Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our “flush times.”
The saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the
gambling dens, the brothels and the jails—unfailing signs of high
prosperity in a mining region—in any region for that matter. Is it
not so? A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that
trade is brisk and money plenty. Still, there is one other sign; it comes
last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that the “flush
times” are at the flood. This is the birth of the “literary”
paper. The Weekly Occidental, “devoted to literature,” made
its appearance in Virginia. All the literary people were engaged to write
for it. Mr. F. was to edit it. He was a felicitous skirmisher with a pen,
and a man who could say happy things in a crisp, neat way. Once, while
editor of the Union, he had disposed of a labored, incoherent,
two-column attack made upon him by a contemporary, with a single line,
which, at first glance, seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous
compliment—viz.: “THE LOGIC OF OUR ADVERSARY RESEMBLES THE
PEACE OF GOD,”—and left it to the reader’s memory and
after-thought to invest the remark with another and “more different”
meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure the rest of the
Scripture—“in that it passeth understanding.” He
once said of a little, half-starved, wayside community that had no
subsistence except what they could get by preying upon chance passengers
who stopped over with them a day when traveling by the overland stage,
that in their Church service they had altered the Lord’s Prayer to
read: “Give us this day our daily stranger!”
We expected great things of the Occidental. Of course it could not get
along without an original novel, and so we made arrangements to hurl into
the work the full strength of the company. Mrs. F. was an able romancist
of the ineffable school—I know no other name to apply to a school
whose heroes are all dainty and all perfect. She wrote the opening
chapter, and introduced a lovely blonde simpleton who talked nothing but
pearls and poetry and who was virtuous to the verge of eccentricity. She
also introduced a young French Duke of aggravated refinement, in love with
the blonde. Mr. F. followed next week, with a brilliant lawyer who set
about getting the Duke’s estates into trouble, and a sparkling young
lady of high society who fell to fascinating the Duke and impairing the
appetite of the blonde. Mr. D., a dark and bloody editor of one of the
dailies, followed Mr. F., the third week, introducing a mysterious
Roscicrucian who transmuted metals, held consultations with the devil in a
cave at dead of night, and cast the horoscope of the several heroes and
heroines in such a way as to provide plenty of trouble for their future
careers and breed a solemn and awful public interest in the novel. He also
introduced a cloaked and masked melodramatic miscreant, put him on a
salary and set him on the midnight track of the Duke with a poisoned
dagger. He also created an Irish coachman with a rich brogue and placed
him in the service of the society-young-lady with an ulterior mission to
carry billet-doux to the Duke.
About this time there arrived in Virginia a dissolute stranger with a
literary turn of mind—rather seedy he was, but very quiet and
unassuming; almost diffident, indeed. He was so gentle, and his manners
were so pleasing and kindly, whether he was sober or intoxicated, that he
made friends of all who came in contact with him. He applied for literary
work, offered conclusive evidence that he wielded an easy and practiced
pen, and so Mr. F. engaged him at once to help write the novel. His
chapter was to follow Mr. D.’s, and mine was to come next. Now what
does this fellow do but go off and get drunk and then proceed to his
quarters and set to work with his imagination in a state of chaos, and
that chaos in a condition of extravagant activity. The result may be
guessed. He scanned the chapters of his predecessors, found plenty of
heroes and heroines already created, and was satisfied with them; he
decided to introduce no more; with all the confidence that whisky inspires
and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he then launched
himself lovingly into his work: he married the coachman to the
society-young-lady for the sake of the scandal; married the Duke to the
blonde’s stepmother, for the sake of the sensation; stopped the
desperado’s salary; created a misunderstanding between the devil and
the Roscicrucian; threw the Duke’s property into the wicked lawyer’s
hands; made the lawyer’s upbraiding conscience drive him to drink,
thence to delirium tremens, thence to suicide; broke the coachman’s
neck; let his widow succumb to contumely, neglect, poverty and
consumption; caused the blonde to drown herself, leaving her clothes on
the bank with the customary note pinned to them forgiving the Duke and
hoping he would be happy; revealed to the Duke, by means of the usual
strawberry mark on left arm, that he had married his own long-lost mother
and destroyed his long-lost sister; instituted the proper and necessary
suicide of the Duke and the Duchess in order to compass poetical justice;
opened the earth and let the Roscicrucian through, accompanied with the
accustomed smoke and thunder and smell of brimstone, and finished with the
promise that in the next chapter, after holding a general inquest, he
would take up the surviving character of the novel and tell what became of
the devil!
