GEORGE W. CABLE.
“THE DEPICTOR OF CREOLE LIFE IN THE SOUTH.”
T is said “Circumstances make the man;” and, again, “Seeming misfortunes are often blessings in disguise.” Whether this is generally true or not, at least in the case of George W. Cable, it has so turned out; for it was poverty and necessity that drove him through a vicissitude of circumstances which stored his mind with observations and facts that enabled him to open a new field of fiction, introducing to the outside world a phase of American life hitherto unsuspected save by those who have seen it. His rendering of the Creole dialect with its French and Spanish variations and mixtures is full of originality. He has depicted the social life of the Louisiana lowlands, with its Creole and negro population, so vividly that many whose portraits he has drawn have taken serious offence at his books. But it is no doubt the truth that hurts, and if so, it should be borne for the sake of history, and it is to the credit of Mr. Cable’s integrity as an author that he has not sacrificed the truth to please his friends. His books have also been the means of effecting wholesome changes in the contract system of convict labor in several Southern States.
George W. Cable was born October 12, 1844, in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father was a Virginian and his mother a New Englander. They removed to New Orleans in 1837. In 1859 Mr. Cable failed in business and died soon after, leaving the family in a straightened condition, and the son—then fifteen years of age—was compelled to leave school and take a clerkship in a store. This he retained until, at the age of nineteen, he volunteered in the service of the Confederate Army, joining the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry, and followed the fortunes of the Southern cause until it was lost. He was said to have been a gallant soldier, was once wounded and narrowly escaped with his life. All his spare moments in camp were given to study.
After the surrender of General Lee, Cable—a young man of twenty-one—returned to New Orleans, penniless, and took employment as an errand boy in a store. From there he drifted to Kosciusko, Mississippi, where he studied civil engineering, and joined a surveying party on bayous Têche and Atchafalaya—the native heath of the Creole—and it was here that his keen observation gathered the material which has since done him so much service.
Cable first began writing to the “New Orleans Picayune” under the nom-de-plume of “Drop Shot,” and his articles evinced a power which soon opened the way to a regular place on the editorial staff of the paper. This position he retained until he was asked to write a theatrical criticism. Cable had rigid religious scruples—piety being one of his marked characteristics—always avoided attendance of the theatre, and he now refused to go, and resigned his position rather than violate his conscience.
Leaving the editorial rooms of the “Picayune,” Cable secured a position as accountant in a cotton-dealer’s office, which he retained until 1879, when the death of his employer threw him out of position. Meantime his sketches of Creole life had been appearing in “Scribner’s Monthly,” and were received with so much favor that he determined to leave business and devote his life to literature. Accordingly, in 1885, he removed North, living at Simsbury, Connecticut, Northampton, Massachusetts, and New York, which he has since made his headquarters, with a continual growing popularity, his books bringing him an ample competency.
Among the published works of this author we mention as the most prominent: “Old Creole Days” (1879–1883); “The Grandissimes” (1880); “Madame Delphine” (1881); “Dr. Sevier” (1883); “The Creoles of Louisiana” (1884); “The Silent South” (1885); “Bonaventure” (1888); “Strange True Stories of Louisiana” (1889); “The Negro Question” and “Life of William Gilmore Sims” (1890); “John March Southerner,” and some later works which the author continues to add at the rate of one book a year.
Mr. Cable has also successfully entered the lecture field, in common with other modern authors, and never fails to interest Northern audiences with his readings or recitations, from his writings or the strange wild melodies and peculiar habits of life current among the French speaking negroes of the lower Mississippi.
THE DOCTOR.[¹]
(FROM “DR. SEVIER.”)
[¹] Copyright, George W. Cable.
