The Confidence-Man

The Confidence-Man

Herman Melville

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 Fidèle, 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,

"Odd fish!"

"Poor fellow!"

"Who can he be?"

"Casper Hauser."

"Bless my soul!"

"Uncommon countenance."

"Green prophet from Utah."

"Humbug!"

"Singular innocence."

"Means something."

"Spirit-rapper."

"Moon-calf."

"Piteous."

"Trying to enlist interest."

"Beware of him."

"Fast asleep here, and, doubtless, pick-pockets on board."

"Kind of daylight Endymion."

"Escaped convict, worn out with dodging."

"Jacob dreaming at Luz."

Such the epitaphic comments, conflictingly spoken or thought, of a

miscellaneous company, who, assembled on the overlooking, cross-wise

balcony at the forward end of the upper deck near by, had not witnessed

preceding occurrences.

Meantime, like some enchanted man in his grave, happily oblivious of all

gossip, whether chiseled or chatted, the deaf and dumb stranger still

tranquilly slept, while now the boat started on her voyage.

The great ship-canal of Ving-King-Ching, in the Flowery Kingdom, seems

the Mississippi in parts, where, amply flowing between low, vine-tangled

banks, flat as tow-paths, it bears the huge toppling steamers, bedizened

and lacquered within like imperial junks.

Pierced along its great white bulk with two tiers of small

embrasure-like windows, well above the waterline, the Fiddle, though,

might at distance have been taken by strangers for some whitewashed fort

on a floating isle.

Merchants on 'change seem the passengers that buzz on her decks, while,

from quarters unseen, comes a murmur as of bees in the comb. Fine

promenades, domed saloons, long galleries, sunny balconies, confidential

passages, bridal chambers, state-rooms plenty as pigeon-holes, and

out-of-the-way retreats like secret drawers in an escritoire, present

like facilities for publicity or privacy. Auctioneer or coiner, with

equal ease, might somewhere here drive his trade.

Though her voyage of twelve hundred miles extends from apple to orange,

from clime to clime, yet, like any small ferry-boat, to right and left,

at every landing, the huge Fidèle still receives additional passengers

in exchange for those that disembark; so that, though always full of

strangers, she continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them

with strangers still more strange; like Rio Janeiro fountain, fed from

the Cocovarde mountains, which is ever overflowing with strange waters,

but never with the same strange particles in every part.

Though hitherto, as has been seen, the man in cream-colors had by no

means passed unobserved, yet by stealing into retirement, and there

going asleep and continuing so, he seemed to have courted oblivion, a

boon not often withheld from so humble an applicant as he. Those staring

crowds on the shore were now left far behind, seen dimly clustering like

swallows on eaves; while the passengers' attention was soon drawn away

to the rapidly shooting high bluffs and shot-towers on the Missouri

shore, or the bluff-looking Missourians and towering Kentuckians among

the throngs on the decks.

By-and-by--two or three random stoppages having been made, and the last

transient memory of the slumberer vanished, and he himself, not

unlikely, waked up and landed ere now--the crowd, as is usual, began in

all parts to break up from a concourse into various clusters or squads,

which in some cases disintegrated again into quartettes, trios, and

couples, or even solitaires; involuntarily submitting to that natural

law which ordains dissolution equally to the mass, as in time to the

member.

As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing

the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of

variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men

of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters;

heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters,

happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all

these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern

speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch,

Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in

cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and

Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and

United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto,

quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews;