University of Virginia Library

36. CHAPTER XXXVI.
IN WHICH THE COSMOPOLITAN IS ACCOSTED BY A MYSTIC, WHEREUPON
ENSUES PRETTY MUCH SUCH TALK AS MIGHT BE EXPECTED.

As, not without some haste, the boon companion withdrew,
a stranger advanced, and touching the cosmopolitan,
said: “I think I heard you say you would see that
man again. Be warned; don't you do so.”

He turned, surveying the speaker; a blue-eyed man,
sandy-haired, and Saxon-looking; perhaps five and
forty; tall, and, but for a certain angularity, well made;
little touch of the drawing-room about him, but a look of
plain propriety of a Puritan sort, with a kind of farmer
dignity. His age seemed betokened more by his brow,
placidly thoughtful, than by his general aspect, which
had that look of youthfulness in maturity, peculiar
sometimes to habitual health of body, the original gift
of nature, or in part the effect or reward of steady temperance
of the passions, kept so, perhaps, by constitution
as much as morality. A neat, comely, almost
ruddy cheek, coolly fresh, like a red clover-blossom at
coolish dawn—the color of warmth preserved by the
virtue of chill. Toning the whole man, was one-knows-not-what
of shrewdness and mythiness, strangely jumbled;

in that way, he seemed a kind of cross between
a Yankee peddler and a Tartar priest, though it seemed
as if, at a pinch, the first would not in all probability
play second fiddle to the last.

“Sir,” said the cosmopolitan, rising and bowing with
slow dignity, “if I cannot with unmixed satisfaction
hail a hint pointed at one who has just been clinking
the social glass with me, on the other hand, I am not
disposed to underrate the motive which, in the present
case, could alone have prompted such an intimation.
My friend, whose seat is still warm, has retired for the
night, leaving more or less in his bottle here. Pray, sit
down in his seat, and partake with me; and then, if
you choose to hint aught further unfavorable to the man,
the genial warmth of whose person in part passes into
yours, and whose genial hospitality meanders through
you—be it so.”

“Quite beautiful conceits,” said the stranger, now
scholastically and artistically eying the picturesque
speaker, as if he were a statue in the Pitti Palace;
“very beautiful:” then with the gravest interest,
“yours, sir, if I mistake not, must be a beautiful soul—
one full of all love and truth; for where beauty is,
there must those be.”

“A pleasing belief,” rejoined the cosmopolitan, beginning
with an even air, “and to confess, long ago it
pleased me. Yes, with you and Schiller, I am pleased
to believe that beauty is at bottom incompatible with
ill, and therefore am so eccentric as to have confidence
in the latent benignity of that beautiful creature, the

rattle-snake, whose lithe neck and burnished maze of
tawny gold, as he sleekly curls aloft in the sun, who on
the prairie can behold without wonder?”

As he breathed these words, he seemed so to enter
into their spirit—as some earnest descriptive speakers
will—as unconsciously to wreathe his form and sidelong
crest his head, till he all but seemed the creature described.
Meantime, the stranger regarded him with
little surprise, apparently, though with much contemplativeness
of a mystical sort, and presently said:
“When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did it
never occur to you to change personalities with him?
to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected
in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful
body one iridescent scabbard of death? In short,
did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt
from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while
in the care-free, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive,
unscrupulous, and irresponsible creature?”

“Such a wish,” replied the other, not perceptibly
disturbed, “I must confess, never consciously was
mine. Such a wish, indeed, could hardly occur to ordinary
imaginations, and mine I cannot think much
above the average.”

“But now that the idea is suggested,” said the
stranger, with infantile intellectuality, “does it not
raise the desire?”

“Hardly. For though I do not think I have any uncharitable
prejudice against the rattle-snake, still, I
should not like to be one. If I were a rattle-snake now,

there would be no such thing as being genial with men—
men would be afraid of me, and then I should be a very
lonesome and miserable rattle-snake.”

“True, men would be afraid of you. And why?
Because of your rattle, your hollow rattle—a sound, as
I have been told, like the shaking together of small, dry
skulls in a tune of the Waltz of Death. And here we
have another beautiful truth. When any creature is by
its make inimical to other creatures, nature in effect
labels that creature, much as an apothecary does a
poison. So that whoever is destroyed by a rattle-snake,
or other harmful agent, it is his own fault. He should
have respected the label. Hence that significant passage
in Scripture, `Who will pity the charmer that is
bitten with a serpent?'”

