CHAPTER VII
G. ALEXANDER MURDONG retired from the Chicago Fredonia wdth his feelings badly mangled by the sarcasm of a fine-grained city editor, one Lawser. The trouble was, Murdong did not care to waste poetic temperament on the prosaic affairs of Market Street, the Drainage Canal, and weepy, villainous individuals who were haled to the various city police stations on various charges affecting their past and present lack of behaviour.
In other words, City Editor Lawser saw in Murdong's casual contributions to the Sunday edition the instinct and the power of a sob writer, and Murdong hated the idea of turning his sweet soul to the task of singing the sorrows of the wicked and the vile. Accordingly, he departed from the Chicago newspaper world.
Murdong would not admit it, but he was a failure as a Chicago reporter. He thought to himself that Chicago grated on his nerves and he had in mind seeking a different environment in which to permit the poetic muse with which he was endowed—which the city editor had tried to divert to bringing tears to the Fredonia's readers—to expand and bloom according to its nature and without let or hindrance.
The young man was rebellious against cutting his genius to fit any of the cut-and-dried literary courses open to him. He wanted the privilege of writing a short-story idea into 24,000 words, and to cram the form and action of a hundred-thousand-word novel into 5,000 words. He felt himself superior to many things regarded with satisfaction by most people afflicted, as he was, with a wayward soul.
He was very indignant about the way the world was permitted to run, and he set forth, hotfoot.
Murdong cared not whither he went, so be it that there could be no return. He went by train, on foot, and at Davenport, Iowa, he took to the Mississippi in a skiff to row down stream to the very end of things. He had read there was a jumping-off place somewhere down the Mississippi.
He, too, was bound for the jumping-off place; he, too, had his reasons for leaving the closed, hide-bound world for the wide open and the undistraught; and he, too, in record skiff time, passed the Forks of the Ohio floating with the current and resting on his oars.
Now the upper Mississippi River is not like the lower river. The change is at Cape Girardeau, or below the Tower at any rate. Murdong rowed with savage energy for days and days, minding neither the wind, nor rain, nor sunshine, nor midnight. Down the upper river he felt the same as when he strolled along Michigan Avenue, along the Park. He was penned in and bound and a prisoner, physically. Mentally, publiishers of all kinds surrounded him by an impenetrable wall of two words, "Not Available." He could let his genius blush unrecognized in the Fredonia newspaper—but that small consolation was wrenched from him for what the publishers declared he possessed:
"You're too prosaic," said the city editor.
"You're too poetic," wrote an editor who saw possibilities in him.
"Reporters must have temperament, and authors must not!" Murdong stated his discovery. "Oh"
The upper Mississippi was like his writing experiences. The great stone bluffs, the rollicking shoals, the numerous cities and towns, the railroad rains pounding up and down and over countless bridges, the very liveliness and sauciness of Nature kept him stirred up and uncalm.
Then, having passed the Grand Tower, and swept down the widening surface and down the lengthening reaches and bends, something gripped him tenderly, and something soothed and softened his frame of mind. He ceased to bend his oars when he pulled them; he ceased to fetch his leather oar collars against the locks with snappy stroke.
His stroke was longer, slower, and growing silent. When he recovered, his blades feathered without the savage hiss of hard and angry swing. His eyes were conscious of a different atmosphere; he felt his chest expanding, his breath coming deep, his mind enjoying a strange and novel contentment.
"What the hell!" he said in so many contemptuous words. A poetic temperament dislikes being sunned out of its tantrums.
Just that was happening. The sunshine was softened by diffusing sky; great stone cliffs receded from the river edge far back and at last out of sight across the Bottoms; a bewilderment of woods, waters, and low, far-away banks replaced the uncompromising stones of much of the banks; there were no jagged lines of spiles sunk across sandbars to hold them against the wear and tear of the waters. The river seemed to be meandering as it wished, unhampered!
The banks no longer dominated the scene. Instead, the river, the Mississippi flood was supreme. The transition may have been gradual or it may have been at some certain point, as at Cape Girardeau, or the Grand Tower, or even at the mouth of the Missouri—but the fact now was, Old Mississip' had come into his own, and the low shore line hardly amounted to anything, except to give swiftness and breadth and mass to that tremendous flood tide pouring so swiftly out of empires into—into its own!
