Latest / G.T.T., or The Wonderful Adventures of a Pullman / Chapter XI

Transcript

Chapter XI · G.T.T., or The Wonderful Adventures of a Pullman

• 0:01
  Chapter eleven of G. T. T. Or The Wonderful Adventures of a
• 0:05
  Pullman by Edward Hale. This LibriVox, according is in the public domain,
• 0:11
  Chapter eleven. But where is the pullman all this time? Asks the indignant
• 0:17
  reader, What do I care? He growls, as to the loves or
• 0:21
  hates of mister Frederick Haydock and Miss Hester sutfan. It was the adventures of
• 0:27
  a pullman which were promised to me. And now all that I am told
• 0:31
  is the fortunes of a palace afloat, in the hospitality of a palace,
• 0:36
  not on wheels. Reader, Be still and persevere, for the week at
• 0:42
  Arcady could not last forever. And though they added six days more to it,
• 0:48
  those could not last forever. If all had been stupid and dull,
• 0:53
  Hester would have thought it lasted forever. But it was all light, with
• 0:57
  kindness and love, and and new joy of spring, and new surprises of
• 1:03
  life unheard of by these northern birds of passage. For Hester, there was
• 1:10
  now a note from fred now a letter, now a telegram. Now a
• 1:15
  boat would run up to the levee, and a black man would run down
• 1:18
  to the landing place and find there a little parcel for Miss Sutfin at mister
• 1:23
  George le Clerk's Arcadie, and Hester would carry it to her room and return
• 1:30
  with a blush with the very volume of Hammerton which she had spoken of to
• 1:34
  Miss Ferguson, and which they had both forgotten, but which the faithful Frederick
• 1:40
  had not forgotten. Ah Me, how long are men's arms, and how
• 1:45
  strong when they are enough in love? Such weeks never last forever. So
• 1:51
  when ended, the girls were kindly and tenderly put on the Saint Mary,
• 1:56
  a funny little stern wheel boat, which was to go up the Red River,
• 2:00
  and their lonely life began again, but with such a chance to write
• 2:05
  long letters as perhaps the world gives nowhere else as it twirls round. There
• 2:12
  could hardly be a greater contrast in life than the change from the airy comfort
• 2:15
  of the large bedrooms in the luxury of Arcady to these little six by six
• 2:22
  staterooms of the Saint Mary, the snuffy air and the cotton quilts. Why
• 2:28
  they were ever called staterooms, said Effie, is something I never could find
• 2:32
  out, for there is less state about them, and more spartan simplicity than
• 2:38
  in any other place I go into. Still. When she wrote home after
• 2:43
  a day's experience of the little boat, she said, happy is the country
• 2:47
  where the humblest emigrant going to the frontier has as good conveyance as we have.
• 2:53
  What you call the law of selection provides what everybody wants. Even if
• 2:59
  it provides but little more. If there are few luxuries, there is still
• 3:04
  a good bed, a good table, and no end of kindness from these
• 3:07
  black men and black women around us. For one generation at least, no
• 3:13
  man need teach the black man or black woman at the south to be kind
• 3:17
  to the northern traveler, be that traveler whom he may. The first day
• 3:23
  was Sunday, Yes, a quiet, preacherless Sunday. The boat toiled on
• 3:30
  as if indeed steam engines were unknown to Moses and not included in the comforts
• 3:35
  of the Ten Commandments. Yet the girls had their Bibles, and Owen Feltham
• 3:40
  and the dear old thumb worn Fenelon and Vaughan's hours with the mystics, and
• 3:46
  Hester had a lovely talk with a nice Norwegian woman who could not speak a
• 3:52
  word of English more than Hester could speak a word of Norwegian. But the
• 3:55
  fair haired stranger produced her Norwegian Testament, and Hester had great joy in spelling
• 4:01
  out the blessings in the fifth chapter of Matthew. And then she showed her
• 4:06
  the same chapter in her book in English. And there was a piano on
• 4:11
  the boat. Where should one go as civilization advances unless he had a piano
• 4:15
  with him? Why you know it was behind the piano in the house in
• 4:20
  Kansas the other day that the panther sheltered himself till missus Sloane could get her
• 4:27
  husband's breech loader and shoot him. And then I suppose while she was waiting
• 4:31
  for the men to come home from dinner and drag out the ugly brute,
• 4:36
  she sat down and opened the piano and played an adagio by Schubert. So
• 4:42
  we live as we face westward seventeen miles a year, as de Tookeville says.