HE main road to wealth in New Orleans has long been Carondelet Street. There you see the most alert faces; noses—it seems to one—with more and sharper edge, and eyes smaller and brighter and with less distance between them than one notices in other streets. It is there that the stock and bond brokers hurry to and fro and run together promiscuously—the cunning and the simple, the headlong and the wary—at the four clanging strokes of the Stock Exchange gong. There rises the tall façade of the Cotton Exchange. Looking in from the sidewalk as you pass, you see its main hall, thronged but decorous, the quiet engine-room of the surrounding city’s most far-reaching occupation, and at the hall’s farther end you descry the “Future Room,” and hear the unearthly ramping and bellowing of the bulls and bears. Up and down the street, on either hand, are the ship-brokers and insurers, and in the upper stories foreign consuls among a multitude of lawyers and notaries.
In 1856 this street was just assuming its present character. The cotton merchants were making it their favorite place of commercial domicile. The open thoroughfare served in lieu of the present exchanges; men made fortunes standing on the curbstone, and during bank hours the sidewalks were perpetually crowded with cotton factors, buyers, brokers, weighers, reweighers, classers, pickers, pressers, and samplers, and the air was laden with cotton quotations and prognostications.
Number 3½, second floor, front, was the office of Dr. Sevier. This office was convenient to everything. Immediately under its windows lay the sidewalks where congregated the men who, of all in New Orleans, could best afford to pay for being sick, and least desired to die. Canal Street, the city’s leading artery, was just below, at the near left-hand corner. Beyond it lay the older town, not yet impoverished in those days,—the French quarter. A single square and a half off at the right, and in plain view from the front windows, shone the dazzling white walls of the St. Charles Hotel, where the nabobs of the river plantations came and dwelt with their fair-handed wives in seasons of peculiar anticipation, when it is well to be near the highest medical skill. In the opposite direction a three minutes’ quick drive around the upper corner and down Common Street carried the Doctor to his ward in the great Charity Hospital, and to the school of medicine, where he filled the chair set apart to the holy ailments of maternity. Thus, as it were, he laid his left hand on the rich and his right on the poor; and he was not left-handed.
Not that his usual attitude was one of benediction. He stood straight up in his austere pure-mindedness, tall, slender, pale, sharp of voice, keen of glance, stern in judgment, aggressive in debate, and fixedly untender everywhere, except—but always except—in the sick chamber. His inner heart was all of flesh; but his demands for the rectitude of mankind pointed out like the muzzles of cannon through the embrasures of his virtues. To demolish evil!—that seemed the finest of aims; and even as a physician, that was, most likely, his motive until later years and a better self-knowledge had taught him that to do good was still finer and better. He waged war—against malady. To fight; to stifle; to cut down; to uproot; to overwhelm,—these were his springs of action. That their results were good proved that his sentiment of benevolence was strong and high; but it was well-nigh shut out of sight by that impatience of evil which is very fine and knightly in youngest manhood, but which we like to see give way to kindlier moods as the earlier heat of the blood begins to pass.
He changed in later years; this was in 1856. To “resist not evil” seemed to him then only a rather feeble sort of knavery. To face it in its nakedness, and to inveigh against it in high places and low, seemed the consummation of all manliness; and manliness was the key-note of his creed. There was no other necessity in this life.
“But a man must live,” said one of his kindred, to whom, truth to tell, he had refused assistance.
“No, sir; that is just what he can’t do. A man must die! So, while he lives, let him be a man!”
How inharmonious a setting, then, for Dr. Sevier, was 3½ Carondelet Street! As he drove each morning, down to that point, he had to pass through long, irregular files of fellow-beings thronging either sidewalk—a sadly unchivalric grouping of men whose daily and yearly life was subordinated only and entirely to the getting of wealth, and whose every eager motion was a repetition of the sinister old maxim that “Time is money.”
“It’s a great deal more, sir, it’s life!” the Doctor always retorted.
Among these groups, moreover, were many who were all too well famed for illegitimate fortune. Many occupations connected with the handling of cotton yielded big harvests in perquisites. At every jog of the Doctor’s horse, men came to view whose riches were the outcome of semi-respectable larceny. It was a day of reckless operation; much of the commerce that came to New Orleans was simply, as one might say, beached in Carondelet Street. The sight used to keep the long, thin, keen-eyed doctor in perpetual indignation.
