Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0145/01459.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 11KB | 203 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01459}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Pudd'nhead Wilson
Chapter I}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{half
dog
years
old
owned
ain't
dawson's
end
first
landing}
$Date{1905}
$Log{}
Title:       Pudd'nhead Wilson
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1905

Chapter I

     Tell the truth or trump - but get the trick.

                    - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar.

     The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's Landing, on the
Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey, per steamboat, below
St. Louis.

     In 1830 it was a snug little collection of modest one and two-story
frame dwellings whose white-washed exteriors were almost concealed from sight
by climbing tangles of rose-vines, honeysuckles, and morning-glories.  Each
of these pretty homes had a garden in front fenced with white palings and
opulently stocked with hollyhocks, marigolds, touch-me-nots, prince's-
feathers, and other old-fashioned flowers; while on the window-sills of the
houses stood wooden boxes containing moss-rose plants and terra-cotta pots
in which grew a breed of geranium whose spread of intensely red blossoms
accented the prevailing pink tint of the rose-clad house-front like an
explosion of flame.  When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and
boxes for a cat, the cat was there - in sunny weather - stretched at full
length, asleep and blissful, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved
over her nose.  Then that house was complete, and its contentment and peace
were made manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is
infallible.  A home without a cat - and a well-fed, well-petted and properly
revered cat - may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

     All along the streets, on both sides, at the outer edge of the brick
sidewalks, stood locust-trees with trunks protected by wooden boxing, and
these furnished shade for summer and a sweet fragrance in spring when the
clusters of buds came forth.  The main street, one block back from the river,
and running parallel with it, was the sole business street.  It was six
blocks long, and in each block two or three brick stores three stories high
towered above interjected bunches of little frame shops.  Swinging signs
creaked in the wind, the street's whole length.  The candy-striped pole,
which indicates nobility proud and ancient along the palace-bordered canals
of Venice, indicated merely the humble barber shop along the main street of
Dawson's Landing.  On a chief corner stood a lofty unpainted pole wreathed
from top to bottom with tin pots and pans and cups, the chief tinmonger's
noisy notice to the world (when the wind blew) that his shop was on hand for
business at that corner.

     The hamlet's front was washed by the clear waters of the great river;
its body stretched itself rearward up a gentle incline; its most rearward
border fringed itself out and scattered its houses about the base-line of the
hills; the hills rose high, inclosing the town in a half-moon curve, clothed
with forests from foot to summit.

     Steamboats passed up and down every hour or so.  Those belonging to the
little Cairo line and the little Memphis line always stopped; the big Orleans
liners stopped for hails only, or to land passengers or freight; and this was
the case also with the great flotilla of "transients." These latter came out
of a dozen rivers - the Illinois, the Missouri, the Upper Mississippi, the
Ohio, the Monongahela, the Tennessee, the Red River, the White River, and so
on; and were bound every whither and stocked with every imaginable comfort
or necessity which the Mississippi's communities could want, from the frosty
Falls of St. Anthony down through nine climates to torrid New Orleans.

     Dawson's Landing was a slaveholding town, with a rich slave-worked grain
and pork country back of it.  The town was sleepy and comfortable and
contented.  It was fifty years old, and was growing slowly - very slowly, in
fact, but still it was growing.

     The chief citizen was York Leicester Driscoll, about forty years old,
judge of the county court.  He was very proud of his old Virginian ancestry,
and in his hospitalities and his rather formal and stately manners he kept
up its traditions.  He was fine and just and generous.  To be a gentleman -
a gentleman without stain or blemish - was his only religion, and to it he
was always faithful.  He was respected, esteemed, and beloved by all the
community.  He was well off, and was gradually adding to his store.  He and
his wife were very nearly happy, but not quite, for they had no children.
The longing for the treasure of a child had grown stronger and stronger as
the years slipped away, but the blessing never came - and was never to come.

     With this pair lived the Judge's widowed sister, Mrs. Rachel Pratt, and
she also was childless - childless, and sorrowful for that reason, and not
to be comforted.  The women were good and commonplace people, and did their
duty and had their reward in clear consciences and the community's
approbation.  They were Presbyterians, the Judge was a free-thinker.