Looking about him in wonderment Murdong rested at his oars. Finally he housed them, and sat back to let Old Mississip' do the work! Heretofore he had rowed and the river had pulled him sixty to ninety miles a day. Now he let the ponderous torrent carry him at its own will, and he enjoyed the sensation.
He was conscious that his thoughts filled him with satisfaction, and he looked around him, wishing that he had a pencil and paper, or typewriter and ribbons—something with which to record those precious if fleeting ideas, which he mistook for his own, but which were, in fact, mere reflections of the river which has fooled so many a wise man into fancying he was responsible.
Thus suddenly had the river ironed out the wrinkles in G. Alexander Murdong's mind and soul, and made him a very much finer person to meet and know. He was humbled now; he saw certain things in better perspective; his most important affairs couldn't amount to as much as a whoop in Hades, when he saw himself afloat in a mile-wide tide, bound down a bend in which the great Ohio River was but a streak of green skirting along under the eastern bank.
Artists, photographers, rich men, poor men, beggars, thieves, yeggmen, absconders, little children, old maids, tormented wives, scandalized husbands, circus performers, actors, preachers, lawyers, and doctors have brought their troubles down from the empires and tossed them overboard at the forks of the Ohio.
Before he reached Putney Bend G. Alexander Murdong decided that he didn't care a damn, and he meant it. Pride of soul, perhaps the most uncomfortable pride in all humanity, had its fall.
"Guess I'll run in and see who those people are in the houseboats," Murdong decided. "Gee! I haven't shaved in two weeks. I bet I look like the devil, but what's the odds?"
What he saw was the little cluster of shantyboats along the bank at the head of the Putney Bend sandbar, in the eddy. This bend is, according to the map, only ten miles below the mouth of the Ohio. There and thereabouts people who float in shantyboats run inshore to land and catch their breath after passing the forks. It takes just about that ten miles to have it dawn on the tripper that he has at last entered the lower river, and is in the realm of the river, and out of the empires up the banks.
Behind the boat is what one flees from; ahead of the boat is one does not know what. It takes a little while, a day or two, to readjust one's mind to the fact that the jumping-off place has been passed, whether for good or evil. Right there, where thousands and tens of thousands of river trippers had landed in, Murdong answered to the spirit of the river, which makes one look askant down stream, and with calm questioning up stream.
Murdong thought that he had left the dead past in Chicago, but now he discovered that he had had a living past, and that he was at the brim of two futures: he could return into the old life—and it was life—or he could swing down into the new opportunities of an entirely—apparently—different feature.
Many a man and many a woman has taken one look at the lower Mississippi, and then caught the steamer bound for home. Sometimes a shantyboat is for sale mighty cheap there in Putney Bend—but mostly shantyboats are not for sale there at any price. There are husbands and fathers who quit the river to return home from Putney Bend; there are wives and sweethearts who scurried back up stream to their old lives from that same place. On the other hand, many a life dates its beginning under cover of a new name from that same changing place.
There, not knowing these things, Murdong met an old lady who declared her name was Mrs. Haney, who invited him in to supper, and whose son Jesse offered him the use of his razor and a leather belt to strop it on.
"I never cared about whiskers myself," Jesse remarked. "Take it in the summer and they itch, and in winter they hangs wet in the drizzle and rain. That's why I takes the trouble to shave."
Murdong accepted the proffer of the razor, and not for days did he think of that incident again. When he did, however, it struck him at first as funny, then as interesting, and finally as a milestone in a new career.
Right there Murdong ceased to be a soft-paw in spirit and became a river man in fact.
"Going clear down?" Jesse asked.
"Yes, I guess so," Murdong answered. "I started up at Davenport in October. I pulled right along"
"You must have! But it's getting kind of late up there. Frosts, and those fall storms! They're bad," Jesse put in words what Murdong knew he ought to say himself.
