By the end of a week he was satisfied that he had a modest stand of hair. He rubbed some dirt on his head and squeezed the juice of some purple berries on it and was astonished. He could have entered civilization two days before. His beard made him look like a wan theological student. The long thin line of his scar could be seen through it. He experimented with the saps of twigs and roots in an effort to stain it. It became manly and opaque.
They reached the river at Gilchrist’s Ferry toward two in the morning of the following night. All was dark in the town. He followed a road to the south along the bluffs. After riding an hour he came upon a cluster of houses and stores, a church and a schoolhouse. He was barely able to make out a sign on the front of one of the buildings: “United States Post Office, Giles, Illinois, pop. 410.” “We can’t have a fine upstanding post office,” he murmured and rode on. An hour later he found what he wanted. There was a general store with a long hitching rail before it, a blacksmith shop beside a dirt clearing in which stood a stake for pitching horseshoes, some shacks, some steps leading down to a landing on the river. Downstream he saw some lights on what appeared to be an island. He retraced his road to a place about a mile north of the village, sat down on the bluff, and fell asleep. He awoke at dawn. Through the mist he saw a long lumber barge descending the river. There was a light in the wheelhouse. He thought he heard voices. He imagined that he smelled coffee and bacon.
On the highest Andes a zephyr may precipitate an avalanche. It was the imagined smell of coffee and bacon that unmanned John Ashley. It brought back with it “The Elms,” the job in which he delighted, the long weariness of the trial with Beata’s proud drawn face ten yards from him, Lily’s singing, Roger’s self-reliance, Sophia’s watchful gravity, Constance’s boisterous love—all, all, all. He put his head between his knees. He fell over to one side, then rolled over to the other. He groaned, he lowed, he bayed. The anguish of mind in a mature man is borne in silence and immobility, but John Ashley was not a mature man.
The sun had been up several hours when he returned to the village. He tethered Evangeline to the hitching rail and stood on the bluff for a long time looking at the river, his back to the general store. He knew that an increasing number of eyes would be fixed upon him and would be appraising the horse. Finally he turned, strolled across the road, nodded to some men on the porch, and entered the store. Five men were standing or sitting about a cold stove. All but the storekeeper dropped their eyes to the floor. Ashley uttered the grunt which is the last reduction of how-do-you-do. It was returned. He purchased a box of ginger snaps, discreetly displaying some dollar bills. He ate a cookie in thoughtful silence. The curiosity about him became intense. Some more men drifted into the store.
“Where you from, son?” asked the storekeeper.
Ashley pointed north with his thumb, smiling: “Canada.”
“Sight ways!” The words were repeated in a murmur around the room.
“I took it slow. Hung up in Ioway a bit. Hunting for my brother.”
“Well, now!”
Ashley continued to chew meditatively. More men and boys gathered about the door. A rig drew up.
“Suppose I could buy some breakfast? Eggs, bacon? Like two bits’ worth?”
“Well! . . . ? Emma! Emma! . . . ? Fix the fella some eggs and bacon and grits.”
A woman appeared at the door behind the counter and stared at him. Ashley tilted his hat. “Right kind of you, ma’am,” he said.
She disappeared. There was another long silence.
“Where you thinking to find your brother?”
“Got word maybe he’s down to New Orleans.”
“Well, now!”
Ashley looked at the storekeeper and said in scorn, “Up to Gilchrist’s Ferry a man offered me twenty-four dollars for my horse!—What’s this place called?”
“Just called ‘Hodge’s.’”
The heads of the men in the doorway had turned to gaze at Evangeline. Several sidled out through the open door to join a circle forming around her. There was talk in low tones. Ashley went out on the porch, still chewing, and looked up and down the river. Addressing no one in particular he asked, “On those lumber barges, do they ever take a man on, just for the ride?”
“Some does and some don’t.”
“Do they ever pull up here?”
There was a low laugh. “They keep away from the shore all right. They don’t like the shore any. See that island down there? That’s Brennan’s Island. They stop there now and again. There’s two of them there now. See them?”
A young man had pulled back Evangeline’s lips and was examining her teeth. Evangeline put back her ears and snorted. Ashley did not look at her.
