I asked several learned and thoughtful people how Memphis came by its name. I got no answer which was really satisfactory. It was suggested to me that cotton grows in Egypt and also in the neighborhood of Memphis. But cotton does not immediately suggest Egypt to the mind. Mummies suggest Egypt. So, though less directly, does corn. If a caché of mummies had been discovered on the banks of the Mississippi it would be easy to account for Memphis. If Tennessee were a great wheat state one could imagine settlers saying "There is corn in Egypt, according to the Scriptures. Let us call our new city by an Egyptian name." But I doubt whether cotton suggested Memphis. It certainly did not suggest Cairo, for Cairo is not a cotton place. I was told,—though without any strong conviction—that the sight of the Mississippi reminded somebody once of the Nile. It would of course remind an Egyptian fellah of the Nile; but the original settlers in Memphis were almost certainly not Egyptian fellaheen. Why should it remind any one else of the Nile? It reminds me of the Shannon, and I should probably have wanted to call Memphis Athlone if I had had a voice in the naming of it. It would remind an Englishman of the Severn, a German of the Rhine, an Austrian of the Danube, a Spaniard—it was, I think, a Spaniard who went there first—of the Guadalquiver. I cannot believe that the sight of a very great river naturally suggests the Nile to anyone who is not familiar with Egypt beforehand.
It is indeed true that both the Mississippi and the Nile have a way of overflowing their banks, but most large rivers do that from time to time. The habit is not so peculiar as to force the thought of the Nile on early observers of the Mississippi. Indeed there is a great difference between the overflowings of the Nile and those of the Mississippi. The Nile, so I have always understood, fertilizes the land round it when it overflows. The Mississippi destroys cotton crops when it breaks loose. South of Memphis for very many miles the river is contained by large dykes, called levees, a word of French origin. These are built up far above the level of the land which they protect. It is a very strange thing to stand on one of these dykes and look down on one side at the roofs of the houses of the village, and on the other side at the river. When we were there the river was very low. Long banks of sand pushed their backs up everywhere in the main stream and there was half a mile of dry land between the river and the bank on which we stood. But at flood time the river comes right up to the dyke, rises along the slope of it, and the level of the water is far above that of the land which the dykes protect. Then the people in the villages near the dyke live in constant fear of inundation, and I saw, beside a house far inland, a boat moored—should I in such a case say tethered?—to a tree in a garden ready for use if the river swept away a dyke. I suppose the people get accustomed to living under such conditions. Men cultivate vines and make excellent wine on the slopes of Vesuvius though Pompeii lies, a bleached skeleton, at their feet. I should myself rather plant cotton behind a dyke, than do that. But I am not nearly so much afraid of water as I am of fire.
I was told that at flood time men patrol the tops of the dykes with loaded rifles in their hands, ready to shoot at sight anyone who attempts to land from a boat. The idea is that unscrupulous people on the left bank, seeing that their own dyke is in danger of collapsing, might try to relieve the pressure on it by digging down a dyke on the right bank and inundating the country behind it. The people on the other side of course take similar precautions. Most men, such unfortunately is human nature, would undoubtedly prefer to see their neighbors' houses and fields flooded rather than their own. But I find it difficult to believe that anyone would be so entirely unscrupulous as to dig down a protecting dyke. The rifle men can scarcely be really necessary but their existence witnesses to the greatness of the peril.
I saw, while I was in Memphis, a place where the river had torn a large piece of land out of the side of a public park. The park stood high above the river and I looked down over the edge of a moderately lofty cliff at the marks of the river's violence. Some unexpected obstacle or some unforeseen alteration in the river bed had sent the mighty current in full force against the land in this particular place. The result was the disappearance of a tract of ground and a semicircle of clay cliff which looked as if it had been made with a gigantic cheese scoop. The river was placid enough when I saw it, a broad but lazy stream. But for the torn edge of the park I should have failed to realize how terrific its force can be. The dykes were convincing. So were the stories of the riflemen. But the other brought the reality home to me almost as well as if I had actually seen a flood.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LAND OF THE FREE
We should have been hard indeed to please if we had not enjoyed our visits to Chicago and Memphis. We should be ungrateful now if we confessed that there was any note of disappointment in the memory of the joyous time we had. Yet there is one thing we regret about that journey of ours to the Middle West and South. We should dearly have liked to see a dozen other places, smaller and less important, which lay along the railway line between Chicago and Memphis, and between Memphis and Indianapolis. We made the former of these journeys entirely, and the latter partly, by day. Some unimaginative friends warned us beforehand that these journeys were dull, that it would be better to sleep through them if possible, rather than spend hours looking out of railway carriage windows at uninteresting landscapes. These friends were entirely wrong. The journeys were anything but dull. The trains dragged us through a whole series of small towns, and, after the manner of many American trains, gave us ample opportunity of looking at the houses and the streets.