• 4:48
  And Hester was just sitting at the piano after tea, and was wishing
• 4:53
  she had brought the Plymouth collection with her, and was trying one and another
• 4:57
  bit of old psalmody when the the familiar signal for stopping the boat was heard,
• 5:02
  and it was announced that they had come to buy you Sarah, by
• 5:06
  you Sarah, How they had heard of by you, Sarah in old war
• 5:11
  days. Each of them had friends in the army who were at by you,
• 5:15
  Sarah. Hester's own brother was at by you, Sarah. But who
• 5:19
  Sarah was, or what a by you was, neither of them knew.
• 5:25
  The more For this, no, Effie Abgar did not know, although Hiram
• 5:30
  Brinkerhoff had campaigned at and around by You, Sarah, and had told her
• 5:34
  so. The little bevy of ladies who had assembled around the piano to listen
• 5:40
  to Effie's playing, all adjourned to the guards to see what might be the
• 5:44
  adventures of a stopping a little longer than usual, And then for a little
• 5:48
  they all walked at by You, Sarah in old prosperous times, which means,
• 5:54
  before the war the landing was the capital of a large and strong planting
• 5:59
  entry. It is now but a forsaken landing place. As they walked,
• 6:04
  a wonderful sunset was going on, But they did not dare to linger long
• 6:09
  on shore. As the boat swung off again, the stern wheels struck a
• 6:14
  floating log, and two of the arms with the floats upon them, broke
• 6:18
  off and floated down the river. This is to say that one sixteenth of
• 6:24
  the paddling power was gone, and the old wheel weakened. While our friends
• 6:30
  were wondering whether this involved practically the end of their Red River voyage, the
• 6:34
  captain said to the pilot, we shall put in new side arms. Someone
• 6:40
  asked how long it would take to make the repairs. The captain said,
• 6:44
  oh, about fifteen minutes. In point of fact, the boat's carpenter and
• 6:48
  his men went steadily to work. It was more than fifteen minutes. It
• 6:53
  was an hour before the boat started again. Then the wheel was as good
• 6:58
  as new. Never was seen a more prompt and efficient piece of practical engineering.
• 7:03
  Allowing for the time in which they removed the wreck, they would have
• 7:08
  built a new wheel in four or five hours. After such an adventure as
• 7:13
  this, the travelers looked with more respect on this quiet captain, whose place
• 7:17
  on the boat they would not so well have understood but for some such exhibition
• 7:23
  of his power. Their friend, the pilot, was supreme in his department,
• 7:29
  and the ladies saw most of him. The mate, said to be
• 7:32
  the most amiable of men, personally appeared at every landing place as the most
• 7:38
  vehement, not to say, the most profane, director of the jolly crew
• 7:42
  of negroes who took the changing cargo on or off. The clerk evidently had
• 7:47
  his set of duties which were not trifles. But if the girls had not
• 7:53
  seen the captain come to the front in some such trial as this of the
• 7:57
  demolished wheel, they would not have known what a captain was. For a
• 8:03
  weirdly picturesque sight was the repair of the broken wheel. The sunset light failed
• 8:07
  fast instantly, almost without orders, One and another black man appeared with the
• 8:13
  long handled iron baskets filled with blazing light wood and pine knots which make the
• 8:20
  torches for all night work at the landings, the carpenters hung out over the
• 8:24
  water, working their wonders by the lurid flashes of these beacons. What amazed
• 8:31
  Effie and Hester was that while everybody was in haste, nobody was in a
• 8:35
  hurry. Nobody scolded, and nobody swore, nobody half did anything. When
• 8:43
  the wheel was finished, it was finished. It was as good a wheel
• 8:48
  as if it had been made new at a ship yard. All this gave
• 8:52
  them far more confidence in their bonny Bark and her crew. The ladies formed
• 8:56
  the habit of dressing long enough before breckway to take a little walk on the
• 9:01
  deck above the saloon by way of appetite. The morning haze over the fresh
• 9:05
  green of the banks gave a dreamy interest to the whole scene. They never
• 9:11
  tired of such mild adventure as a sharp turn in the river, coming back,
• 9:16
  perhaps after three or four miles, to the other side of some narrow
• 9:20
  neck, where was a cabin or a peculiar tree, which they had seen
• 9:24
  long before when they passed it on the other side. One morning, as
• 9:30
  they joined the pilot in his lookout, they mounted to the high throne reserved
• 9:33
  for visitors who may look through the glass sides of the house in every direction.
• 9:39
  And how far have we come in the night, asked Effie. The
• 9:43
  pilot told her, and with the science she had already acquired, she expressed
• 9:48
  her surprise that the run had been so short. The captain told me he
• 9:52
  should be opposite Nakotosh before this time. But the captain did not tell you,
• 9:56
  for he did not know of that snack which we were to run into.
• 10:01
  This was the good natured answer of the good natured pilot, and in
• 10:05
  an instant he was sorry for it. Snag Snag, screamed Hester and Effie,
• 10:11
  neither had confessed to the other, or to any living being else,
• 10:16
  the terrors which the idea of snags, whatever snags might be, had inspired.
• 10:22
  Then the pilot expressed his surprise. He would not have told them,
• 10:26
  but he supposed everybody on the boat knew of it. It was between twelve
• 10:31
  and one that the boat had struck on a snag, which was just near
• 10:35
  enough the water's edge to strike, not projecting far. The pilot thought,
• 10:39
  so it was not easily seen. Seene, screamed Effie, How should anything
• 10:46
  be seen between twelve o'clock and one in the night with such a mist as
• 10:50
  this on the river? Anyway, said the good natured pilot. William did
• 10:54
  not see it. I was below, he added modestly. Fortunately it did
• 11:00
  not strike the hull, only the after guard. Look over the rail when
• 11:05
  you go down to breakfast, and you will see where it ripped the guard
• 11:09
  away. We dropped three hogsheads of sugar into the river, and that will
• 11:13
  sweeten their coffee for them. Three of those great hogsheads into that muddy river.
• 11:20
  What a shame. This was Hester's ejaculation. But Effie, who had
• 11:24
  been peering over, said how far aft was it. And when the pilot
• 11:30
  told her, the ladies both understood that the snag had poked its head up
• 11:33
  and the sugar had fallen through just below the two staterooms in which they had
• 11:39
  themselves been sleeping. Only they were such good sailors now that they had not
• 11:43
  been wakened, not much wakened. Yes, they had waked up, and
• 11:50
  they had heard voices, but each of them had thought it was a landing.
• 11:54
  And they confessed each to each that the comfort of feeling no throb of
• 11:58
  the engine, and of sleeping as one sleeps at home, had overcome all
• 12:03
  curiosity, and so they had slept one thin floor from death. They both
• 12:09
  went down to breakfast, solemnized, but not sad or unhappy. The people
• 12:15
  who live on those narrow strips of solid land between the upper Red River and
• 12:20
  the swamps behind it, above Natchetush and below Shriefport call it the garden of
• 12:26
  the world. A great many other people call a great many other places the
• 12:30
  garden of the world. Let that be as it may. It is no
• 12:33
  wonder these people call this. So. The strip is not wide. Sometimes
• 12:39
  it is a few hundred yards, sometimes it is a few miles. Between
• 12:43
  the river and the swamps, But narrow or wide, it is as fertile
• 12:48
  as so much land can be. Hardly an inch is wasted in fences.