“Look at the wreckers!” he would say.
It was breakfast at eight, indignation at nine, dyspepsia at ten.
So his setting was not merely inharmonious; it was damaging. He grew sore on the whole matter of money-getting.
“Yes, I have money. But I don’t go after it. It comes to me, because I seek and render service for the service’s sake. It will come to anybody else the same way; and why should it come any other way?”
He not only had a low regard for the motives of most seekers of wealth, he went further, and fell into much disbelief of poor men’s needs. For instance, he looked upon a man’s inability to find employment, or upon a poor fellow’s run of bad luck, as upon the placarded woes of a hurdy-gurdy beggar.
“If he wants work he will find it. As for begging, it ought to be easier for any true man to starve than to beg.”
The sentiment was ungentle, but it came from the bottom of his belief concerning himself, and a longing for moral greatness in all men.
“However,” he would add, thrusting his hand into his pocket and bringing out his purse, “I’ll help any man to make himself useful. And the sick—well, the sick, as a matter of course. Only I must know what I’m doing.”
Have some of us known want? To have known her—though to love her was impossible—is “a liberal education.” The Doctor was learned; but this acquaintanceship, this education, he had never got. Hence his untenderness. Shall we condemn the fault? Yes. And the man? We have not the face. To be just, which he never knowingly failed to be, and at the same time to feel tenderly for the unworthy, to deal kindly with the erring—it is a double grace that hangs not always in easy reach even of the tallest. The Doctor attained to it—but in later years; meantime, this story—which, I believe, had he ever been poor would never have been written.
He had barely disposed of the three or four waiting messengers that arose from their chairs against the corridor wall, and was still reading the anxious lines left in various handwritings on his slate, when the young man entered. He was of fair height, slenderly built, with soft auburn hair, a little untrimmed, neat dress, and a diffident, yet expectant and courageous, face.
“Dr. Sevier?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Doctor, my wife is very ill; can I get you to come at once and see her?”
“Who is her physician?”
“I have not called any; but we must have one now.”
“I don’t know about going at once. This is my hour for being in the office. How far is it, and what’s the trouble?”
“We are only three squares away, just here in Custom-house Street.” The speaker began to add a faltering enumeration of some very grave symptoms. The Doctor noticed that he was slightly deaf; he uttered his words as though he did not hear them.
“Yes,” interrupted Dr. Sevier, speaking half to himself as he turned around to a standing case of cruel-looking silver-plated things on shelves; “that’s a small part of the penalty women pay for the doubtful honor of being our mothers. I’ll go. What is your number? But you had better drive back with me if you can.” He drew back from the glass case, shut the door, and took his hat.
“Narcisse!”
On the side of the office nearest the corridor a door let into a hall-room that afforded merely good space for the furniture needed by a single accountant. The Doctor had other interests besides those of his profession, and, taking them altogether, found it necessary, or at least convenient, to employ continuously the services of a person to keep his accounts and collect his bills. Through the open door the bookkeeper could be seen sitting on a high stool at a still higher desk—a young man of handsome profile and well-knit form. At the call of his name he unwound his legs from the rounds of the stool and leaped into the Doctor’s presence with a superlatively highbred bow.
“I shall be back in fifteen minutes,” said the Doctor. “Come, Mr. ——,” and went out with the stranger.
Narcisse had intended to speak. He stood a moment, then lifted the last half inch of a cigarette to his lips, took a long, meditative inhalation, turned half round on his heel, dashed the remnant with fierce emphasis into a spittoon, ejected two long streams of smoke from his nostrils, and, extending his fist toward the door by which the Doctor had gone out, said:—
“All right, ole hoss!” No, not that way. It is hard to give his pronunciation by letter. In the word “right” he substituted an a for the r, sounding it almost in the same instant with the i, yet distinct from it: “All a-ight, ole hoss!”
Then he walked slowly back to his desk, with that feeling of relief which some men find in the renewal of a promissory note, twined his legs again among those of the stool, and, adding not a word, resumed his pen.