“I would pity him,” said the cosmopolitan, a little
bluntly, perhaps.

“But don't you think,” rejoined the other, still maintaining
his passionless air, “don't you think, that for a
man to pity where nature is pitiless, is a little presuming?”

“Let casuists decide the casuistry, but the compassion
the heart decides for itself. But, sir,” deepening in
seriousness, “as I now for the first realize, you but a
moment since introduced the word irresponsible in a
way I am not used to. Now, sir, though, out of a tolerant
spirit, as I hope, I try my best never to be
frightened at any speculation, so long as it is pursued in
honesty, yet, for once, I must acknowledge that you do
really, in the point cited, cause me uneasiness; because

a proper view of the universe, that view which is suited
to breed a proper confidence, teaches, if I err not, that
since all things are justly presided over, not very many
living agents but must be some way accountable.”

“Is a rattle-snake accountable?” asked the stranger
with such a preternaturally cold, gemmy glance out of
his pellucid blue eye, that he seemed more a metaphysical
merman than a feeling man; “is a rattle-snake
accountable?”

“If I will not affirm that it is,” returned the other,
with the caution of no inexperienced thinker, “neither
will I deny it. But if we suppose it so, I need not say
that such accountability is neither to you, nor me, nor
the Court of Common Pleas, but to something superior.”

He was proceeding, when the stranger would have
interrupted him; but as reading his argument in his eye,
the cosmopolitan, without waiting for it to be put into
words, at once spoke to it: “You object to my supposition,
for but such it is, that the rattle-snake's
accountability is not by nature manifest; but might not
much the same thing be urged against man's? A
reductio ad absurdum, proving the objection vain. But
if now,” he continued, “you consider what capacity
for mischief there is in a rattle-snake (observe, I do not
charge it with being mischievous, I but say it has the
capacity), could you well avoid admitting that that
would be no symmetrical view of the universe which
should maintain that, while to man it is forbidden to
kill, without judicial cause, his fellow, yet the rattlesnake

has an implied permit of unaccountability to
murder any creature it takes capricious umbrage at—man
included?—But,” with a wearied air, “this is no genial
talk; at least it is not so to me. Zeal at unawares embarked
me in it. I regret it. Pray, sit down, and take
some of this wine.”

“Your suggestions are new to me,” said the other,
with a kind of condescending appreciativeness, as of
one who, out of devotion to knowledge, disdains not to
appropriate the least crumb of it, even from a pauper's
board; “and, as I am a very Athenian in hailing a new
thought, I cannot consent to let it drop so abruptly.
Now, the rattle-snake—”

“Nothing more about rattle-snakes, I beseech,” in
distress; “I must positively decline to reënter upon
that subject. Sit down, sir, I beg, and take some of this
wine.”

“To invite me to sit down with you is hospitable,”
collectedly acquiescing now in the change of topics;
“and hospitality being fabled to be of oriental origin,
and forming, as it does, the subject of a pleasing Arabian
romance, as well as being a very romantic thing in itself
—hence I always hear the expressions of hospitality
with pleasure. But, as for the wine, my regard for
that beverage is so extreme, and I am so fearful of letting
it sate me, that I keep my love for it in the lasting
condition of an untried abstraction. Briefly, I quaff
immense draughts of wine from the page of Hafiz, but
wine from a cup I seldom as much as sip.”

The cosmopolitan turned a mild glance upon the

speaker, who, now occupying the chair opposite him, sat
there purely and coldly radiant as a prism. It seemed
as if one could almost hear him vitreously chime and
ring. That moment a waiter passed, whom, arresting
with a sign, the cosmopolitan bid go bring a goblet of
ice-water. “Ice it well, waiter,” said he; “and now,”
turning to the stranger, “will you, if you please, give
me your reason for the warning words you first addressed
to me?”

“I hope they were not such warnings as most warnings
are,” said the stranger; “warnings which do not
forewarn, but in mockery come after the fact. And yet
something in you bids me think now, that whatever
latent design your impostor friend might have had upon
you, it as yet remains unaccomplished. You read his
label.”

“And what did it say? `This is a genial soul.' So
you see you must either give up your doctrine of labels,
or else your prejudice against my friend. But tell me,”
with renewed earnestness, “what do you take him for?
What is he?”

“What are you? What am I? Nobody knows who
anybody is. The data which life furnishes, towards
forming a true estimate of any being, are as insufficient
to that end as in geometry one side given would be to
determine the triangle.”

“But is not this doctrine of triangles someway inconsistent
with your doctrine of labels?”

“Yes; but what of that? I seldom care to be consistent.
In a philosophical view, consistency is a certain

level at all times, maintained in all the thoughts of
one's mind. But, since nature is nearly all hill and
dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in knowledge
without submitting to the natural inequalities in
the progress? Advance into knowledge is just like
advance upon the grand Erie canal, where, from the
character of the country, change of level is inevitable;
you are locked up and locked down with perpetual
inconsistencies, and yet all the time you get on; while
the dullest part of the whole route is what the boatmen
call the `long level'—a consistently-flat surface of sixty
miles through stagnant swamps.”

“In one particular,” rejoined the cosmopolitan, “your
simile is, perhaps, unfortunate. For, after all these
weary lockings-up and lockings-down, upon how much
of a higher plain do you finally stand? Enough to make
it an object? Having from youth been taught reverence
for knowledge, you must pardon me if, on but this one
account, I reject your analogy. But really you someway
bewitch me with your tempting discourse, so that
I keep straying from my point unawares. You tell me
you cannot certainly know who or what my friend is;
pray, what do you conjecture him to be?”

“I conjecture him to be what, among the ancient
Egyptians, was called a —” using some unknown
word.

“A —! And what is that?”

“A — is what Proclus, in a little note to his third
book on the theology of Plato, defines as — —”
coming out with a sentence of Greek.

Holding up his glass, and steadily looking through its
transparency, the cosmopolitan rejoined: “That, in so
defining the thing, Proclus set it to modern understandings
in the most crystal light it was susceptible of, I
will not rashly deny; still, if you could put the defition
in words suited to perceptions like mine, I should
take it for a favor.

“A favor!” slightly lifting his cool eyebrows; “a
bridal favor I understand, a knot of white ribands, a
very beautiful type of the purity of true marriage; but of
other favors I am yet to learn; and still, in a vague way,
the word, as you employ it, strikes me as unpleasingly
significant in general of some poor, unheroic submission
to being done good to.”

Here the goblet of iced-water was brought, and, in
compliance with a sign from the cosmopolitan, was
placed before the stranger, who, not before expressing
acknowledgments, took a draught, apparently refreshing—its
very coldness, as with some is the case, proving
not entirely uncongenial.

At last, setting down the goblet, and gently wiping
from his lips the beads of water freshly clinging there
as to the valve of a coral-shell upon a reef, he turned
upon the cosmopolitan, and, in a manner the most cool,
self-possessed, and matter-of-fact possible, said: “I hold
to the metempsychosis; and whoever I may be now, I
feel that I was once the stoic Arrian, and have inklings
of having been equally puzzled by a word in the current
language of that former time, very probably answering
to your word favor.”

“Would you favor me by explaining?” said the cosmopolitan,
blandly.

“Sir,” responded the stranger, with a very slight
degree of severity, “I like lucidity, of all things, and
am afraid I shall hardly be able to converse satisfactorily
with you, unless you bear it in mind.”

The cosmopolitan ruminatingly eyed him awhile, then
said: “The best way, as I have heard, to get out of a
labyrinth, is to retrace one's steps. I will accordingly
retrace mine, and beg you will accompany me. In
short, once again to return to the point: for what
reason did you warn me against my friend?”

“Briefly, then, and clearly, because, as before said, I
conjecture him to be what, among the ancient Egyptians—”

“Pray, now,” earnestly deprecated the cosmopolitan,
“pray, now, why disturb the repose of those ancient
Egyptians? What to us are their words or their
thoughts? Are we pauper Arabs, without a house of
our own, that, with the mummies, we must turn squatters
among the dust of the Catacombs?”

“Pharaoh's poorest brick-maker lies proudlier in his
rags than the Emperor of all the Russias in his hollands,”
oracularly said the stranger; “for death, though
in a worm, is majestic; while life, though in a king, is
contemptible. So talk not against mummies. It is a
part of my mission to teach mankind a due reverence
for mummies.”

