Chapter: CHAPTER I. A MUTE GOES ABOARD A BOAT ON THE MISSISSIPPI.


At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac
at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the
city of St. Louis.

His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur
one, 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, a
stranger.

In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favorite
steamer Fidele, on the point of starting for New Orleans. Stared at, but
unsaluted, with the air of one neither courting nor shunning regard, but
evenly 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 a
placard nigh the captain's office, offering a reward for the capture of
a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East;
quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though
wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given; but what
purported to be a careful description of his person followed.

As if it had been a theatre-bill, crowds were gathered about the
announcement, and among them certain chevaliers, whose eyes, it was
plain, were on the capitals, or, at least, earnestly seeking sight of
them from behind intervening coats; but as for their fingers, they were
enveloped in some myth; though, during a chance interval, one of these
chevaliers somewhat showed his hand in purchasing from another
chevalier, ex-officio a peddler of money-belts, one of his popular
safe-guards, while another peddler, who was still another versatile
chevalier, hawked, in the thick of the throng, the lives of Measan, the
bandit of Ohio, Murrel, the pirate of the Mississippi, and the brothers
Harpe, the Thugs of the Green River country, in Kentucky--creatures,
with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the time, and for
the most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the same
regions, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem cause
for unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those who think
that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes
increase.

Pausing at this spot, the stranger so far succeeded in threading his
way, as at last to plant himself just beside the placard, when,
producing a small slate and tracing some words upon if, he held it up
before him on a level with the placard, so that they who read the one
might read the other. The words were these:--

"Charity thinketh no evil."

As, in gaining his place, some little perseverance, not to say
persistence, of a mildly inoffensive sort, had been unavoidable, it was
not with the best relish that the crowd regarded his apparent intrusion;
and upon a more attentive survey, perceiving no badge of authority about
him, but rather something quite the contrary--he being of an aspect so
singularly innocent; an aspect too, which they took to be somehow
inappropriate to the time and place, and inclining to the notion that
his writing was of much the same sort: in short, taking him for some
strange kind of simpleton, harmless enough, would he keep to himself,
but not wholly unobnoxious as an intruder--they made no scruple to
jostle him aside; while one, less kind than the rest, or more of a wag,
by an unobserved stroke, dexterously flattened down his fleecy hat upon
his head. Without readjusting it, the stranger quietly turned, and
writing 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 a
second time thrust him aside, and not without epithets and some buffets,
all of which were unresented. But, as if at last despairing of so
difficult an adventure, wherein one, apparently a non-resistant, sought
to impose his presence upon fighting characters, the stranger now moved
slowly 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 moved
slowly up and down, at his turning points again changing his inscription
to--

"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 for
convenience in blank.

To some observers, the singularity, if not lunacy, of the stranger was
heightened by his muteness, and, perhaps also, by the contrast to his
proceedings afforded in the actions--quite in the wonted and sensible
order of things--of the barber of the boat, whose quarters, under a
smoking-saloon, and over against a bar-room, was next door but two to
the captain's office. As if the long, wide, covered deck, hereabouts
built up on both sides with shop-like windowed spaces, were some
Constantinople arcade or bazaar, where more than one trade is plied,
this river barber, aproned and slippered, but rather crusty-looking for
the moment, it may be from being newly out of bed, was throwing open
his premises for the day, and suitably arranging the exterior. With
business-like dispatch, having rattled down his shutters, and at a
palm-tree angle set out in the iron fixture his little ornamental pole,
and this without overmuch tenderness for the elbows and toes of the
crowd, he concluded his operations by bidding people stand still more
aside, when, jumping on a stool, he hung over his door, on the customary
nail, a gaudy sort of illuminated pasteboard sign, skillfully executed
by himself, gilt with the likeness of a razor elbowed in readiness to
shave, and also, for the public benefit, with two words not unfrequently
seen ashore gracing other shops besides barbers':--

"NO TRUST."

An inscription which, though in a sense not less intrusive than the
contrasted ones of the stranger, did not, as it seemed, provoke any
corresponding derision or surprise, much less indignation; and still
less, to all appearances, did it gain for the inscriber the repute of
being a simpleton.

Meanwhile, he with the slate continued moving slowly up and down, not
without causing some stares to change into jeers, and some jeers into
pushes, and some pushes into punches; when suddenly, in one of his
turns, he was hailed from behind by two porters carrying a large trunk;
but as the summons, though loud, was without effect, they accidentally
or otherwise swung their burden against him, nearly overthrowing him;
when, by a quick start, a peculiar inarticulate moan, and a pathetic
telegraphing of his fingers, he involuntarily betrayed that he was not
alone dumb, but also deaf.