“I’ll give you twenty dollars for the horse and saddle,” said the young man in a loud voice.
Ashley gave no sign of having heard him. He re-entered the store and sat down on a nail keg, his eyes on the floor. Emma brought him his breakfast in a pewter basin. Evangeline neighed. Some women came into the store and made some purchases in a constrained manner. Evangeline neighed again. There was a stir at the door; the loungers drew back. A short solid woman of fifty marched in and placed herself before Ashley. She was wearing a jacket and skirt of the denim from which overalls are made. A man’s cap, visor at the back, was pulled close over her short wiry hair. Her scuffed cheeks were red, almost as red as the turkey-red scarf tied about her throat. Her manner was brusque, but a smile seemed to come and go in her gray eyes.
“Thirty dollars,” she said.
Ashley looked up at her quickly, then ate a forkful of grits. “Is that you who just come in that rig?”
“Yes.”
“Let me look at your horse.”
The woman gave a scornful snort. Ashley filled his mouth again slowly and went out into the road. He inspected her horse from all sides. The woman stood beside Evangeline, who bunted her sleeve and shoulder smelling oats.
“Thirty-two,” said Ashley, “and you get someone to row me to Brennan’s Island.”
“Done!—Follow me.”
Ashley paid his bill, exchanged grunts with the company, and rode after the woman’s rig. At the end of ten minutes they turned in at a gate bearing the sign MRS. T. HODGE, HAY AND FEED. She called “Victor! Victor!” A boy of sixteen came running from the barn. Ashley dismounted.
“Does that horse know her name?”
“Yes—Evangeline.’’
“Where’d you get that saddle?”
“Friend gave it to me.”
“I’ve only seen one like it before. It’s Indian work. Victor, put Evangeline in Julia’s stall and give her some oats. Then get your oars. I’ve got to go in the house and fetch something. Let my rig stay like it is. And bring me a jenny bag of corn.”
Evangeline did not look back.
Mrs. Hodge was gone some time. She returned carrying an old carpetbag, which she handed to Ashley.
“Victor, row this gentleman over to Dinkler’s. Take the corn down to the boat and wait for him.”
Victor started down the steps to the dock. Mrs. Hodge took an old shapeless purse out of her pocket and put it in Ashley’s hand.
“It’s a fifty-dollar horse, what with that saddle. Give that corn to Win Dinkler—runs the store at Brennan’s Point. Tell him it comes from Mrs. Hodge. Tell him I said to fix you up on one of those Swede barges.”
She looked at him in silence for a moment. Only once before had he seen such eyes—his grandmother’s. “Keep your mouth closed. Don’t go shooting anybody, unless you have to. Take off your hat.”
He did. She nodded, laughing in a low rumble. “Coming on. You’ll not need to wash your head for a week or two.”
Ashley put his hand on her wrist. He asked urgently, “After a while . . . ? could you think of some way to get a word to my wife?”
“Start getting down into that boat.—To torment her worse? Say to yourself: seven years. Leave impatience to boys. Goodbye. Run along.”
He started down t
he steps. She added: “Trust women. Men won’t be much help to you from now on.”
She turned and went back to her house.
Ashley spent the next four days in and around Dinkler’s store, which was part grocery, part chandlery, and part saloon. It sold flea and tick powder. Barges came and went. When Dinkler’s was full of rivermen he stayed in his shed at the water’s edge. The satchel Mrs. Hodge had given him contained socks, underwear, shirts, soap, a half-used tube of salve, a razor, a frayed copy of Robert Burns’s poems, and a suit of church-going black, of old-fashioned cut and for a taller man. Thrust into the pocket was an old envelope addressed to Mrs. Tolland Hodge, Giles, Illinois. He did not finish the letter that began “Dear Bet.” He decided that his new name was James Tolland, a Canadian. On the fifth day Win Dinkler put him on a Norwegian barge, forty cents a day and another twenty cents for all the akvavit you could drink. Life on a barge headed downstream is of an almost intolerable boredom. The men played cards. He won back half his passage and half his akvavit. He made friends. In their language the rivermen called him the “young one.” To explain himself he told a number of lies and was allowed to resume his taciturnity. On clear nights he slept under the stars on the odorous boards. At table he repeatedly turned the conversation toward the subject of New Orleans. He learned the names of a number of réunions where fairly clean cards were played far into the night. He was warned to avoid a certain café, Aux Marins, which was frequented by smugglers, ammunition runners, and the like—men without “papers.” He heard a great deal about the importance of “papers.” Just when he was beginning to be concerned about the problem of eluding the port inspectors the solution was offered to him. Twenty miles north of the city they could expect a boat to draw up beside the barge. There would be long chaffering. They would be offered clandestine rum, mash, sapot, and aphrodisiac drugs. His moment came; as the boat was leaving, Ashley seized his carpetbag, jumped into the boat, shouted goodbye to his friends and was rowed ashore.
In New Orleans Ashley seldom left his room by day. He wore his overalls and went to no pains to keep them neat. He dragged his fingers through his thick hair and even rubbed grime on his face. He was a Canadian seaman looking for a job. He changed his lodgings every four days, never moving far from the neighborhood of Gallatin and Gasquet streets. There was nothing about him to arouse suspicion, but he was everywhere an object of curiosity and he knew it. But for a long time he was unaware that a preposterous thing had befallen his appearance. The curly straw-colored sidewhiskers followed the line of his jaw, descending to a short beard. Other curls played about his wide forehead. The commonplace features of John Ashley of Coaltown had taken on a strange distinction. He had come to resemble one of the Apostles—a John or a James—as they are pictured in art, particularly in bad art, on name-day cards, and votive medals, or as wax or plaster statues. People stopped to stare at him; later, in the southern hemisphere, passersby furtively crossed themselves. Ashley did not know this, or that the police—alert for the bloodthirsty assassin of Illinois who had shot his best friend in the back of the head and had fought his way, single-handed, through a posse of ten armed men—gave no second glance at this pious-looking youth.
Every night at eleven he pushed open the door of Aux Marins, murmured “Bon soir” cheerfully, and sat down with his newspapers. He often laid out a pack of cards and studied the card games he had been taught on the raft. Jean-le-Borgne suffered from insomnia. Night after night he postponed the hour when he must climb the circular iron staircase to wait for sleep beside his dropsical wife. He watched his Canadian customer at his games and proposed that they play together. It became custom. The stakes were small. Luck favored them in alternation. Ashley learned la manille, les trois valets, and piquet. There was at first little conversation, but the silences became congenial. Finally Ashley’s patience was rewarded. He learned of a certain ship that would be leaving—in a week or two, or maybe a month or two—for Panama from a certain abandoned and decaying dock on an island in the Delta. Its cargo would be, ostensibly, rice.
Ashley needed money. He had the black suit altered to fit him. He put on a high stock collar. He presented himself at La Réunion du Tapis Vert and at La Dame de Pique, paid his door fee, and joined the tables. These clubs were frequented by small merchants, in slavery to cards, and by the younger sons of plantation owners who had no wish to play under their fathers’ eyes at the more fashionable clubs. For the first two hours Ashley neither won nor lost; toward four in the morning he would occasionally have a sudden run of luck. When he resorted to cheating it was with limited ambition and great circumspection.
Ashley was a man of faith and did not know it; he was also a gifted mathematician—perhaps with a touch of genius—and did not know it. He was a born card player, though he had not played in twenty years. In the fraternity house at his engineering school in Hoboken, New Jersey, there had seldom been fewer than six games in progress, night and day. Ashley had no competitive sense and no need of money, but he took great interest in the play of numbers. He drew up charts analyzing the elements of probability in the various games. He had a memory for numbers and symbols. He had applied himself there to not winning overmuch and—since he was president of the fraternity—to preventing any other player from doing so. On the barge, at play with Jean-le-Borgne, and here at the clubs he learned new games; alone in his room he studied their structure.
Men of faith and men of genius have this in common: they know (observe and remember) many things they are not conscious of knowing. They are attentive to relationships, recurrences, patterns, and “laws.” There is no impurity in this operation of their minds—neither self-advancement nor pride nor self-justification. The nets they fling are wider and deeper than they are fully aware of. Clarity is a noble quality of mind, but those who primarily demand clarity of themselves miss many a truth which—with patience—might become clear at some future time. Minds that are impatient for clarity—or even reasonableness—become gradually narrower and dryer. A few years after these events a relatively obscure scientist, working in a bureau of weights and measures in Switzerland, was searching—as were many others—for a formula that would express the nature of energy. He tells us that it appeared to him in a dream. He awoke and reconsidered; he laughed, for it was of a laughable self-evidence. An ancient philosopher ascribes knowledge to recollection: the delighted surprise at learning what one already knows. Ashley had no idea why he was so accomplished a gambler. He relied upon a whole series of fetishes, irrational promptings and superstitions, and was ashamed of them.
Faith is an ever-widening pool of clarity, fed from springs beyond the margin of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.
His sailing was delayed. He waited.
Several nights a week, in grimy overalls, he explored the city. He renewed a lapsed curiosity about the lives of others. His interest was centered on the relationships in the family. With the coming on of night he set out on long walks. He became an impenitent eavesdropper. He followed married couples; he particularly lingered where he could overhear the conversation between a father and his older son or daughter. Everywhere he attempted to appraise the quality of a relationship. He turned about the homes of the prosperous as though he were planning to rob them. Most attentively he immersed himself in the lives of those in his own quarter. He came to feel like some husband, father, or uncle who returns unrecognized after years of absence—an Enoch Arden, a Ulysses beggar at his own hearth. He was driven by a need to persuade himself of the happiness of others. He shrank from the sights and sounds of brutality and disease, but, by some unhappy chance, he came upon them everywhere. In the mines at Coaltown he had learned to distinguish the cough of tuberculosis; he now heard it on all sides and saw the red spittle on the pavements. He had thrust upon him the marks of other diseases, also—the one-eyed, the ravaged noses. Everywhere prostitutes patrolled their exclusive territory, as bees are said to do. He did not venture into the half-mile square of Storeyville
—famous in song, parterre of youth and beauty, selected and fostered from among thousands. Here about him were women who could never enter Storeyville or who had outlived their service there. At dusk the world fed; there were sounds of laughter and contentment. This was followed by an hour of strolling, of sitting on galleries and front steps, of low-voiced courtships, of measured discussions in the cafés—lofty intelligences discussing politics. By ten-thirty, however, the mood changed. An ominous current invaded the city. By midnight sudden cries filled the air, blows, pursuits, overturned furniture, sobbing and whimpering. In Coaltown the report that men—particularly the miners—beat their wives was matter for laughter. Here Ashley saw them. In a narrow alley he came upon a man striking a woman, blow after blow; she sank gradually to her knees, taunting him as no father, as a clown of a father. Another man was beating a woman’s head monotonously against the wall of a staircase. He saw children cowering under blows. A girl of six rushed from a doorway and leapt into his arms like a squirrel on a treetop. A man followed her, his head lowered, a table leg in his hand. All three fell into the gutter. Ashley hurried away. A hunted man is in no position to defend the persecuted. He longed to be at sea, to be on a mountain peak, on the Andes.
He waited.
He descended.
He ventured into other cafés. He spent an evening at Joly’s, at Bresson’s, and many an evening at Quédebac’s. The underworld has its hierarchies. Ashley was a pariah and must accept his caste. One stratum above him was Bresson’s—the resort of thieves, burglars, pickpockets, small-time confidence men, the touts at races and cockfights. These were active eager-eyed men, full of plans, heavy drinkers, loud talkers, boisterous liars. Whenever the police—in or out of uniform—strolled among the tables at Bresson’s, the habitués neither lowered their voices nor glanced up. Their remarks took on a sarcastic edge; they pretended they were unaware of the intruders. These were convivial men and they admitted only convivial men to their number. Ashley was not a convivial and dared not expose himself to their sharp curiosity. Below him was the rock bottom of social life—Joly’s—the pimps’ café, which no other man ever knowingly enters. Pimps foregather only with one another.