CHAPTER IX.

SQUALOR.

Wandering about for what seemed a long while, turning from one thoroughfare into another, so as to make pursuit uncertain, it finally crossed my mind that it was past my bedtime. Fear had driven away my hunger so completely that I thought no more of it till the next day.

Brushing and rubbing as much of the coal-dust from my clothes as I could, I now walked boldly up to the counter of the Commercial Hotel, and said that I wanted to see the head-porter.

The clerk eyed me curiously as he asked me what I desired of the head-porter. I wanted, I said, to black boots for a night’s lodging. The clerk called the chief-porter, and they both looked at me as a natural curiosity, I suppose, while they plied me with a few questions. They seemed pleased with my answers, or touched by my forlorn condition or my extreme youth, and decided that I might have a night’s lodging without blacking boots for it.

Accordingly one of my questioners conducted me up into the highest story of the building, and, pointing to a bed in a large dormitory, left me in the society of some dozen or more snoring waiters and cooks. I knew in an instant the nature of the occupation of my room-mates, for I recognized on entering the apartment that post-culinary smell of dish-water with which custom had rendered me familiar, and which the philosophic nostril will, I think, almost always detect about those whose constant business it is to prepare or serve the prandial dish.

When I think of that dark dormitory now, and the sounds that rose from it, I am reminded of a midsummer night’s frog-pond; but I regarded it far more seriously then. I know not by what chain of reasoning I established the connection between their stertorous idiosyncrasies and their waking employments, yet I remember very distinctly that I occupied myself, until I fell asleep, in assigning the proper rank and position to each of the snorers. The barytone, that came to me through the darkness from the far corner, I concluded, after some deliberation, was that of the chief-cook himself.

Then there was a deep bass,--the real Mephistophelian hero of that opera of sleepers,--whose exact whereabout in the room I could never quite discover, for his note sounded each time in the place farthest from the one where I had heard it last, or expected to hear it next; this _basso cantante_, I had not the slightest doubt,--and I crouched lower on my pillow at the thought,--was that most inscrutable and relentless of tyrants, in all dining-halls and cabins, the head-waiter.

The several tenors, distributed all round me a little too lavishly perhaps for the nicer harmonies of strict musical taste, being--as I suppose, now, in the light of a larger experience--ambitious and fitful, as is the proverbial wont of tenors, and running jealously ever and anon into a dishonest _falsetto_, as if with a professional wish to attract attention,--these several tenor-snorers were, I felt sure, what the world might very well suffer a great many ambitious, fitful, and dishonest tenors always to be, namely, among the common rank and file of cooks and waiters.

And I had firmly made up my mind, long before I was lulled to sleep by the steady _crescendo_ of the chorus, that the tapering treble which piped darkling, like some night bird, high over all, proceeded from some pale-faced, meek-eyed scullion of the outer kitchen, who, awake and in the presence of his chief, would not dare say his soul was his own.

* * * * *

I slept soundly enough till about five o’clock the next morning, when I arose hurriedly. Whether my half-roused operatic company of the night before thought me a ghost, or how they explained my mysterious coming and going among them, I did not wait to learn. Leaving them to stare at one another in drowsy amazement, I stole noiselessly and breakfastless away from the hotel.

The fright of the evening preceding had shaken my confidence in human nature generally. I cannot tell how, but I became impressed with the ludicrous idea that the hotel clerk or porter would take my five coppers away from me, in payment for my lodging,--to say nothing of my breakfast, if I should stay for it. So I went down to the docks of the lower part of the city, as far from the Pacific and her captain as possible.

Here I had the good fortune to strike a bargain with the cook of a lumber schooner to wash his dishes for him, provided he should first give me all I could eat; and thus I broke my fast of twenty-four hours with the first full meal I had taken in forty-eight hours.

While finishing up the work I had agreed to do I saw the steamer Pacific passing down the stream, on her voyage away from Detroit, and I breathed freely once more.

