as unfluctuating possessions to be relied
on.
But where was slipped in the entering wedge? Philosophy,
knowledge, experience—were those trusty knights
of the castle recreant? No, but unbeknown to them, the
enemy stole on the castle's south side, its genial one,
where Suspicion, the warder, parleyed. In fine, his too
indulgent, too artless and companionable nature betrayed
him. Admonished by which, he thinks he must be a
little splenetic in his intercourse henceforth.
He revolves the crafty process of sociable chat, by
which, as he fancies, the man with the brass-plate
wormed into him, and made such a fool of him as insensibly
to persuade him to waive, in his exceptional
case, that general law of distrust systematically applied
to the race. He revolves, but cannot comprehend, the
operation, still less the operator. Was the man a
trickster, it must be more for the love than the lucre.
Two or three dirty dollars the motive to so many nice
wiles? And yet how full of mean needs his seeming.
Before his mental vision the person of that threadbare
Talleyrand, that impoverished Machiavelli, that seedy
Rosicrucian—for something of all these he vaguely deems
him—passes now in puzzled review. Fain, in his disfavor,
would he make out a logical case. The doctrine
of analogies recurs. Fallacious enough doctrine when
wielded against one's prejudices, but in corroboration of
cherished suspicions not without likelihood. Analogically,
he couples the slanting cut of the equivocator's
coat-tails with the sinister cast in his eye; he weighs
slyboot's sleek speech in the light imparted by the oblique
import of the smooth slope of his worn boot-heels;
the insinuator's undulating flunkyisms dovetail into
those of the flunky beast that windeth his way on his
belly.
From these uncordial reveries he is roused by a cordial
slap on the shoulder, accompanied by a spicy volume of
tobacco-smoke, out of which came a voice, sweet as a
seraph's:
“A penny for your thoughts, my fine fellow.”