In other countries trains are obliged to hide themselves as much as possible when they come to towns. They go into tunnels when they can or wander round the backs of mean houses so that the traveler sees nothing except patches of half bald earth sown with discarded tins and rows of shirts and stockings hanging out to dry. European peoples, it appears, do not welcome trains. In America the train seems to be an honored guest. It is allowed, perhaps invited, to wander along or across the chief streets. I have been told by a very angry critic that this way of stating the fact is wrong, misleading, and abominably unjust to the American people. The towns, he says, did not invite the train, but the train, being there first, so to speak, invited the towns to exist. Very likely this is so. But it seems to me to matter but little whether the train or the town came first. The noticeable thing is that the town evidently likes the train. It is just as sure a mark of affection to lay out a main street alongside the railway line as it would be to invite the railway to run its line down the middle of the main street. An English town, if it found that a railway was established on its site before it got there would angrily turn its back to the line, would, even at the cost of great inconvenience, run its streets away from the railway. The American plan from the point of view of the passenger is far better. He gets the most delightful glances of human activity and is set wondering at ways of life that are strange to him.
Our imagination would, I think, have in any case been equal to the task of conjuring up mental pictures of what life is like in these small isolated inland towns. We should, no doubt, have gone grievously wrong, but we should have enjoyed ourselves even without guidance. Fortunately we were not left to our own imaginative blunderings. We had with us a volume of Mr. Irvin Cobb's stories for the possession of which we selfishly disputed. It gave us just what we wanted, a sure groundwork for our imaginings. We peopled those little towns with the men and women whom Mr. Cobb revealed to us. His humor and his delightful tenderness gave us real glimpses of the lives, the hopes, the fears, the prejudices and memories of many people who otherwise would have been quite strange to us. Each little town as we came to it was inhabited by friendly men and women. Thanks to Mr. Cobb they were our friends. All that was wanted was that we should be theirs. Hence the bitter disappointment at not being able to stop at one after the other of the towns, at being denied the chance of completing a friendship with people whom we already liked. But it may well be that we should not really have got to know them any better. We have not, alas! Mr. Cobb's gift of gentle humor or his power of sympathetic understanding. Also it takes years to get to know anyone. We could not, in any case, have stayed for years in all these towns. Life has not years enough in it.
Besides the towns there were the people we met on the trains. There was, for instance, a man who went up and down selling apples and grapes in little paper bags. We bought from him and while buying we heard him speak. There was no doubt about the matter. He was an Irishman, and not merely an Irishman by descent, the son or grandson of an emigrant, but one who had quite recently left Ireland. His voice to our ears was like well-remembered music. I know the feeling of joy which comes with landing from an English-manned steamer on the quay in Dublin and hearing again the Irish intonation and the Irish turns of phrase. But that is an expected pleasure. It is nothing compared to the sudden delight of hearing an Irish voice in some place thousands of miles from Ireland where the last thing you expect to happen is a meeting with an Irishman. I remember being told of an Irishwoman who was traveling from Singapore to Ceylon in a steamer. She lay in her cabin, helplessly ill with some fever contracted during her stay in the Far East. She seemed incapable of taking an interest in anything until two men came to mend something in the corridor outside her cabin door. They talked together and at the sound of their voices the sick lady roused herself. She had found something in life which still interested her. She wanted very much to know whether the men came from County Antrim or County Down. She was sure their homes were in one or the other. The Irish voices had stirred her.
We were neither sick nor apathetic, but we were roused to fresh vitality by the sound of our Irish apple seller's voice. He came from County Wicklow. He told us so, needlessly indeed, for we knew it by his talk. He had been in America for two years, had drifted westward from New York, was selling apples in a train. Did he like America? Was he happy? Was he doing well? and—crucial, test question—would he like to go back to Ireland?