XX.
TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.
IN the Boy's Town a great many men gave nearly their whole time to theaffairs of the state, and did hardly anything but talk politics all day;they even sat up late at night to do it. Among these politicians theWhigs were sacred in my boy's eyes, but the Democrats appeared likeenemies of the human race; and one of the strangest things that everhappened to him was to find his father associating with men who came outof the Democratic party at the time he left the Whig party, and joiningwith them in a common cause against both. But when he understood what agood cause it was, and came to sing songs against slavery, he wasreconciled, though he still regarded the Whig politicians as chief amongthe great ones, if not the good ones, of the earth. When he passed oneof them on the street, he held his breath for awe till he got by, whichwas not always so very soon, for sometimes a Whig statesman wanted thewhole sidewalk to himself, and it was hard to get by him. There wereother people in that town who wanted the whole sidewalk, and these werethe professional drunkards, whom the boys regarded as the keystones, ifnot corner-stones, of the social edifice. There were three or four ofthem, and the boys held them all, rich and poor alike, in a deepinterest, if not respect, as persons of peculiar distinction. I do notthink any boy realized the tragedy of those hopeless, wasted, slavishlives. The boys followed the wretched creatures, at a safe distance, andplagued them, and ran whenever one of them turned and threatened them.That was because the boys had not the experience to enable them to thinkrightly, or to think at all about such things, or to know what images ofperdition they had before their eyes; and when they followed them andteased them, they did not know they were joining like fiends in thetorment of lost souls. Some of the town-drunkards were the outcasts ofgood homes, which they had desolated, and some had merely destroyed inthemselves that hope of any home which is the light of heaven in everyhuman heart; but from time to time a good man held out a helping hand toone of them, and gave him the shelter of his roof, and tried to reclaimhim. Then the boys saw him going about the streets, pale and tremulous,in a second-hand suit of his benefactor's clothes, and fighting hardagainst the tempter that beset him on every side in that town; and thensome day they saw him dead drunk in a fence corner; and they did notunderstand how seven devils worse than the first had entered in theplace which had been swept and garnished for them.
Besides the town-drunkards there were other persons in whom the boyswere interested, like the two or three dandies, whom their splendor indress had given a public importance in a community of carelessly dressedmen. Then there were certain genteel loafers, young men of goodfamilies, who hung about the principal hotel, and whom the boys believedto be fighters of singular prowess. Far below these in the social scale,the boys had yet other heroes, such as the Dumb Negro and his family.Between these and the white people, among whom the boys knew of nodistinctions, they were aware that there was an impassable gulf; and itwould not be easy to give a notion of just the sort of consideration inwhich they held them. But they held the Dumb Negro himself in almostsuperstitious regard as one who, though a deaf-mute, knew everythingthat was going on, and could make you understand anything he wished. Hewas, in fact, a master of most eloquent pantomime; he had gestures thatcould not be mistaken, and he had a graphic dumb-show for persons andoccupations and experiences that was delightfully vivid. For a dentist,he gave an upward twist of the hand from his jaw, and uttered a howlwhich left no doubt that he meant tooth-pulling; and for what wouldhappen to a boy if he kept on misbehaving, he crossed his fingers beforehis face and looked through them in a way that brought the jail-windowclearly before the eyes of the offender.
The boys knew vaguely that his family helped runaway slaves on their wayNorth, and in a community that was for the most part bitterlypro-slavery these negroes were held in a sort of respect for theircourageous fidelity to their race. The men were swarthy, handsomefellows, not much darker than Spaniards, and they were so little afraidof the chances which were often such fatal mischances to colored peoplein that day that one of them travelled through the South, and passedhimself in very good company as a Cherokee Indian of rank and education.
As far as the boys knew, the civic affairs of the place were transactedentirely by two constables. Of mayors and magistrates, such as theremust have been, they knew nothing, and they had not the least notionwhat the Whigs whom they were always trying to elect were to do whenthey got into office. They knew that the constables were both Democrats,but, if they thought at all about the fact, they thought their Democracythe natural outcome of their dark constabulary nature, and by no meansimagined that they were constables because they were Democrats. Theworse of the two, or the more merciless, was also the town-crier, whoseoffice is now not anywhere known in America, I believe; though I heard atown-crier in a Swiss village not many years ago. In the Boy's Town thecrier carried a good-sized bell; when he started out he rang it till hereached the street corner, and then he stopped, and began some suchproclamation as, "O, yes! O, yes! O, yes! There will be an auction thisevening at early candle-light, at Brown & Robinson's store! Dry goods,boots and shoes, hats and caps, hardware, queen's ware, and so forth,and so forth. Richard Roe, Auctioneer! Come one, come all, comeeverybody!" Then the crier rang his bell, and went on to the nextcorner, where he repeated his proclamation. After a while, the constablegot a deputy to whom he made over his business of town-crier. Thisdeputy was no other than that reckless boy who used to run out from theprinting-office and shoot the turtle-doves; and he decorated hisproclamation with quips and quirks of his own invention, and withpersonal allusions to his employer, who was auctioneer as well asconstable. But though he was hail-fellow with every boy in town, andalthough every boy rejoiced in his impudence, he was so panoplied in theawfulness of his relation to the constabulary functions that, howeverremote it was, no boy would have thought of trifling with him when hewas on duty. If ever a boy holloed something at him when he was out withhis crier's bell, he turned and ran as hard as he could, and as if fromthe constable himself.
The boys knew just one other official, and that was the gauger, whomthey watched at a respectful distance, when they found him employed withhis mysterious instruments gauging the whiskey in the long rows ofbarrels on the Basin bank. They did not know what the process was, and Iown that I do not know to this day what it was. My boy watched him withthe rest, and once he ventured upon a bold and reckless act. He had solong heard that it was whiskey which made people drunk that at last thenotion came to have an irresistible fascination for him, and hedetermined to risk everything, even life itself, to know what whiskeywas like. As soon as the gauger had left them, he ran up to one of thebarrels where he had seen a few drops fall from his instrument when helifted it from the bunghole, and plunged the tip of his little fingerinto the whiskey, and then put it to his tongue. He expected to becomedrunk instantly, if not to end a town-drunkard there on the spot; butthe whiskey only tasted very disgusting; and he was able to get homewithout help. Still, I would not advise any other boy to run the risk hetook in this desperate experiment.
There was a time not long after that when he really did get drunk, butit was not with whiskey. One morning after a rain, when the boys werehaving fun in one of those open canal-boats with the loose planks whichthe over-night shower had set afloat, a fellow came up and said he hadgot some tobacco that was the best kind to learn to chew with. Every boywho expected to be anything in the world expected to chew tobacco; forall the packet-drivers chewed; and it seemed to my boy that his fatherand grandfather and uncles were about the only people who did not chew.If they had only smoked, it would have been something, but they did noteven smoke; and the boy felt that he had a long arrears of manliness tobring up, and that he should have to retrieve his family in spite ofitself from the shame of not using tobacco in any form. He knew that hisfather abhorred it, but he had never been explicitly forbidden to smokeor chew, for his father seldom forbade him anything explicitly, and hegave himself such freedom of choice in the matter that when
the boy withthe tobacco began to offer it around, he judged it right to take a chewwith the rest. The boy said it was a peculiar kind of tobacco, and wasknown as molasses-tobacco because it was so sweet. The other boys didnot ask how he came to know its name, or where he got it; boys never askanything that it would be well for them to know; but they accepted histheory, and his further statement that it was of a mildness singularlyadapted to learners, without misgiving. The boy was himself chewingvigorously on a large quid, and launching the juice from his lips rightand left like a grown person; and my boy took as large a bite as hisbenefactor bade him. He found it as sweet as he had been told it was,and he acknowledged the aptness of its name of molasses-tobacco; itseemed to him a golden opportunity to acquire a noble habit on easyterms. He let the quid rest in his cheek as he had seen men do, when hewas not crushing it between his teeth, and for some moments he poled hisplank up and down the canal-boat with a sense of triumph that nothingmarred. Then, all of a sudden, he began to feel pale. The boat seemedto be going round, and the sky wheeling overhead; the sun was dodgingabout very strangely. Drops of sweat burst from the boy's forehead; helet fall his pole, and said that he thought he would go home. The fellowwho gave him the tobacco began to laugh, and the other fellows to mock,but my boy did not mind them. Somehow, he did not know how, he got outof the canal-boat and started homeward; but at every step the groundrose as high as his knees before him, and then when he got his foot highenough, and began to put it down, the ground was not there. He wasdeathly sick, as he reeled and staggered on, and when he reached home,and showed himself white and haggard to his frightened mother, he hadscarcely strength to gasp out a confession of his attempt to retrievethe family honor by learning to chew tobacco. In another moment naturecame to his relief, and then he fell into a deep sleep which lasted thewhole afternoon, so that it seemed to him the next day when he woke up,glad to find himself alive, if not so very lively. Perhaps he hadswallowed some of the poisonous juice of the tobacco; perhaps it hadacted upon his brain without that. His father made no very close inquiryinto the facts, and he did not forbid him the use of tobacco. It was notnecessary; in that one little experiment he had got enough for a wholelifetime. It shows that, after all, a boy is not so hard to satisfy ineverything.
There were some people who believed that tobacco would keep off thefever-and-ague, which was so common then in that country, or at any ratethat it was good for the toothache. In spite of the tobacco, there werefew houses where ague was not a familiar guest, however unwelcome. Ifthe family was large, there was usually a chill every day; one had itone day, and another the next, so that there was no lapse. This was thecase in my boy's family, after they moved to the Faulkner house, whichwas near the Basin and its water-soaked banks; but they accepted theague as something quite in the course of nature, and duly broke it upwith quinine. Some of the boys had chills at school; and sometimes,after they had been in swimming, they would wait round on the bank tilla fellow had his chill out, and then they would all go off together andforget about it. The next day that fellow would be as well as any one;the third day his chill would come on again, but he did not allow it tointerfere with his business or pleasure, and after a while the aguewould seem to get tired of it, and give up altogether. That strangeearth-spirit who was my boy's friend simply beat the ague, as it were,on its own ground. He preferred a sunny spot to have his chill in, acosy fence-corner or a warm back door-step, or the like; but as for thefever that followed the chill, he took no account of it whatever, or atleast made no provision for it.
The miasm which must have filled the air of the place from so manynatural and artificial bodies of fresh water showed itself in lowfevers, which were not so common as ague, but common enough. The onlylong sickness that my boy could remember was intermittent fever, whichseemed to last many weeks, and which was a kind of bewilderment ratherthan a torment. When it was beginning he appeared to glide down thestairs at school without touching the steps with his feet, andafterwards his chief trouble was in not knowing, when he slept, whetherhe had really been asleep or not. But there was rich compensation forthis mild suffering in the affectionate petting which a sick boy alwaysgets from his mother when his malady takes him from his rough littleworld and gives him back helpless to her tender arms again. Then shemakes everything in the house yield to him; none of the others areallowed to tease him or cross him in the slightest thing. They have towalk lightly; and when he is going to sleep, if they come into the room,they have got to speak in a whisper. She sits by his bed and fans him;she smooths the pillow and turns its cool side up under his hot andaching head; she cooks dainty dishes to tempt his sick appetite, andbrings them to him herself. She is so good and kind and loving that hecannot help having some sense of it all, and feeling how much better sheis than anything on earth. His little ruffian world drifts far away fromhim. He hears the yells and shouts of the boys in the street without apang of envy or longing; in his weakness, his helplessness, he becomes agentle and innocent child again; and heaven descends to him out of hismother's heart.