• 12:54
  The long plantations were carefully cultivated to the very edge, and the girls learned
• 13:00
  their prejudices as to Southern laziness as they saw the work here. Effie asked
• 13:05
  a young gentleman whom they took from one plantation to another, how long the
• 13:11
  cotton planting season was? Thirteen months in the year, said he, laughing,
• 13:16
  And that is our joke about it. You see the fresh green yonder
• 13:20
  of this year's crop. These men have not been lazy. But you see
• 13:24
  the mule is trotting round in the gin house. Yon, the last year's
• 13:28
  crop is not yet wholly made. This is not because they have been slack
• 13:35
  to leave a part of that work till now. May be in this case
• 13:39
  good farming. Effie and Hester both remembered the raft in their old geography days.
• 13:46
  It was over this raft that poor will Harold fared when he was escaping
• 13:50
  from the apaches or were they comanches? And what is left of the raft,
• 13:56
  and what the pilot explained to them did not disappoint them. The history
• 14:01
  of the raft can be made out clearly enough by any traveler who passes up
• 14:05
  the stream. For there were places in the river not as wide as the
• 14:09
  steamboat was long, so that at those points she could not have turned round
• 14:13
  for twenty miles. Indeed, the river never seemed three times as wide as
• 14:18
  at these narrow points. If then, in some age, not long after
• 14:24
  the last deluge, maybe in some ebbing frichet which was bringing down masses of
• 14:30
  floating trees from above, two or three such trees happened to make what they
• 14:35
  call a jam at such a narrow place. If for two or three hundred
• 14:39
  years there happened to be no eager lumbermen striving by hook and crook, by
• 14:46
  axe, saw and crowbar to loosen this jam, why, of course every
• 14:52
  new tree that floated down the river would pile in behind, but never a
• 14:56
  tree of them all would go down to the Gulf of Mexic. This is
• 15:01
  just what made the raft. It piled up more and more from year to
• 15:05
  year. It increased perceptibly on its upper end. Within the memory of the
• 15:11
  present century. At last it became in many places a bridge where you could
• 15:16
  walk across the river would sometimes cut around it. But always flow under it.
• 15:24
  So matters lasted till Uncle Sam, in his might, had leisure to
• 15:28
  stop and look at the raft. It was then one hundred and thirty miles
• 15:33
  long. Uncle Sam sent Colonel Shreve with his steamboats and tooth pullers of various
• 15:39
  kinds, and bade him abate the raft. This was in eighteen thirty six.
• 15:46
  Colonel Shreve did as he was bid, and now the river is open
• 15:50
  for hundreds, not to say thousands, of miles above the place where the
• 15:54
  raft once closed it to all navigation. It is hard to say what were
• 16:00
  the adventures of the ever changing panorama as the ladies watched the shores of the
• 16:04
  narrow river. Now some young gentleman in the pilot house through a harper's bazaar
• 16:11
  ashore, to be picked up by the admiring group who watched the boat as
• 16:15
  it went by. Who was the she for whom the bazaar was whirled so
• 16:19
  deftly. Now it was a mountain of bags of cottonseed, which would have
• 16:25
  staggered the might of afrites, which the good natured deckhands had to land under
• 16:30
  the persuasion of the eager mate. Now three little lambs strayed from an intelligent
• 16:36
  mother in that exquisite park where they were grazing, and stupidly ran down upon
• 16:41
  the beach, so to call it below the little bluff. How stupid lambs
• 16:45
  are the poor frightened mamma runs along on the crests, but cannot tell them
• 16:51
  to turn round and escape the way they came. How stupid sheep are.
• 16:56
  Narrower grows the beach, and narrower will they never never returned to their mother?
• 17:02
  At last, one makes a bold venturance scrambles up the bank safe.
• 17:07
  Then number two safe also, And here is number three, stupidest of all.