     Pembroke Howard, lawyer and bachelor, aged about forty, was another old
Virginian grandee with proved descent from the First Families.  He was a
fine, brave, majestic creature, a gentleman according to the nicest
requirements of the Virginia rule, a devoted Presbyterian, an authority on
the "code," and a man always courteously ready to stand up before you in the
field if any act or word of his had seemed doubtful or suspicious to you, and
explain it with any weapon you might prefer from brad-awls to artillery.  He
was very popular with the people, and was the Judge's dearest friend.

     Then there was Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, another F. F. V. of
formidable caliber - however, with him we have no concern.

     Percy Northumberland Driscoll, brother to the judge, and younger than he
by five years, was a married man, and had had children around his hearthstone;
but they were attacked in detail by measles, croup, and scarlet fever, and
this had given the doctor a chance with his effective antediluvian methods; so
the cradles were empty.  He was a prosperous man, with a good head for
speculations, and his fortune was growing.  On the 1st of February, 1830, two
boy babes were born in his house; one to him, the other to one of his slave
girls, Roxana by name.  Roxana was twenty years old.  She was up and around
the same day, with her hands full, for she was tending both babies.

     Mrs. Percy Driscoll died within the week.  Roxy remained in charge of the
children.  She had her own way, for Mr. Driscoll soon absorbed himself in his
speculations and left her to her own devices.

     In that same month of February, Dawson's Landing gained a new citizen.
This was Mr. David Wilson, a young fellow of Scotch parentage.  He had
wandered to this remote region from his birthplace in the interior of the
State of New York, to seek his fortune.  He was twenty-five years old,
college-bred, and had finished a post-college course in an Eastern law school
a couple of years before.

     He was a homely, freckled, sandy-haired young fellow, with an intelligent
blue eye that had frankness and comradeship in it and a covert twinkle of a
pleasant sort.  But for an unfortunate remark of his, he would no doubt have
entered at once upon a successful career at Dawson's Landing. But he made his
fatal remark the first day he spent in the village, and it "gaged" him.  He
had just made the acquaintance of a group of citizens when an invisible dog
began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself very comprehensively
disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud:

     "I wish I owned half of that dog."

     "Why?" somebody asked.

     "Because I would kill my half."

     The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found
no light there, no expression that they could read.  They fell away from him
as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him.  One said:

     "'Pears to be a fool."

     "'Pears?" said another.  "Is, I reckon you better say."

     "Said he wished he owned half of the dog, the idiot," said a third. "What
did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half? Do you
reckon he thought it would live?"

     "Why, he must have thought it, unless he is the downrightest fool in the
world; because if he hadn't thought it, he would have wanted to own the whole
dog, knowing that if he killed his half and the other half died, he would be
responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed that half instead
of his own.  Don't it look that way to you, gents?"

     "Yes, it does.  If he owned one half of the general dog, it would be so;
if he owned one end of the dog and another person owned the other end, it
would be so, just the same; particularly in the first case, because if you
kill one half of a general dog, there ain't any man that can tell whose half
it was, but if he owned one end of the dog, maybe he could kill his end of it
and - "

     "No, he couldn't, either; he couldn't and not be responsible if the other
end died, which it would.  In my opinion the man ain't in his right mind."

     "In my opinion he hain't got any mind."

     No. 3 said: "Well, he's a lummox, anyway."

     "That's what he is," said No. 4, "he's a labrick - just a Simon-pure
labrick, if ever there was one."

     "Yes, sir, he's a dam fool, that's the way I put him up," said No. 5.
"Anybody can think different that wants to, but those are my sentiments."

     "I'm with you, gentlemen," said No. 6.  "Perfect jackass - yes, and it
ain't going too far to say he is a pudd'nhead.  If he ain't a pudd'nhead, I
ain't no judge, that's all."

     Mr. Wilson stood elected.  The incident was told all over the town, and
gravely discussed by everybody.  Within a week he had lost his first name;
Pudd'nhead took its place.  In time he came to be liked, and well liked, too;
but by that time the nickname had got well stuck on, and it stayed.  That
first day's verdict made him a fool, and he was not able to get it set aside,
or even modified.  The nickname soon ceased to carry any harsh or unfriendly
feeling with it, but it held its place, and was to continue to hold its place
for twenty long years.