Presently, as if not wholly unaffected by his reception thus far, he
went forward, seating himself in a retired spot on the forecastle, nigh
the foot of a ladder there leading to a deck above, up and down which
ladder some of the boatmen, in discharge of their duties, were
occasionally going.

From his betaking himself to this humble quarter, it was evident that,
as a deck-passenger, the stranger, simple though he seemed, was not
entirely ignorant of his place, though his taking a deck-passage might
have been partly for convenience; as, from his having no luggage, it was
probable that his destination was one of the small wayside landings
within a few hours' sail. But, though he might not have a long way to
go, yet he seemed already to have come from a very long distance.

Though neither soiled nor slovenly, his cream-colored suit had a tossed
look, almost linty, as if, traveling night and day from some far country
beyond the prairies, he had long been without the solace of a bed. His
aspect was at once gentle and jaded, and, from the moment of seating
himself, increasing in tired abstraction and dreaminess. Gradually
overtaken by slumber, his flaxen head drooped, his whole lamb-like
figure relaxed, and, half reclining against the ladder's foot, lay
motionless, as some sugar-snow in March, which, softly stealing down
over night, with its white placidity startles the brown farmer peering
out from his threshold at daybreak.

 April Fools' Day: it's sunrise on the Mississippi in St. Louis. A dude appears out of nowhere like he's some great Incan legend. Our guy boards the boat. Cue token shot of hair, duds, and doodads: dude's blonde, rocking peach fuzz only , and wearing a cream suit with white fur cap, but, umm, here's something weird: he's got no bags with him. According to the crowd on board, his look plus lack of luggage and friends means he's a stranger. They don't take kindly to strangers. Whatevs, dude's onboard the Fidele headed to New Orleans with a sense of duty. There's a crowd aboard and they stop judging our newbie for five hot seconds while they stare at a sign . Among the crowd are pickpockets and blokes hawking some dubious wares. Some of these are books on criminals and notorious bandits. This is a meta-moment with Melville name-dropping some books that exist IRL. In case we don't get that all of these characters are bad news bears, our narrator dubs them chevaliers. For realsies, that'd mean they would be honored French soldiers; for sarcastic funsies, this means--wink wink, nod nod--these guys are thoroughly up to no good and are definitely not soldiers. Back to our guy: he's threaded his way through the crowd up to the captivating placard. We still have no idea what it says, but our stranger decides to stand next to it, pulls out a slate. On it, he scribbles: "Charity thinketh no evil." Deep. This does not go over well with the crowd, so they give our dude a once-over. Their assessment: he's innocent but annoying. He doesn't belong. They push him to the side, and one dude with a bad attitude squashes his cap flat on his head. Sad. Our guy is undeterred. He updates his sign: "Charity suffereth long, and is kind." Crowd is really peeved now. They push him harder, and his lack of resentment upsets them all the more. They're violent types; he's not. According to them, he has got to go. Update to slate number three: "Charity endureth all things." The crowd stares at our guy, and he sort of walks in front of them, back and forth, meeting their gaze. Update to slate number four: "Charity believeth all things." And, finally, the last update: "Charity never faileth." It's worth noting that "charity" never gets erased when our guy updates his slate. It stays crisp while the rest of the words are smudged and written anew. After this keen observation, we get another this stranger is dif-fer-ent moment with a quick visual contrast: dude is standing there, staring at the audience with his charity slate, and up hops the local barber onto the scene. He's one of many vendors running a little dingy business on the boat. Whereas the stranger is tidy and quiet with a sharp little makeshift sign, the barber is gruff, loud, and props up a cheesy sign for his services. Turns out the crowd is cool with the barber's interruption. Weird. These folks are so not cool with the stranger's lingering presence; pushes turn into punches until he almost gets run down by two porters carrying luggage. This is the first time our guy seems distressed, and in the tussle, it becomes evident that he has a hearing impairment. The crowd continues to be unsympathetic. Shocking . The stranger goes to sit underneath a ladder in the deck-passage area signaling his station on board the ship. He's tuckered out and promptly checks out. While he snoozes, the narrator clues us in to his look: he's tidy, but worn down. He looks like he's been travelling a long, long way--and this is not his last stop.

