Chapter 1

by Herman Melville

　　A MUTE GOES ABOARD A BOAT ON THE MISSISSIPPI.At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capacat the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in thecity of St. Louis.His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white furone, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag,nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends.From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd,it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, astranger.In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favoritesteamer Fidle, on the point of starting for New Orleans. Stared at, butunsaluted, with the air of one neither courting nor shunning regard, butevenly pursuing the path of duty, lead it through solitudes or cities,he held on his way along the lower deck until he chanced to come to aplacard nigh the captain's office, offering a reward for the capture ofa mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East;quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, thoughwherein his originality consisted was not clearly given; but whatpurported to be a careful description of his person followed.As if it had been a theatre-bill, crowds were gathered about theannouncement, and among them certain chevaliers, whose eyes, it wasplain, were on the capitals, or, at least, earnestly seeking sight ofthem from behind intervening coats; but as for their fingers, they wereenveloped in some myth; though, during a chance interval, one of thesechevaliers somewhat showed his hand in purchasing from anotherchevalier, ex-officio a peddler of money-belts, one of his popularsafe-guards, while another peddler, who was still another versatilechevalier, hawked, in the thick of the throng, the lives of Measan, thebandit of Ohio, Murrel, the pirate of the Mississippi, and the brothersHarpe, the Thugs of the Green River country, in Kentucky--creatures,with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the time, and forthe most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the sameregions, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem causefor unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those who thinkthat in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxesincrease.Pausing at this spot, the stranger so far succeeded in threading hisway, as at last to plant himself just beside the placard, when,producing a small slate and tracing some words upon if, he held it upbefore him on a level with the placard, so that they who read the onemight read the other. The words were these:--"Charity thinketh no evil."As, in gaining his place, some little perseverance, not to saypersistence, of a mildly inoffensive sort, had been unavoidable, it wasnot with the best relish that the crowd regarded his apparent intrusion;and upon a more attentive survey, perceiving no badge of authority abouthim, but rather something quite the contrary--he being of an aspect sosingularly innocent; an aspect too, which they took to be somehowinappropriate to the time and place, and inclining to the notion thathis writing was of much the same sort: in short, taking him for somestrange kind of simpleton, harmless enough, would he keep to himself,but not wholly unobnoxious as an intruder--they made no scruple tojostle him aside; while one, less kind than the rest, or more of a wag,by an unobserved stroke, dexterously flattened down his fleecy hat uponhis head. Without readjusting it, the stranger quietly turned, andwriting anew upon the slate, again held it up:--"Charity suffereth long, and is kind."Illy pleased with his pertinacity, as they thought it, the crowd asecond time thrust him aside, and not without epithets and some buffets,all of which were unresented. But, as if at last despairing of sodifficult an adventure, wherein one, apparently a non-resistant, soughtto impose his presence upon fighting characters, the stranger now movedslowly away, yet not before altering his writing to this:--"Charity endureth all things."Shield-like bearing his slate before him, amid stares and jeers he movedslowly up and down, at his turning points again changing his inscriptionto--"Charity believeth all things."and then--"Charity never faileth."The word charity, as originally traced, remained throughout uneffaced,not unlike the left-hand numeral of a printed date, otherwise left forconvenience in blank.To some observers, the singularity, if not lunacy, of the stranger washeightened by his muteness, and, perhaps also, by the contrast to hisproceedings afforded in the actions--quite in the wonted and sensibleorder of things--of the barber of the boat, whose quarters, under asmoking-saloon, and over against a bar-room, was next door but two tothe captain's office. As if the long, wide, covered deck, hereaboutsbuilt up on both sides with shop-like windowed spaces, were someConstantinople arcade or bazaar, where more than one trade is plied,this river barber, aproned and slippered, but rather crusty-looking forthe moment, it may be from being newly out of bed, was throwing openhis premises for the day, and suitably arranging the exterior. Withbusiness-like dispatch, having rattled down his shutters, and at apalm-tree angle set out in the iron fixture his little ornamental pole,and this without overmuch tenderness for the elbows and toes of thecrowd, he concluded his operations by bidding people stand still moreaside, when, jumping on a stool, he hung over his door, on the customarynail, a gaudy sort of illuminated pasteboard sign, skillfully executedby himself, gilt with the likeness of a razor elbowed in readiness toshave, and also, for the public benefit, with two words not unfrequentlyseen ashore gracing other shops besides barbers':--"NO TRUST."An inscription which, though in a sense not less intrusive than thecontrasted ones of the stranger, did not, as it seemed, provoke anycorresponding derision or surprise, much less indignation; and stillless, to all appearances, did it gain for the inscriber the repute ofbeing a simpleton.Meanwhile, he with the slate continued moving slowly up and down, notwithout causing some stares to change into jeers, and some jeers intopushes, and some pushes into punches; when suddenly, in one of histurns, he was hailed from behind by two porters carrying a large trunk;but as the summons, though loud, was without effect, they accidentallyor otherwise swung their burden against him, nearly overthrowing him;when, by a quick start, a peculiar inarticulate moan, and a pathetictelegraphing of his fingers, he involuntarily betrayed that he was notalone dumb, but also deaf.Presently, as if not wholly unaffected by his reception thus far, hewent forward, seating himself in a retired spot on the forecastle, nighthe foot of a ladder there leading to a deck above, up and down whichladder some of the boatmen, in discharge of their duties, wereoccasionally going.From his betaking himself to this humble quarter, it was evident that,as a deck-passenger, the stranger, simple though he seemed, was notentirely ignorant of his place, though his taking a deck-passage mighthave been partly for convenience; as, from his having no luggage, it wasprobable that his destination was one of the small wayside landingswithin a few hours' sail. But, though he might not have a long way togo, yet he seemed already to have come from a very long distance.Though neither soiled nor slovenly, his cream-colored suit had a tossedlook, almost linty, as if, traveling night and day from some far countrybeyond the prairies, he had long been without the solace of a bed. Hisaspect was at once gentle and jaded, and, from the moment of seatinghimself, increasing in tired abstraction and dreaminess. Graduallyovertaken by slumber, his flaxen head drooped, his whole lamb-likefigure relaxed, and, half reclining against the ladder's foot, laymotionless, as some sugar-snow in March, which, softly stealing downover night, with its white placidity startles the brown farmer peeringout from his threshold at daybreak.