Fortunately, to arrest these incoherencies, or rather,
to vary them, a haggard, inspired-looking man now approached—a

crazy beggar, asking alms under the form
of peddling a rhapsodical tract, composed by himself,
and setting forth his claims to some rhapsodical apostleship.
Though ragged and dirty, there was about him
no touch of vulgarity; for, by nature, his manner was
not unrefined, his frame slender, and appeared the more
so from the broad, untanned frontlet of his brow, tangled
over with a disheveled mass of raven curls, throwing a
still deeper tinge upon a complexion like that of a
shriveled berry. Nothing could exceed his look of picturesque
Italian ruin and dethronement, heightened by
what seemed just one glimmering peep of reason, insufficient
to do him any lasting good, but enough, perhaps,
to suggest a torment of latent doubts at times, whether
his addled dream of glory were true.

Accepting the tract offered him, the cosmopolitan
glanced over it, and, seeming to see just what it was, closed
it, put it in his pocket, eyed the man a moment, then,
leaning over and presenting him with a shilling, said to
him, in tones kind and considerate: “I am sorry, my
friend, that I happen to be engaged just now; but,
having purchased your work, I promise myself much
satisfaction in its perusal at my earliest leisure.”

In his tattered, single-breasted frock-coat, buttoned
meagerly up to his chin, the shatter-brain made him a
bow, which, for courtesy, would not have misbecome a
viscount, then turned with silent appeal to the stranger.
But the stranger sat more like a cold prism than ever,
while an expression of keen Yankee cuteness, now replacing
his former mystical one, lent added icicles to his

aspect. His whole air said: “Nothing from me.” The
repulsed petitioner threw a look full of resentful pride
and cracked disdain upon him, and went his way.

“Come, now,” said the cosmopolitan, a little reproachfully,
“you ought to have sympathized with that man;
tell me, did you feel no fellow-feeling? Look at his
tract here, quite in the transcendental vein.”

“Excuse me,” said the stranger, declining the tract,
“I never patronize scoundrels.”

“Scoundrels?”

“I detected in him, sir, a damning peep of sense—
damning, I say; for sense in a seeming madman is scoundrelism.
I take him for a cunning vagabond, who picks
up a vagabond living by adroitly playing the madman.
Did you not remark how he flinched under my eye?'

“Really,” drawing a long, astonished breath, “I could
hardly have divined in you a temper so subtlely distrustful.
Flinched? to be sure he did, poor fellow;
you received him with so lame a welcome. As for his
adroitly playing the madman, invidious critics might
object the same to some one or two strolling magi of
these days. But that is a matter I know nothing about.
But, once more, and for the last time, to return to the
point: why sir, did you warn me against my friend? I
shall rejoice, if, as I think it will prove, your want of
confidence in my friend rests upon a basis equally slender
with your distrust of the lunatic. Come, why did you
warn me? Put it, I beseech, in few words, and those
English.”

“I warned you against him because he is suspected

for what on these boats is known—so they tell me—as
a Mississippi operator.”

“An operator, ah? he operates, does he? My friend,
then is something like what the Indians call a Great
Medicine, is he? He operates, he purges, he drains off
the repletions.”

“I perceive, sir,” said the stranger, constitutionally
obtuse to the pleasant drollery, “that your notion, of
what is called a Great Medicine, needs correction. The
Great Medicine among the Indians is less a bolus than a
man in grave esteem for his politic sagacity.”

“And is not my friend politic? Is not my friend sagacious?
By your own definition, is not my friend a Great
Medicine?”

“No, he is an operator, a Mississippi operator; an
equivocal character. That he is such, I little doubt,
having had him pointed out to me as such by one desirous
of initiating me into any little novelty of this
western region, where I never before traveled. And,
sir, if I am not mistaken, you also are a stranger here
(but, indeed, where in this strange universe is not one a
stranger?) and that is a reason why I felt moved to warn
you against a companion who could not be otherwise
than perilous to one of a free and trustful disposition.
But I repeat the hope, that, thus far at least, he has not
succeeded with you, and trust that, for the future, he
will not.”

“Thank you for your concern; but hardly can I equally
thank you for so steadily maintaining the hypothesis
of my friend's objectionableness. True, I but made his

acquaintance for the first to-day, and know little of his
antecedents; but that would seem no just reason why a
nature like his should not of itself inspire confidence.
And since your own knowledge of the gentleman is not,
by your account, so exact as it might be, you will pardon
me if I decline to welcome any further suggestions unflattering
to him. Indeed, sir,” with friendly decision,
“let us change the subject.”