* * * * *

I spent some days now, doing odd jobs for cooks and pantrymen for my board and lodging, while their vessels were in port; but my clothes were so worn and soiled by this and previous service that I could get no chance to work for wages as cabin-boy. Because of my clothes, also, no steamer would allow me to go out of port with her; for I was told that there was a law, then existing in most of the lake cities, by which a boat was made responsible for the support of all vagrants she carried into a town.

I do not know whether this was the case; I know merely that I was invariably sent ashore on the departure of any craft for which I had been washing dishes or scouring knives. It was indeed a precarious existence that I led in this way, but one to which I could see no immediate end. I think it was twice I went with but two meals in forty-eight hours, getting nothing from breakfast to breakfast.

And, I may say here, I have always attributed great advantage to the fact that--after the short and disastrous companionship with my young friend of Irish descent, mentioned some pages back--I was my own _fidus Achates_ in all these worst distresses.

Two boys will, certainly, do more mischief together than half a dozen will do separately; three boys together will do more than eighteen separately,--and so on. In short, I fancy it may be laid down as a general principle, that, under the conditions just enunciated, there is an increasing geometrical ratio between the number of boys and the amount of evil they will do.

I have alluded before to an account of these experiences which I gave to my school-fellows months afterward. The degree of fertile suggestion which even the narrative stirred up in my auditory should have made me thankful then, as I am certainly now, that I did thus lead my vagabond life alone. These ardent youngsters would interpolate, in the very thickest and thrillingest movements of my story, advice as to what I should have done, or hints as to what they would have done, under the circumstances.

During this narration to my school-fellows--and now I am coming to the purpose of the present digression--a boy with a very sinister-looking face, who has since happily died of the small-pox, asked me why I didn’t _steal_, averring, with great frankness, that was what he would have done.

Now that was the very first time the idea of stealing ever crossed my mind, in connection with my boyish calamities and deprivations. I am sure of this, for I remember the startling impression made upon me at the moment of the boy’s suggestion. I dare not say that I would not have stolen, after some of my long fasts,--if I had ever once thought of it. And I am only too glad that this anomaly should have occurred in my case, for, of a truth, it strikes me as much greater as a metaphysical phenomenon than as a juvenile virtue.[A]

[A] “Multum interest, utrum peccare aliquis nolit, aut nesciat.” This bit of Seneca seems so appropriate, that I hope the reader will excuse me for quoting it here, even if I did get it at second-hand from Montaigne.

* * * * *

In the very midst of my direst misfortunes, when it seemed that nothing worse could possibly happen to me, the Pacific came steaming back to Detroit. She arrived in the afternoon, and, although I had had nothing to eat that day, I was in too great apprehension of her captain to think of anything but concealment, or escape from the city.

After nightfall I stole on board the Michigan Central steamer May Flower, and found the fourth porter. I had been among menials so long that I knew all about the ramifications of their grades, and what particular line of duties belonged to individuals of each grade. The fourth porter, I was well aware, had charge of the forecastle, where the deck-hands and firemen ate and slept.

Now the fourth porter of the May Flower was a lazy, good-natured little pock-marked Irishman, whom I had no great difficulty in persuading to smuggle me to Buffalo, on condition that I should do the greater part of his work in the forecastle. I was glad, it will be seen, to make any port in the storm which at that time swept across my terrified imagination; Buffalo was not, of course, the best one for me, but anything seemed better, just then, than the prospect of that Cimmerian House of Vagrancy.

My friend, the fourth porter, was so well pleased with the skill and taste I displayed in the cleansing of his greasy dishes that he lent a degree of zeal to the carrying out of his part of the contract which wellnigh proved fatal to me. For, the next day, when we were out on the lake, and the fares were collecting, he hid me away between two mattresses, as black as the coal handled by the sturdy firemen who usually slept on them. I was already half smothered when the clerk and his satellites descended into the forecastle; but the fourth porter, to crush out, I suppose, the merest crease of suspicion, sat down on the mattress which covered me, and carelessly picked his teeth till the danger was past.

It was well that the forecastle was so uninviting a place as to detain the clerk but a short time, since I should have screamed or perished in a half-minute more. When drawn out, at last, by the party of the first part to our contract, I was very black in the face, not only from the smothering I had endured, but from the coal-dust I had taken from the mattresses.