"But I'm taking it easy now"
"You got six weeks of nice weather to Mendova; then you'll have Arkansaw Old Mouth, and Down Below," Jesse nodded. "It's nice to trip down slow. Sleep in that skiff or'd you go up the bank in a tent?"
"In the bottom of the skiff. That canvas is just a hoop up over the skiff. I got blankets and an air mattress."
"That's a nice way to trip down; but down below, you'll find a little shantyboat best—if you ain't in no hurry."
"I expect to live on the river quite a while."
"If you do that summers, you'll want about a pound of quinine 'long next summer sometime!" Mrs. Haney remarked.
"Oh, I don't care. Malaria. What's the odds?"
"Better take care of yourself." Mrs. Haney shook her head. "You're young. Don't do anything you'll be sorry for. When you're as old as I am, you'll see nothing much now mattered for you!"
Murdong was startled from his moment of pessimism. Mrs. Haney had read his thought.
"Yes, if you've done something, in six or seven years the Statue of Limitations'll save ye; if it's a girl, why, there's girls down thisaway'll make you forget you was ever up-the-bank."
"There's Delia," Jesse suggested, grinning.
"Now look't that!" Mrs. Haney retorted. "Since she was here Jesse's done nothing but think about her; well, so's everybody else, for that matter."
"Who is Delia?" Murdong asked.
"Why, that is what nobody seems to know." Mrs. Haney shook her head, continuing as she straightened up from putting biscuits into the oven to bake: "She's as pretty a bolt of silks and fine linen as I've seen dropping down Old Mississip' in many a day"
"Delia, you say?"
"That's it and all of it; she didn't say who she was or where she was from; but down below here a fellow that was following her down sure got his! Whisky Williams found him on that long sandbar above Slough Neck, on the east side. He had a bullet through him, and he was crazy. Delia's got his motorboat and her own boat, too, but that's all anybody knows."
"Sort of a pirate lady, eh?"
"Well, if I was young, and a feller, and good looking, I might think so, and again I might not. She's down toward Plum Point, with Mrs. Mahna now. If what ails you is a girl, and you wanted to forget her, I'd sure get to see Delia, yes, I would! Course, what she thinks of your looks would count, too. A lady don't have to be nice to a man down thisaway if she don't want to. That's one advantage. If he don't mind his own business and she shoots him—all right."
"I hadn't noticed any river girls." Murdong shook his head. "They sound interesting from your description."
"They're as int'resting as they sound, too," Mrs. Haney declared.
"There's only one thing that makes more murders down the Mississippi than whisky," Jesse observed, judicially, "that's women!"
"Humph!" Mrs. Haney sniffed, "hear him talk! If men'd mind their own business, same as women tries to do, hit'd be plumb peaceable in every reach and bend from here to N'Orleans, and you know it, Jesse Haney!"
"Oh, shucks, Maw! What's the use of arguing about men and women! I get plumb sick and tired hearing which ain't responsible."
"Yes, sir! And you men folks'll get a darned sight sicker and tireder 'fore you get done with it, too," Mrs. Haney declared, vehemently, whereupon the men both laughed.
It was thus that Murdong was transformed from recusance to toleration. His nonconformity drifted easily and without shock into river ways of talking and thinking.
He smoked a silent pipe with Jesse and Mrs. Haney, and then, while Jesse held the lantern, he spread the canvas cover over the hoops and pumped up his pneumatic couch. Then having bid Jesse good-night, he turned in to sleep, his boat swinging and swaying on the end of a twenty-foot line made fast to the starboard stern timberhead of the Haney shantyboat.
He did not go to sleep immediately. Lying there, he gave his imagination free play with the pictures conjured up by his talk with the river people. He wondered, more than anything else, what kind of a girl Delia could be, pretty—according to river standdards, which he questioned—dropping down alone, pursued by strange men, and then shooting one and pirating his cruiser.
Anywhere else, his poetic temperament would have rebelled against that strong-arm kind of a girl, but down here on Old Mississip', with its rebellious women, it sounded almost natural and according to caving banks, lonesome bends, Mrs. Haney, and the jumping-off place.