The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 35, September, 1860

So I did. One of the three widows met me with a tearful countenance and told me that Doctor Potter had disappeared. So he had. I think that he was ashamed to meet me again, and therefore ran away. The widows thought not. They came to the conclusion, that, like Enoch and Elijah before him, he had been translated. They cried for him a good deal more than he was worth, quarreled scandalously among themselves, sold their house at a loss, and dispersed. I know nothing more of them. Neither do I know anything further of my neighbor, the prophet.

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THE PILOT'S STORY

I  It was a story the pilot told, with his back to his hearers,—  Keeping his hand on the wheel and his eye on the globe of the jack-staff,  Holding the boat to the shore and out of the sweep of the current,  Lightly turning aside for the heavy logs of the drift-wood,  Widely shunning the snags that made us sardonic obeisance.II  All the soft, damp air was full of delicate perfume  From the young willows in bloom on either bank of the river,—  Faint, delicious fragrance, trancing the indolent senses  In a luxurious dream of the river and land of the lotus.  Not yet out of the west the roses of sunset were withered;  In the deep blue above light clouds of gold and of crimson  Floated in slumber serene, and the restless river beneath them  Rushed away to the sea with a vision of rest in its bosom.  Far on the eastern shore lay dimly the swamps of the cypress;  Dimly before us the islands grew from the river's expanses,—  Beautiful, wood-grown isles,—with the gleam of the swart inundation  Seen through the swaying boughs and slender trunks of their willows;  And on the shore beside its the cotton-trees rose in the evening,  Phantom-like, yearningly, wearily, with the inscrutable sadness  Of the mute races of trees. While hoarsely the steam from her     'scape-pipes  Shouted, then whispered a moment, then shouted again to the silence,  Trembling through all her frame with the mighty pulse of her engines,  Slowly the boat ascended the swollen and broad Mississippi,  Bank-full, sweeping on, with nearing masses of drift-wood,  Daintily breathed about with hazes of silvery vapor,  Where in his arrowy flight the twittering swallow alighted,  And the belated blackbird paused on the way to its nestlings.III  It was the pilot's story:—"They both came aboard there, at Cairo,  From a New Orleans boat, and took passage with us for Saint Louis.  She was a beautiful woman, with just enough blood from her mother,  Darkening her eyes and her hair, to make her race known to a trader:  You would have thought she was white. The man that was with her,—you     see such,—  Weakly good-natured and kind, and weakly good-natured and vicious,  Slender of body and soul, fit neither for loving nor hating.  I was a youngster then, and only learning the river,—Not over-fond of the wheel. I used to watch them at monte,  Down in the cabin at night, and learned to know all of the gamblers.  So when I saw this weak one staking his money against them,  Betting upon the turn of the cards, I knew what was coming:They never left their pigeons a single feather to fly with.  Next day I saw them together,—the stranger and one of the gamblers:  Picturesque rascal he was, with long black hair and moustaches,  Black slouch hat drawn down to his eyes from his villanous forehead:  On together they moved, still earnestly talking in whispers,  On toward the forecastle, where sat the woman alone by the gangway.  Roused by the fall of feet, she turned, and, beholding her master,  Greeted him with a smile that was more like a wife's than another's,  Rose to meet him fondly, and then, with the dread apprehension  Always haunting the slave, fell her eye on the face of the gambler,  Dark and lustful and fierce and full of merciless cunning.  Something was spoken so low that I could not hear what the words were;  Only the woman started, and looked from one to the other,  With imploring eyes, bewildered hands, and a tremor  All through her frame: I saw her from where I was standing, she shook so.  'Say! is it so?' she cried. On the weak, white lips of her master  Died a sickly smile, and he said,—'Louise, I have sold you.'  