• 17:11
  Will dear little number three be drowned? Ah? No? The intelligent
• 17:17
  pilot, equally interested with the ladies, gives one scream from his whistle,
• 17:22
  and in an agony of terror, dear little number three rushes up the bank
• 17:26
  to the welcome of its mother. Dear lamb, there are always friends watching
• 17:32
  us whom we do not know, And the terror most terrible may be a
• 17:37
  friend in disguise. Hefi EFFI, wake up, Effie, we are at
• 17:42
  Koshatta. This was Hester's cry to missus Apgar as she took her constitutional and
• 17:48
  regular siesta after dinner. And what is Kushata to me, or what am
• 17:53
  I to Kushata? Said, poor sleepy Effie, dazed or dozing as you
• 17:59
  do choose, when she emerged at the outward door of her stateroom. Observe,
• 18:06
  untraveled reader, that each stateroom has two doors. You step into the
• 18:11
  saloon or out upon the guards, according as you go to dinner or to
• 18:17
  see a landing. Effie Abgar, I am ashamed of you. You did
• 18:22
  not know whether Campte was an Indian mound or a city, and now you
• 18:26
  do not know what Kushata is. Yet Kushata furnishes. Let me tell you
• 18:33
  every year, one four hundredth part of the cotton of the world. The
• 18:38
  chances are therefore that as you press your head upon your pillow, one two
• 18:44
  hundredth part of the cooling surface is from these ports of shipment. I am
• 18:48
  not wholly certain indeed, whether you ever heard of Shreveport, the place of
• 18:53
  our destination. From that port, one fortieth of the cotton of the world
• 19:00
  goes in search of its market. So the ladies began to take some interest
• 19:04
  in cotton, and to learn how it was that people ever thought cotton was
• 19:08
  king. Here they took cotton seed on board to land it. There Where
• 19:15
  was some new plantation. Here was a plantation wholly owned and run by new
• 19:21
  maid freemen. There was an old plantation on its metal to adapt itself to
• 19:26
  the new order. Everywhere was diligent care, And while the boat was at
• 19:33
  the landing, at least vigorous labor. They went creeping up among the cotton
• 19:37
  plantations all day, stopping often. They expected to get to Shreveport that night,
• 19:44
  but the fog settled on them so heavily at sundown that the friendly captain
• 19:48
  had to tie the boat to a tree, and they must spend one more
• 19:52
  night on board. Not so bad, as the friendly captain said, as
• 19:56
  his mother's experience. She was forty days coming from New Orleans and only came
• 20:03
  to the raft then. So, in one last social singing party, ended
• 20:10
  their last day in the garden of the world. How little they had thought
• 20:14
  that they should ever feel at home on the Red River, but there certainly
• 20:18
  was a homesick feeling about parting from it. Here was nice missus Ridgshey and
• 20:25
  her pretty daughter. Here was poor miss Harnett, who had such a sad
• 20:29
  limp, but was so patient about it. Here was the droll little French
• 20:33
  bride who could not understand a word of English, though she were Hester's and
• 20:38
  Effie's fellow countrywoman, born under the American flag, and under that flag,
• 20:44
  to live till she should die. With all of these ladies, our travelers
• 20:48
  had come to be intimate. They had sung together at night, they had
• 20:53
  copied each other's patterns, they had borrowed each other's novels. They had taken
• 20:59
  each other's at and told each other confidential secrets. And now they were to
• 21:04
  part and never never to see each other any more. And here was the
• 21:10
  nice Norwegian girl who had come to regard Effie and Hester as her guardian angels,
• 21:15
  and who had now only two hundred miles more to travel before she met
• 21:19
  her lover, who had traveled a thousand miles to meet her. They all
• 21:25
  met for one last good sing before going to bed, French songs, Yankee
• 21:30
  songs, German songs, Texan songs, psalms and hymns, and spiritual songs,
• 21:37
  and the Norwegian girl contributed her Norwegian song. My lover sailed away far,
• 21:47
  far beyond the sea. But on the parting day he gave a ring
• 21:52
  to me, and he said if God should make my grave beneath the sea,
• 21:56
  this ring will snap and break, for I'll never come back to thee
• 22:03
  He kissed me and was gone far far beyond the sea, and I am
• 22:07
  left alone, for he's not come back to me. I have heard of
• 22:11
  storm and wreck, but his ring is safe with me, so I know
• 22:17
  he will come back to the ring he left and me, and with this
• 22:22
  pretty omen if any one had understood the Norwegian, the party broke up forever.
• 22:30
  The next morning early they were at Shreveport end of chapter eleven.