It read with singular smoothness, and with a “dead”
earnestness that was funny enough to suffocate a body. But there was war
when it came in. The other novelists were furious. The mild stranger, not
yet more than half sober, stood there, under a scathing fire of
vituperation, meek and bewildered, looking from one to another of his
assailants, and wondering what he could have done to invoke such a storm.
When a lull came at last, he said his say gently and appealingly—said
he did not rightly remember what he had written, but was sure he had tried
to do the best he could, and knew his object had been to make the novel
not only pleasant and plausible but instructive and—
The bombardment began again. The novelists assailed his ill-chosen
adjectives and demolished them with a storm of denunciation and ridicule.
And so the siege went on. Every time the stranger tried to appease the
enemy he only made matters worse. Finally he offered to rewrite the
chapter. This arrested hostilities. The indignation gradually quieted
down, peace reigned again and the sufferer retired in safety and got him
to his own citadel.
But on the way thither the evil angel tempted him and he got drunk again.
And again his imagination went mad. He led the heroes and heroines a
wilder dance than ever; and yet all through it ran that same convincing
air of honesty and earnestness that had marked his first work. He got the
characters into the most extraordinary situations, put them through the
most surprising performances, and made them talk the strangest talk! But
the chapter cannot be described. It was symmetrically crazy; it was
artistically absurd; and it had explanatory footnotes that were fully as
curious as the text. I remember one of the “situations,” and
will offer it as an example of the whole. He altered the character of the
brilliant lawyer, and made him a great-hearted, splendid fellow; gave him
fame and riches, and set his age at thirty-three years. Then he made the
blonde discover, through the help of the Roscicrucian and the melodramatic
miscreant, that while the Duke loved her money ardently and wanted it, he
secretly felt a sort of leaning toward the society-young-lady. Stung to
the quick, she tore her affections from him and bestowed them with tenfold
power upon the lawyer, who responded with consuming zeal. But the parents
would none of it. What they wanted in the family was a Duke; and a Duke
they were determined to have; though they confessed that next to the Duke
the lawyer had their preference. Necessarily the blonde now went into a
decline. The parents were alarmed. They pleaded with her to marry the
Duke, but she steadfastly refused, and pined on. Then they laid a plan.
They told her to wait a year and a day, and if at the end of that time she
still felt that she could not marry the Duke, she might marry the lawyer
with their full consent. The result was as they had foreseen: gladness
came again, and the flush of returning health. Then the parents took the
next step in their scheme. They had the family physician recommend a long
sea voyage and much land travel for the thorough restoration of the blonde’s
strength; and they invited the Duke to be of the party. They judged that
the Duke’s constant presence and the lawyer’s protracted
absence would do the rest—for they did not invite the lawyer.
So they set sail in a steamer for America—and the third day out,
when their sea-sickness called truce and permitted them to take their
first meal at the public table, behold there sat the lawyer! The Duke and
party made the best of an awkward situation; the voyage progressed, and
the vessel neared America.
But, by and by, two hundred miles off New Bedford, the ship took fire; she
burned to the water’s edge; of all her crew and passengers, only
thirty were saved. They floated about the sea half an afternoon and all
night long. Among them were our friends. The lawyer, by superhuman
exertions, had saved the blonde and her parents, swimming back and forth
two hundred yards and bringing one each time—(the girl first). The
Duke had saved himself. In the morning two whale ships arrived on the
scene and sent their boats. The weather was stormy and the embarkation was
attended with much confusion and excitement. The lawyer did his duty like
a man; helped his exhausted and insensible blonde, her parents and some
others into a boat (the Duke helped himself in); then a child fell
overboard at the other end of the raft and the lawyer rushed thither and
helped half a dozen people fish it out, under the stimulus of its mother’s
screams. Then he ran back—a few seconds too late—the blonde’s
boat was under way. So he had to take the other boat, and go to the other
ship. The storm increased and drove the vessels out of sight of each other—drove
them whither it would.