God is my judge! May I never see such a look of despairing,  Desolate anguish, as that which the woman cast on her master,  Griping her breast with her little hands, as if he had stabbed her,  Standing in silence a space, as fixed as the Indian woman,  Carved out of wood, on the pilot-house of the old Pocahontas!  Then, with a gurgling moan, like the sound in the throat of the dying,  Came back her voice, that, rising, fluttered, through wild incoherence,  Into a terrible shriek that stopped my heart while she answered:—  'Sold me? sold me? sold–And you promised to give me my freedom!—  Promised me, for the sake of our little boy in Saint Louis!  What will you say to our boy, when he cries for me there in Saint Louis?  What will you say to our God?—Ah, you have been joking! I see it!—  No? God! God! He shall hear it,—and all of the angels in heaven,—  Even the devils in hell!—and none will believe when they hear it!  Sold me!'—Fell her voice with a thrilling wail, and in silence  Down she sank on the deck, and covered her face with her fingers."IV  In his story a moment the pilot paused, while we listened  To the salute of a boat, that, rounding the point of an island,  Flamed toward us with fires that seemed to burn from the waters,—  Stately and vast and swift, and borne on the heart of the current.  Then, with the mighty voice of a giant challenged to battle,  Rose the responsive whistle, and all the echoes of island,  Swamp-land, glade, and brake replied with a myriad clamor,  Like wild birds that are suddenly startled from slumber at midnight;  Then were at peace once more, and we heard the harsh cries of the     peacocks  Perched on a tree by a cabin-door, where the white-headed settler's  White-headed children stood to look at the boat as it passed them,  Passed them so near that we heard their happy talk and their laughter.  Softly the sunset had faded, and now on the eastern horizon  Hung, like a tear in the sky, the beautiful star of the evening.V  Still with his back to us standing, the pilot went on with his story:—  "Instantly, all the people, with looks of reproach and compassion,  Flocked round the prostrate woman. The children cried, and their mothers  Hugged them tight to their breasts; but the gambler said to the     captain,—  'Put me off there at the town that lies round the bend of the river.  Here, you! rise at once, and be ready now to go with me.'  Roughly he seized the woman's arm and strove to uplift her.  She—she seemed not to heed him, but rose like one that is dreaming,  Slid from his grasp, and fleetly mounted the steps of the gangway,  Up to the hurricane-deck, in silence, without lamentation.  Straight to the stern of the boat, where the wheel was, she ran, and     the people  Followed her fast till she turned and stood at bay for a moment,  Looking them in the face, and in the face of the gambler.  Not one to save her,—not one of all the compassionate people!  Not one to save her, of all the pitying angels in heaven!  Not one bolt of God to strike him dead there before her!  Wildly she waved him back, we waiting in silence and horror.  Over the swarthy face of the gambler a pallor of passion  Passed, like a gleam of lightning over the west in the night-time.  White, she stood, and mute, till he put forth his hand to secure her;  Then she turned and leaped,—in mid air fluttered a moment,—  Down, there, whirling, fell, like a broken-winged bird from a tree-top,  Down on the cruel wheel, that caught her, and hurled her, and     crushed her,  And in the foaming water plunged her, and hid her forever."VI  Still with his back to us all the pilot stood, but we heard him  Swallowing hard, as he pulled the bell-rope to stop her. Then, turning,—  "This is the place where it happened," brokenly whispered the pilot.  "Somehow, I never like to go by here alone in the night-time."  Darkly the Mississippi flowed by the town that lay in the starlight,  Cheerful with lamps. Below we could hear them reversing the engines,  And the great boat glided up to the shore like a giant exhausted.  Heavily sighed her pipes. Broad over the swamps to the eastward  Shone the full moon, and turned our far-trembling wake into silver.  All was serene and calm, but the odorous breath of the willows  Smote like the subtile breath of an infinite sorrow upon us.

A DAY WITH THE DEAD

"Good morning!" said the old custodian, as he stood in the door of the lodge, brushing out with his knuckles the cobwebs of sleep entangled in his eyelashes, and ventilating the apartments of his fleshly tabernacle with prolonged oscitations. "You are on hand early this time, a'n't you? You're the first live man I've seen since I got up."

So saying, he vanished, and reappearing in a moment with a huge brass key, entered the arch, unlocked the gate which closed the aperture fronting the east like the cover of a porthole, and sent it with a heavy push wide open.

Wading through the flood of sunlight which poured into the passage-way–But stop! I was about,—who knows?—in imitation of divers admired models, to tell the reader in choicest poetic diction how the City of the Dead, with its magnificent streets, shining palaces, and lofty monuments, burst upon my dazzled vision,—how I walked for half a mile along a spacious avenue, beneath an arcade of giant elms hung with wreaths of mist and vocal with singing, feathery fruit,—past marble tombs whose yards were filled with bright and fragrant flowers,– among waving grassy knolls spread with the silver nets of spiders and sparkling dew,—through vales of cool twilight and ravines of sombre dusk,—and so on for more than a page, until finally, step by step, through laboriously elegant sentences, I worked my way up to the top of a lofty hill, the view from which to be graphically described as a picture and a poem dissolved together into mingled glory and mirage, and inundating with a billowy sea of beauty the landscape below;—and then further depicting to the delighted fancy of the reader, how on one side was a most remarkable river,—such as was never heard of before, probably,—in fact, a web of water framed between the hills, its rushing warp-currents, as it rolled along, woven by smoking steam-shuttles with a woof of foam,—how, at the entrance of a bay, flocks of snowy sails, with black, shining beaks, and sleek, unruffled plumage, were swimming out to sea,—how another river, not quite so unique as the last, was also in sight, coiling among emerald steeps and crags and precipices and forest,—while beyond, green woodlands, checkered fields, groves, orchards, villages, hills, farms, and villas, all glowed in an exceedingly charming manner in the morning sun;—and then, still further, to say something as brilliant as possible about a certain city, designated as the Great Metropolis,—how it resembled, perhaps, a Cyclopean type-form, with blocks of buildings for letters, domes, turrets, and towers for punctuation-points, church-spires for interrogation and exclamation marks, and squares and avenues for division-spaces between the paragraphs, set up and leaded with streets into a vast editorial page of original matter on Commerce and Manufactures, rolled every morning with the ink of toil, and printing before night an edition of results circulated to the remotest quarters of the globe. And the tall chimneys yonder were to be called—let me see—oh, the smoking cathedral-towers of the Holy Catholic Church of Labor, islanding the air with clouds of incense more grateful to the Deity than the fume of priest-swung censers. All this, and much more of a similar nature, including an eloquent address to the ocean hard by, it is possible I was about to say. But, unwilling to smother the reader beneath a mountain of rhetorical flowers,—which accident might happen, should I resolve to be "equal to the occasion,"—I shall contain myself, and state, in the way of a curt preface, in plain prose, and directly to the point, that I entered a remarkably large and populous cemetery, no matter where, very early one morning,—in fact, you have the gate-keeper's word for it that I was the first person there,—that I climbed to the summit of a high hill and enjoyed the view of a beautiful landscape, just after sunrise; and with this finally said and done, let us proceed.

As I stood listening to the music of the sea-breeze in the pine-forests below, and watching the ships sinking into the ocean from view or dropping through the sky into sight at the rim of the horizon, and the clouds changing their picturesque sunrise-dress for a uniform of sober white, forming into rank and file, marching and countermarching, sending off scouts into the far distance and foraging-parties to scour the yellow fields of air, pitching their tents and placing sentinels on guard around the camp,—amusing myself with fashioning quaint, arabesque fancies,—a sort of intellectual whittling-habit I have when idle,—I was roused from my reverie by the creaking of an iron gate.

Descending a few steps into a cluster of trees, I saw through their leafy lattice-work, in an inclosure ornamented with rose-bushes and other flowering shrubs, a young woman, richly dressed in black, kneeling by the side of a new-made grave. The mound, evidently covering a full-grown person, was nicely laid at the top with carefully cut sods, the dark edges of which projected a little over the lighter-colored gravel that sloped gradually down to the greensward. I was not long in becoming satisfied that the person I saw was a young widow at the grave of her husband, now three or four weeks dead, hither on her accustomed morning visit to display her love and affection for his memory.

Bowing her head, for a few moments she gave way to sobs and weeping, and then, removing the cover from a little willow basket, which stood by her side, she took from it handfuls of bright flowers, and began to adorn the table of sods upon the top of the mound.

As I regard her thus employed, weaving the tokens of her affection into garlands, chaplets, and fanciful devices, arranging their symbolic characters into interpretable monograms and hieroglyphs, matching their colors and blending their hues and shades with the skill of an artist, she becomes more and more absorbed in her work, the tears disappear from her eyes, and the morning light flushes her pale and beautiful face. Is she thinking now, I wonder, of the dead husband, or of something else? What has she found among the flowers so consoling? Do they suggest pleasant fancies, or recall the memories of happy days? Have they, perhaps, a double meaning,—souvenirs of felicity as well as symbols of sorrow? Are they opiates obliterating actual suffering, or prophets uttering hopeful predictions? Or is it none of these things, and does she find her work pleasant only because duty makes its performance cheerful labor? I cannot say what it is, but something has assuaged her grief; for I see her smiling now, as she holds a rosebud in her fingers, and gazes at it abstractedly; and her thoughts and feelings, whatever they may be, are indubitably not of a mournful character;—in fact, I am sure that she never was happier in her life than she is at this moment.

"Happy, do you say?"

Yes, I say happy.

The nature of woman, it is conceded by all men, is a curious, interesting, and perplexing, if not, in respect of positive practical results, a most unsatisfactory study. But nothing puzzles us so much to comprehend as the fact just alluded to. The tenderest female constitution will sustain a burden of grief which would crush a robust and iron-nerved man, and drive him to despair and suicide. A woman rarely succumbs to a calamity; however sudden and overwhelming the initial shock may be, she revives and grows cheerful and happy under it in a way and to a degree marvellous to behold. What singular secret is there among the psychological mysteries of her nature which is able to account for this phenomenon?—A gentle, timid girl of sixteen, whom the sight of a spider or a live snake would have frightened into hysterics, I had once an opportunity, on a tour through Italy, to observe, while she took little or no notice of other works of art, would gaze, as if fascinated, at the writhings of Laocoön and his sons in the folds and fangs of the serpents, at the sculptured death of the Gladiator, and even at the ghastly, repulsive pictures of martyrdoms and barbaric mutilations and tortures,—the hideous monstrosities of a diseased and degraded imagination found in the churches and convents of Rome, which made others turn their backs with a shivering of the bones and a creeping of the flesh. On expressing surprise at such a singular exhibition of taste, I received this innocent, unpremeditated reply:—"Why, I don't like them; the sight of them almost freezes my blood; but—somehow I do like to look at them, for I always feel better after it!" Now is there not involved in this artless answer a possible explanation of the above-mentioned fact? Has not woman, hidden somewhere among her other (of course angelic)—affections, a positive love of sickness, death, sorrow, and suffering, which man does not possess? Is not the pain they cause, in her case, qualified by actual pleasure? Do they not act as a stimulus upon her sensitive nervous system, and produce, somehow, a delightfully intoxicated state of the feelings? Would not this explain her otherwise unaccountable fondness for witnessing the execution of murderers, for the horrible in novels and the deaths and catastrophes in the newspapers, that she has a constitutional relish for such horrid things, and that she enjoys them, not because they are in se productive of pleasure, but just, as is the case with her "crying," because she feels better after it? And I think it would be found, if an investigation of the subject were instituted, that a foreknowledge of this inevitable result, derived from intuition or experience, is the agent which breaks up the clouds of her sorrow: so that, while the grief of a man stricken down by misfortune is an equinoctial storm, dark and dismal, which lasts for weeks and months, the grief of woman is a succession of refreshing April showers, each of brief duration, and the spaces between them filled with sunshine and rainbows.

But the sweets of that widow's present sorrow will be soon extracted. How many weeks will she find it a pleasure to make morning visits here and plait pretty flowers on the grave of her husband?—The grave in the next inclosure furnishes an answer to the question. A few months ago, it, too, was tended at sunrise by just such a tearful woman; but now the wreaths of evergreen are yellow, and the weeds are springing up among the withered garlands. The living partner has visited already the "mitigated grief" department of the mourning store, and the severed cords of her affections have been spliced and made almost as good as new. Not that I would not have it so; not that I believe the grief of woman to be less real and sincere than man's, though it be enjoyed; not that I would have her thrum a long mournful threnody on the harpstrings of her heart, and waste on the dead, who need them not, affections which, Heaven knows, the living need too much.

