Chapter: CHAPTER XXXVI. IN WHICH THE COSMOPOLITAN IS ACCOSTED BY A MYSTIC, WHEREUPON ENSUES PRETTY MUCH SUCH TALK AS MIGHT BE EXPECTED.



As, not without some haste, the boon companion withdrew, a stranger
advanced, and touching the cosmopolitan, said: "I think I heard you say
you would see that man again. Be warned; don't you do so."

He turned, surveying the speaker; a blue-eyed man, sandy-haired, and
Saxon-looking; perhaps five and forty; tall, and, but for a certain
angularity, well made; little touch of the drawing-room about him, but a
look of plain propriety of a Puritan sort, with a kind of farmer
dignity. His age seemed betokened more by his brow, placidly thoughtful,
than by his general aspect, which had that look of youthfulness in
maturity, peculiar sometimes to habitual health of body, the original
gift of nature, or in part the effect or reward of steady temperance of
the passions, kept so, perhaps, by constitution as much as morality. A
neat, comely, almost ruddy cheek, coolly fresh, like a red
clover-blossom at coolish dawn--the color of warmth preserved by the
virtue of chill. Toning the whole man, was one-knows-not-what of
shrewdness and mythiness, strangely jumbled; in that way, he seemed a
kind of cross between a Yankee peddler and a Tartar priest, though it
seemed as if, at a pinch, the first would not in all probability play
second fiddle to the last.

"Sir," said the cosmopolitan, rising and bowing with slow dignity, "if I
cannot with unmixed satisfaction hail a hint pointed at one who has just
been clinking the social glass with me, on the other hand, I am not
disposed to underrate the motive which, in the present case, could alone
have prompted such an intimation. My friend, whose seat is still warm,
has retired for the night, leaving more or less in his bottle here.
Pray, sit down in his seat, and partake with me; and then, if you choose
to hint aught further unfavorable to the man, the genial warmth of whose
person in part passes into yours, and whose genial hospitality meanders
through you--be it so."

"Quite beautiful conceits," said the stranger, now scholastically and
artistically eying the picturesque speaker, as if he were a statue in
the Pitti Palace; "very beautiful:" then with the gravest interest,
"yours, sir, if I mistake not, must be a beautiful soul--one full of all
love and truth; for where beauty is, there must those be."

"A pleasing belief," rejoined the cosmopolitan, beginning with an even
air, "and to confess, long ago it pleased me. Yes, with you and
Schiller, I am pleased to believe that beauty is at bottom incompatible
with ill, and therefore am so eccentric as to have confidence in the
latent benignity of that beautiful creature, the rattle-snake, whose
lithe neck and burnished maze of tawny gold, as he sleekly curls aloft
in the sun, who on the prairie can behold without wonder?"

As he breathed these words, he seemed so to enter into their spirit--as
some earnest descriptive speakers will--as unconsciously to wreathe his
form and sidelong crest his head, till he all but seemed the creature
described. Meantime, the stranger regarded him with little surprise,
apparently, though with much contemplativeness of a mystical sort, and
presently said:

"When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did it never occur to you to
change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to
glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole
beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In short, did the wish
never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and
conscience, and revel for a while in the carefree, joyous life of a
perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, and irresponsible creature?"

"Such a wish," replied the other, not perceptibly disturbed, "I must
confess, never consciously was mine. Such a wish, indeed, could hardly
occur to ordinary imaginations, and mine I cannot think much above the
average."

"But now that the idea is suggested," said the stranger, with infantile
intellectuality, "does it not raise the desire?"

"Hardly. For though I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice
against the rattle-snake, still, I should not like to be one. If I were
a rattle-snake now, there would be no such thing as being genial with
men--men would be afraid of me, and then I should be a very lonesome and
miserable rattle-snake."

"True, men would be afraid of you. And why? Because of your rattle, your
hollow rattle--a sound, as I have been told, like the shaking together
of small, dry skulls in a tune of the Waltz of Death. And here we have
another beautiful truth. When any creature is by its make inimical to
other creatures, nature in effect labels that creature, much as an
apothecary does a poison. So that whoever is destroyed by a
rattle-snake, or other harmful agent, it is his own fault. He should
have respected the label. Hence that significant passage in Scripture,
'Who will pity the charmer that is bitten with a serpent?'"

"_I_ would pity him," said the cosmopolitan, a little bluntly, perhaps.

"But don't you think," rejoined the other, still maintaining his
passionless air, "don't you think, that for a man to pity where nature
is pitiless, is a little presuming?"

"Let casuists decide the casuistry, but the compassion the heart decides
for itself. But, sir," deepening in seriousness, "as I now for the first
realize, you but a moment since introduced the word irresponsible in a
way I am not used to. Now, sir, though, out of a tolerant spirit, as I
hope, I try my best never to be frightened at any speculation, so long
as it is pursued in honesty, yet, for once, I must acknowledge that you
do really, in the point cited, cause me uneasiness; because a proper
view of the universe, that view which is suited to breed a proper
confidence, teaches, if I err not, that since all things are justly
presided over, not very many living agents but must be some way
accountable."

"Is a rattle-snake accountable?" asked the stranger with such a
preternaturally cold, gemmy glance out of his pellucid blue eye, that he
seemed more a metaphysical merman than a feeling man; "is a rattle-snake
accountable?"

"If I will not affirm that it is," returned the other, with the caution
of no inexperienced thinker, "neither will I deny it. But if we suppose
it so, I need not say that such accountability is neither to you, nor
me, nor the Court of Common Pleas, but to something superior."

He was proceeding, when the stranger would have interrupted him; but as
reading his argument in his eye, the cosmopolitan, without waiting for
it to be put into words, at once spoke to it: "You object to my
supposition, for but such it is, that the rattle-snake's accountability
is not by nature manifest; but might not much the same thing be urged
against man's? A _reductio ad absurdum_, proving the objection vain. But
if now," he continued, "you consider what capacity for mischief there is
in a rattle-snake (observe, I do not charge it with being mischievous, I
but say it has the capacity), could you well avoid admitting that that
would be no symmetrical view of the universe which should maintain that,
while to man it is forbidden to kill, without judicial cause, his
fellow, yet the rattle-snake has an implied permit of unaccountability
to murder any creature it takes capricious umbrage at--man
included?--But," with a wearied air, "this is no genial talk; at least
it is not so to me. Zeal at unawares embarked me in it. I regret it.
Pray, sit down, and take some of this wine."

"Your suggestions are new to me," said the other, with a kind of
condescending appreciativeness, as of one who, out of devotion to
knowledge, disdains not to appropriate the least crumb of it, even from
a pauper's board; "and, as I am a very Athenian in hailing a new
thought, I cannot consent to let it drop so abruptly. Now, the
rattle-snake----"

"Nothing more about rattle-snakes, I beseech," in distress; "I must
positively decline to reenter upon that subject. Sit down, sir, I beg,
and take some of this wine."

"To invite me to sit down with you is hospitable," collectedly
acquiescing now in the change of topics; "and hospitality being fabled
to be of oriental origin, and forming, as it does, the subject of a
pleasing Arabian romance, as well as being a very romantic thing in
itself--hence I always hear the expressions of hospitality with
pleasure. But, as for the wine, my regard for that beverage is so
extreme, and I am so fearful of letting it sate me, that I keep my love
for it in the lasting condition of an untried abstraction. Briefly, I
quaff immense draughts of wine from the page of Hafiz, but wine from a
cup I seldom as much as sip."

The cosmopolitan turned a mild glance upon the speaker, who, now
occupying the chair opposite him, sat there purely and coldly radiant as
a prism. It seemed as if one could almost hear him vitreously chime and
ring. That moment a waiter passed, whom, arresting with a sign, the
cosmopolitan bid go bring a goblet of ice-water. "Ice it well, waiter,"
said he; "and now," turning to the stranger, "will you, if you please,
give me your reason for the warning words you first addressed to me?"

"I hope they were not such warnings as most warnings are," said the
stranger; "warnings which do not forewarn, but in mockery come after the
fact. And yet something in you bids me think now, that whatever latent
design your impostor friend might have had upon you, it as yet remains
unaccomplished. You read his label."

"And what did it say? 'This is a genial soul,' So you see you must
either give up your doctrine of labels, or else your prejudice against
my friend. But tell me," with renewed earnestness, "what do you take him
for? What is he?"

"What are you? What am I? Nobody knows who anybody is. The data which
life furnishes, towards forming a true estimate of any being, are as
insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to
determine the triangle."

"But is not this doctrine of triangles someway inconsistent with your
doctrine of labels?"

"Yes; but what of that? I seldom care to be consistent. In a
philosophical view, consistency is a certain level at all times,
maintained in all the thoughts of one's mind. But, since nature is
nearly all hill and dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in
knowledge without submitting to the natural inequalities in the
progress? Advance into knowledge is just like advance upon the grand
Erie canal, where, from the character of the country, change of level is
inevitable; you are locked up and locked down with perpetual
inconsistencies, and yet all the time you get on; while the dullest part
of the whole route is what the boatmen call the 'long level'--a
consistently-flat surface of sixty miles through stagnant swamps."

"In one particular," rejoined the cosmopolitan, "your simile is,
perhaps, unfortunate. For, after all these weary lockings-up and
lockings-down, upon how much of a higher plain do you finally stand?
Enough to make it an object? Having from youth been taught reverence for
knowledge, you must pardon me if, on but this one account, I reject your
analogy. But really you someway bewitch me with your tempting discourse,
so that I keep straying from my point unawares. You tell me you cannot
certainly know who or what my friend is; pray, what do you conjecture
him to be?"

"I conjecture him to be what, among the ancient Egyptians, was called a
----" using some unknown word.

"A ----! And what is that?"

"A ---- is what Proclus, in a little note to his third book on the
theology of Plato, defines as ---- ----" coming out with a sentence of
Greek.

Holding up his glass, and steadily looking through its transparency, the
cosmopolitan rejoined: "That, in so defining the thing, Proclus set it
to modern understandings in the most crystal light it was susceptible
of, I will not rashly deny; still, if you could put the definition in
words suited to perceptions like mine, I should take it for a favor.

"A favor!" slightly lifting his cool eyebrows; "a bridal favor I
understand, a knot of white ribands, a very beautiful type of the purity
of true marriage; but of other favors I am yet to learn; and still, in a
vague way, the word, as you employ it, strikes me as unpleasingly
significant in general of some poor, unheroic submission to being done
good to."

Here the goblet of iced-water was brought, and, in compliance with a
sign from the cosmopolitan, was placed before the stranger, who, not
before expressing acknowledgments, took a draught, apparently
refreshing--its very coldness, as with some is the case, proving not
entirely uncongenial.

At last, setting down the goblet, and gently wiping from his lips the
beads of water freshly clinging there as to the valve of a coral-shell
upon a reef, he turned upon the cosmopolitan, and, in a manner the most
cool, self-possessed, and matter-of-fact possible, said: "I hold to the
metempsychosis; and whoever I may be now, I feel that I was once the
stoic Arrian, and have inklings of having been equally puzzled by a word
in the current language of that former time, very probably answering to
your word _favor_."

"Would you favor me by explaining?" said the cosmopolitan, blandly.

"Sir," responded the stranger, with a very slight degree of severity, "I
like lucidity, of all things, and am afraid I shall hardly be able to
converse satisfactorily with you, unless you bear it in mind."

The cosmopolitan ruminatingly eyed him awhile, then said: "The best way,
as I have heard, to get out of a labyrinth, is to retrace one's steps. I
will accordingly retrace mine, and beg you will accompany me. In short,
once again to return to the point: for what reason did you warn me
against my friend?"

"Briefly, then, and clearly, because, as before said, I conjecture him
to be what, among the ancient Egyptians----"

"Pray, now," earnestly deprecated the cosmopolitan, "pray, now, why
disturb the repose of those ancient Egyptians? What to us are their
words or their thoughts? Are we pauper Arabs, without a house of our
own, that, with the mummies, we must turn squatters among the dust of
the Catacombs?"

"Pharaoh's poorest brick-maker lies proudlier in his rags than the
Emperor of all the Russias in his hollands," oracularly said the
stranger; "for death, though in a worm, is majestic; while life, though
in a king, is contemptible. So talk not against mummies. It is a part of
my mission to teach mankind a due reverence for mummies."

Fortunately, to arrest these incoherencies, or rather, to vary them, a
haggard, inspired-looking man now approached--a crazy beggar, asking
alms under the form of peddling a rhapsodical tract, composed by
himself, and setting forth his claims to some rhapsodical apostleship.
Though ragged and dirty, there was about him no touch of vulgarity; for,
by nature, his manner was not unrefined, his frame slender, and appeared
the more so from the broad, untanned frontlet of his brow, tangled over
with a disheveled mass of raven curls, throwing a still deeper tinge
upon a complexion like that of a shriveled berry. Nothing could exceed
his look of picturesque Italian ruin and dethronement, heightened by
what seemed just one glimmering peep of reason, insufficient to do him
any lasting good, but enough, perhaps, to suggest a torment of latent
doubts at times, whether his addled dream of glory were true.

Accepting the tract offered him, the cosmopolitan glanced over it, and,
seeming to see just what it was, closed it, put it in his pocket, eyed
the man a moment, then, leaning over and presenting him with a shilling,
said to him, in tones kind and considerate: "I am sorry, my friend, that
I happen to be engaged just now; but, having purchased your work, I
promise myself much satisfaction in its perusal at my earliest leisure."

In his tattered, single-breasted frock-coat, buttoned meagerly up to his
chin, the shutter-brain made him a bow, which, for courtesy, would not
have misbecome a viscount, then turned with silent appeal to the
stranger. But the stranger sat more like a cold prism than ever, while
an expression of keen Yankee cuteness, now replacing his former mystical
one, lent added icicles to his aspect. His whole air said: "Nothing
from me." The repulsed petitioner threw a look full of resentful pride
and cracked disdain upon him, and went his way.

"Come, now," said the cosmopolitan, a little reproachfully, "you ought
to have sympathized with that man; tell me, did you feel no
fellow-feeling? Look at his tract here, quite in the transcendental
vein."

"Excuse me," said the stranger, declining the tract, "I never patronize
scoundrels."

"Scoundrels?"

"I detected in him, sir, a damning peep of sense--damning, I say; for
sense in a seeming madman is scoundrelism. I take him for a cunning
vagabond, who picks up a vagabond living by adroitly playing the madman.
Did you not remark how he flinched under my eye?'

"Really?" drawing a long, astonished breath, "I could hardly have
divined in you a temper so subtlely distrustful. Flinched? to be sure he
did, poor fellow; you received him with so lame a welcome. As for his
adroitly playing the madman, invidious critics might object the same to
some one or two strolling magi of these days. But that is a matter I
know nothing about. But, once more, and for the last time, to return to
the point: why sir, did you warn me against my friend? I shall rejoice,
if, as I think it will prove, your want of confidence in my friend rests
upon a basis equally slender with your distrust of the lunatic. Come,
why did you warn me? Put it, I beseech, in few words, and those
English."

"I warned you against him because he is suspected for what on these
boats is known--so they tell me--as a Mississippi operator."

"An operator, ah? he operates, does he? My friend, then, is something
like what the Indians call a Great Medicine, is he? He operates, he
purges, he drains off the repletions."

"I perceive, sir," said the stranger, constitutionally obtuse to the
pleasant drollery, "that your notion, of what is called a Great
Medicine, needs correction. The Great Medicine among the Indians is less
a bolus than a man in grave esteem for his politic sagacity."

"And is not my friend politic? Is not my friend sagacious? By your own
definition, is not my friend a Great Medicine?"

"No, he is an operator, a Mississippi operator; an equivocal character.
That he is such, I little doubt, having had him pointed out to me as
such by one desirous of initiating me into any little novelty of this
western region, where I never before traveled. And, sir, if I am not
mistaken, you also are a stranger here (but, indeed, where in this
strange universe is not one a stranger?) and that is a reason why I felt
moved to warn you against a companion who could not be otherwise than
perilous to one of a free and trustful disposition. But I repeat the
hope, that, thus far at least, he has not succeeded with you, and trust
that, for the future, he will not."

"Thank you for your concern; but hardly can I equally thank you for so
steadily maintaining the hypothesis of my friend's objectionableness.
True, I but made his acquaintance for the first to-day, and know little
of his antecedents; but that would seem no just reason why a nature like
his should not of itself inspire confidence. And since your own
knowledge of the gentleman is not, by your account, so exact as it might
be, you will pardon me if I decline to welcome any further suggestions
unflattering to him. Indeed, sir," with friendly decision, "let us
change the subject."

 After Charlie heads out, a man who we'll just call the Puritan for now sidles up to Frank and goes, I don't trust that guy. Frank isn't into the trash-talking, but he invites the Puritan to finish up the wine with him. The Puritan accepts and looks Frank over. He tells Frank he is beautiful and must also have a beautiful soul. Frank riffs on the idea that outward and inner beauty match and argues that the rattlesnake must have some good in it because it's so pretty. Two creepy descriptions are offered up by our narrator: 1) Frank seems to embody beautiful snakeness here; and 2) the Puritan asks him if he ever wonders what it be like to be a snake. You know, free and allowed to kill whatever. Yikes. Frank: Nah. The Puritan: Bet you kind of want to now, though, huh? Frank: Nah. I like people, and no offense to the snake, but if I were one, then people wouldn't want to hang out with me. Sad. The dudes talk about the rattler some more. The Puritan makes a victim-blame-y comment about how people who get bitten by rattlesnakes deserve it because they should know better, what with the rattling warning and all. Frank doesn't agree. The dudes sit down to drink, and Frank asks why the Puritan said he doesn't trust Charlie. It takes the Puritan fo-re-ver to get to the point because his answers are all semi-riddling riffs on this: Can anyone really trust anyone? Who is who? What is the what? At one point, the Puritan gives Frank a reason. Charlie, according to the Puritan, is what the Egyptians call "--." Yeah, that's not a typo. Melville really does just give us a blank line. It's kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure moment. Since the Puritan doesn't drink wine, ice water is brought out. Frank still tries to get a straight answer from the Puritan when a very poor man with some sort of mental illness walks by. He's offering to sing people songs that he's written. Frank buys one of the pamphlets the poor man's got with the lyrics, but tells the poor man he'll read it later and that he doesn't need to sing for them. The Puritan gives the poor man a death-glare. This scares the poor man away. Frank asks the Puritan what his problem is. The Puritan thinks the poor man is a fake with just enough sense to pretend to be mentally ill. For proof, the Puritan relies on the fact that he could scare the poor man off. Frank asks about the Puritan's distrust of Charlie again and demands there be no more mad libs. He just wants a reason in plain English. The Puritan: Charlie's a Mississippi operator. The guys have different views of what this term means, but the Puritan ultimately just reiterates that Charlie is untrustworthy. Frank: Let's just change the subject.

