The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0139/01391.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 30KB | 516 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01391}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter XXXI}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{night
time
how
last
now
adler
upon
hands
tell
tried}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter XXXI

A Thumb-Print And What Came Of It

     We were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas.  So I began to think about my
errand there.  Time, noonday; and bright and sunny.  This was bad - not best,
anyway; for mine was not (preferably) a noonday kind of errand. The more I
thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me - now in one form, now in
another.  Finally, it took the form of a distinct question: Is it good common
sense to do the errand in daytime, when by a little sacrifice of comfort and
inclination you can have night for it, and no inquisitive eyes around?  This
settled it.  Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of
most perplexities.

     I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create
annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really seemed best
that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon.  Their disapproval
was prompt and loud; their language mutinous.  Their main argument was one
which has always been the first to come to the surface, in such cases, since
the beginning of time: "But you decided and agreed to stick to this boat,"
etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise thing, one is thereby bound to
go ahead and make two unwise things of it, by carrying out that determination.
I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good success:
under which encouragement I increased my efforts; and, to show them that I had
not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to blame for it, I
presently drifted into its history - substantially as follows:

     Toward the end of last year I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria. In
November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's pension, Ia, Karlstrasse; but
my working quarters were a mile from there, in the house of a widow who
supported herself by taking lodgers.  She and her two young children used to
drop in every morning and talk German to me - by request.  One day, during a
ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments where the
government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are
permanently dead, and not in a trance state.  It was a grisly place, that
spacious room.  There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on
their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows - all of them with
wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds.  Along the
sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay-windows; and in each of these
lay several marble- visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of
fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands.  Around a finger of each
of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the
ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder,
where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the
aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a
movement - for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring
that fearful bell.  I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone,
far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a
twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that
awful summons!  So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually?
if the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to
make his last moments easy? But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and
frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way with
a humbled crest.

     Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure when she exclaimed:

     "Come with me!  I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know.
He has been a night watchman there."

     He was a living man, but he did not look it.  He was abed and had his
head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless, his
deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast, was talonlike, it
was so bony and long-fingered.  The widow began her introduction of me.  The
man's eyes opened slowly, and glittered wickedly out from the twilight of
their caverns; he frowned a black frown; he lifted his lean hand and waved us
peremptorily away.  But the widow kept straight on, till she had got out the
fact that I was a stranger and an American.  The man's face changed at once,
brightened, became even eager - and the next moment he and I were alone
together.

     I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English;
thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest.

     This consumptive and I became good friends.  I visited him every day, and
we talked about everything.  At least, about everything but wives and
children.  Let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned and three things
always followed: the most gracious and loving and tender light glimmered in
the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its place came that
deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever saw his lids unclose;
thirdly, he ceased from speech there and then for that day, lay silent,
abstracted, and absorbed, apparently heard nothing that I said, took no notice
of my good-bys, and plainly did not know by either sight or hearing when I
left the room.

     When I had been this Karl Ritter's daily and sole intimate during two
months, he one day said abruptly:

     "I will tell you my story."

A Dying Man's Confession

     Then he went on as follows:

     "I have never given up until now.  But now I have given up.  I am going
to die.  I made up my mind last night that it must be, and very soon, too.
You say you are going to revisit your river by and by, when you find
opportunity.  Very well; that, together with a certain strange experience
which fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you my history - for
you will see Napoleon, Arkansas, and for my sake you will stop there and do a
certain thing for me - a thing which you will willingly undertake after you
shall have heard my narrative.

     "Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being
long.  You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to settle
in that lonely region in the South.  But you do not know that I had a wife.
My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely good and blameless
and gentle!  And our little girl was her mother in miniature.  It was the
happiest of happy households.

     "One night - it was toward the close of the war - I woke up out of a
sodden lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted with
chloroform!  I saw two men in the room, and one was saying to the other in a
hoarse whisper: 'I told her I would, if she made a noise, and as for the child
- '

     "The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice:

     "'You said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them, or I wouldn't
have come.'

     "'Shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked up. You
done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you.  Come, help
rummage.'

     "Both men were masked and wore coarse, ragged 'nigger' clothes; they had
a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light I noticed that the gentler robber had
no thumb on his right hand.  The rummaged around my poor cabin for a moment:
the head bandit then said in his stage whisper:

     "'It's a waste of time - he shall tell where it's hid.  Undo his gag and
revive him up.'

     "The other said:

     "'All right - provided no clubbing.'

     "'No clubbing it is, then - provided he keeps still.'

     "'They approached me.  Just then there was a sound outside, a sound of
voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held their breath and