Retracing my steps, and descending the opposite slope of the hill, I entered a beautiful vale covered with stately tombs and containing a little lake, in the middle of which a fountain was springing high into the air. In a spot so much frequented at a later hour of the day only a single human being was in sight,—a young man, perhaps five-and-twenty years of age, jauntily dressed, and his upper lip adorned with a long moustache, who was leaning lazily upon a marble balustrade, and staring, with a stupid, vacant look, at the massive monument it surrounded. As nothing appeared at the moment more attractive to my eyes, I fixed them upon him. No great skill in deciphering human character is required to tell his past or foretell his future history, or even to read the few poor spent thoughts that flicker in his brain. His father—some city merchant—died last year, and left him a man of leisure, with a fortune on his hands to spend in idleness and dissipation. This is the first anniversary of the old gentleman's decease and departure to another and better world, and the hopeful heir of his bank-stock and buildings has, as a matter of etiquette, come out here from the city this morning to pass an hour of solemn meditation—as he calls the sixty minutes in which he does not smoke or swear—by the old man's grave. I observe him every moment forming a firm resolution to fix his feeble thoughts upon sober things and his latter end, and breaking it the second afterwards: the effort is too much for the exhausted condition of his mind, and results in a total failure. He is evidently well pleased that any attention is directed towards him, and fancies that I regard him as a very dutiful son, and his appearance here, so early in the morning and long before breakfast, a remarkable example of posthumous filial affection. To intensify, if possible, this sentiment in my breast, he has just now pulled out a white cambric handkerchief and pretends to be wiping tears from his eyes. Poor fellow! you have no natural talent for the solemn parts in acting, or you would know that the expression which your face now wears is not that of sorrow, solemnity, meekness, gentleness, humility, or any other sober Christian grace or virtue. But I leave you, for I see something more attractive now. Stand thy hour out, young man! we shall meet again.

"In the other world?"

No: to-morrow evening, as I am taking my accustomed walk into the country, I shall be wellnigh run over by a swiftly driven team; I shall spring suddenly aside, when thou wilt pass, O bogus son of Jehu, with thy dog-cart and two-forty span of bays, dashing down the road, thy thoughts fixed on horse-flesh instead of eternity, and thy soul bounded, north by thy cigar, east and west by the wheels thy vehicle, and south by the dumb beasts that drag thee along.

But, not to introduce the reader to more solemn scenes of affliction and sorrow which are witnessed here during the first vigil of the day, we pass to a later hour. The mourners who come hither in the early morning to decorate the graves of the recent dead, and to weep over them undisturbed by visitors, have now departed. The sun is already high, the dew has disappeared from the trees and the shrubs, and the paths and walks and avenues begin to be thronged with loungers and sight-seers from the city.

I had stopped at the forks of a lane and was hesitating which branch to take and what to do with myself, when a tall and beautiful Willow, standing upon a knoll a few rods distant, with thick drooping boughs sweeping the ground on every side, beckoned to me. On approaching him, he extended a branch, shook me cordially by the hand, and invited me to accept the shelter and hospitality of his roof. The proposal so generously made was at once accepted with profuse thanks, and, parting the boughs, I entered the tent and threw myself upon the soft grass.

Do you ever talk with trees? It is a custom of mine, and I usually find their conversation much more entertaining and profitable than that of most men I know. "Good morning!" I say to an acquaintance. "Fine day," he replies; "how's business?" And so on for an hour, over themes of every nature, the current of conversation rippled with trite truisms, and whirling in the surface-eddies of Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy." But the tree takes the whole of the Tupperian philosophy for granted at the start, and the truisms which most men utter, and takes you for granted likewise,—supposing neither half of your eyeballs blind, and that you have a soul as well as a body,—and enters at once into conversation upon the high table-land of science, reason, and poetry. The entire talk of a fashionable tea-party, strained from its lees of scandal, filtered through a sober reflection of the following morning, is not equal in value to the quivering of a single leaf. A tree will discourse with you upon botany, physiology, music, painting, philosophy, and a dozen arts and sciences besides, none of which it simply chats about, but all of which it is: and if you do not understand its language and comprehend what it tells you about them, so much the worse for you; it is not the fault of the tree.

I say, I talk with trees for this reason,—because their wisdom is so much greater than that of my ordinary acquaintances,—and further, (to put the major after the minor premise,) because they are virtually living beings, endowed with instinct, feeling, reason, and display every essential attribute of sentient creatures,—in fact, because they have souls as well as men, only they are clothed in vegetable flesh.