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 ROUND-ABOUT 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."