When it calmed, at the end of three days, the blonde’s ship was
seven hundred miles north of Boston and the other about seven hundred
south of that port. The blonde’s captain was bound on a whaling
cruise in the North Atlantic and could not go back such a distance or make
a port without orders; such being nautical law. The lawyer’s captain
was to cruise in the North Pacific, and he could not go back or
make a port without orders. All the lawyer’s money and baggage were
in the blonde’s boat and went to the blonde’s ship—so
his captain made him work his passage as a common sailor. When both ships
had been cruising nearly a year, the one was off the coast of Greenland
and the other in Behring’s Strait. The blonde had long ago been
well-nigh persuaded that her lawyer had been washed overboard and lost
just before the whale ships reached the raft, and now, under the pleadings
of her parents and the Duke she was at last beginning to nerve herself for
the doom of the covenant, and prepare for the hated marriage.
But she would not yield a day before the date set. The weeks dragged on,
the time narrowed, orders were given to deck the ship for the wedding—a
wedding at sea among icebergs and walruses. Five days more and all would
be over. So the blonde reflected, with a sigh and a tear. Oh where was her
true love—and why, why did he not come and save her? At that moment
he was lifting his harpoon to strike a whale in Behring’s Strait,
five thousand miles away, by the way of the Arctic Ocean, or twenty
thousand by the way of the Horn—that was the reason. He struck, but
not with perfect aim—his foot slipped and he fell in the whale’s
mouth and went down his throat. He was insensible five days. Then he came
to himself and heard voices; daylight was streaming through a hole cut in
the whale’s roof. He climbed out and astonished the sailors who were
hoisting blubber up a ship’s side. He recognized the vessel, flew
aboard, surprised the wedding party at the altar and exclaimed:
“Stop the proceedings—I’m here! Come to my arms, my own!”
There were foot-notes to this extravagant piece of literature wherein the
author endeavored to show that the whole thing was within the
possibilities; he said he got the incident of the whale traveling from
Behring’s Strait to the coast of Greenland, five thousand miles in
five days, through the Arctic Ocean, from Charles Reade’s “Love
Me Little Love Me Long,” and considered that that established the
fact that the thing could be done; and he instanced Jonah’s
adventure as proof that a man could live in a whale’s belly, and
added that if a preacher could stand it three days a lawyer could surely
stand it five!
There was a fiercer storm than ever in the editorial sanctum now, and the
stranger was peremptorily discharged, and his manuscript flung at his
head. But he had already delayed things so much that there was not time
for some one else to rewrite the chapter, and so the paper came out
without any novel in it. It was but a feeble, struggling, stupid journal,
and the absence of the novel probably shook public confidence; at any
rate, before the first side of the next issue went to press, the Weekly
Occidental died as peacefully as an infant.
An effort was made to resurrect it, with the proposed advantage of a
telling new title, and Mr. F. said that The Phenix would be just
the name for it, because it would give the idea of a resurrection from its
dead ashes in a new and undreamed of condition of splendor; but some low-
priced smarty on one of the dailies suggested that we call it the Lazarus;
and inasmuch as the people were not profound in Scriptural matters but
thought the resurrected Lazarus and the dilapidated mendicant that begged
in the rich man’s gateway were one and the same person, the name
became the laughing stock of the town, and killed the paper for good and
all.
I was sorry enough, for I was very proud of being connected with a
literary paper—prouder than I have ever been of anything since,
perhaps. I had written some rhymes for it—poetry I considered it—and
it was a great grief to me that the production was on the “first
side” of the issue that was not completed, and hence did not see the
light. But time brings its revenges—I can put it in here; it will
answer in place of a tear dropped to the memory of the lost Occidental.
The idea (not the chief idea, but the vehicle that bears it) was probably
suggested by the old song called “The Raging Canal,” but I
cannot remember now. I do remember, though, that at that time I thought my
doggerel was one of the ablest poems of the age:
