No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

by Mark Twain

  I suppose it was wicked to feel such joy as I felt, but I couldn’t help it. To have that hated rival put summarily out of my way and my road left free—the thought was intoxicating! The master asked me—as a formality—to deny that I was the person who had invaded Marget’s chamber.

  I promptly furnished the denial. It had always cost me shame to tell an injurious lie before, but I told this one without a pang, so eager was I to ruin the creature that stood between me and my worshipped little wife. The master took his leave, then, saying—

  “It is sufficient. It is all I wanted. He shall marry the girl before the sun sets!”

  Good heavens! in trying to ruin the Duplicate, I had only ruined myself.

  Chapter 26

  I was so miserable! A whole endless hour dragged along. Oh, why didn’t he come, why didn’t he come! wouldn’t he ever come, and I so in need of his help and comfort!

  It was awfully still and solemn and midnighty, and this made me feel creepy and shivery and afraid of ghosts; and that was natural, for the place was foggy with them, as Ernest Wasserman said, who was the most unexact person in his language in the whole castle, foggy being a noun of multitude and not applicable to ghosts, for they seldom appear in large companies, but mostly by ones and twos, and then—oh, then, when they go flitting by in the gloom like forms made of delicate smoke, and you see the furniture through them—

  My, what is that! . . . . I heard it again! . . . . I was quaking like a jelly, and my heart was so cold and scared! Such a dry, bony noise, such a kl—lackety klackclack, kl—lackety klackclack!—dull, muffled, far away down the distant caverns and corridors—but approaching! oh, dear, approaching! It shriveled me up like a spider in a candle-flame, and I sat scrunched together and quivering, the way the spider does in his death-agony, and I said to myself, “skeletons a-coming, oh, what shall I do!”

  Do? Shut my door, of course! if I had the strength to get to it—which I wouldn’t have, on my legs, I knew it well; but I collapsed to the floor and crawled to the door, and panted there and listened, to see if the noise was certainly coming my way—which it was!—and I took a look; and away down the murky hall a long square of moonlight lay across the floor, and a tall figure was capering across it, with both hands held aloft and violently agitated and clacking out that clatter—and next moment the figure was across and blotted out in the darkness, but not the racket, which was getting loud and sharp, now—then I pushed the door to, and crept back a piece and lay exhausted and gasping.

  It came, and came,—that dreadful noise—straight to my door, then that figure capered in and slammed the door to, and went on capering gaily all around me and everywhere about the room; and it was not a skeleton; no, it was a tall man, clothed in the loudest and most clownish and outlandish costume, with a vast white collar that stood above its ears, and a battered hat like a bucket, tipped gallusly to one side, and betwixt the fingers of the violent hands were curved fragments of dry bone which smote together and made that terrible clacking; and the man’s mouth reached clear across his face and was unnaturally red, and had extraordinarily thick lips, and the teeth showed intensely white between them, and the face was as black as midnight. It was a terrible and ferocious spectre, and would bound as high as the ceiling, and crack its heels together, and yah-yah-yah! like a fiend, and keep the bones going, and soon it broke into a song in a sort of bastard English,

  “Buffalo gals can’t you come out to-night,

  Can’t you come out to-night,

  Can’t you come out to-night,

  O, Buffalo gals can’t you come out to-night—

  A-n-d dance by de light er de moon!”

  And then it burst out with a tremendous clatter of laughter, and flung itself furiously over and over in the air like the wings of a windmill in a gale, and landed with a whack! on its feet alongside of me and looked down at me and shouted most cheerfully—

  “Now den, Misto’ Johnsing, how does yo’ corporsosity seem to segashuate!”

  I gasped out—

  “Oh, dread being, have pity, oh—if—if—”

  “Bress yo’ soul, honey, I ain’ no dread being, I’s Cunnel Bludso’s nigger fum Souf C’yarlina, en I’s heah th’ee hund’d en fifty year ahead o’ time, caze you’s down in de mouf en I got to ’muse you wid de banjo en make you feel all right en comfy agin. So you jist lay whah you is, boss, en listen to de music; I gwineter sing to you, honey, de way de po’ slave-niggers sings when dey’s sol’ away fum dey home en is homesick en down in de mouf.”

  Then out of nowhere he got that thing that he called a banjo, and sat down and propped his left ancle on his right knee, and canted his bucket-hat a little further and more gallusly over his ear, and rested the banjo in his lap, and set the grip of his left fingers on the neck of it high up, and fetched a brisk and most thrilling rake across the strings low down, giving his head a toss of satisfaction, as much as to say “I reckon that gets in to where you live, oh I guess not!” Then he canted his head affectionately toward the strings, and twisted the pegs at the top and tuned the thing up with a musical plunkety-plunk or so; then he re-settled himself in his chair and lifted up his black face toward the ceiling, grave, far-away, kind of pathetic, and began to strum soft and low—and then! Why then his voice began to tremble out and float away toward heaven—such a sweet voice, such a divine voice, and so touching—

  “Way down upon de Swanee river,

  Far, far away,

  Dah’s whah my heart is turnin’ ever,

  Dah’s whah de ole folks stay.”

  And so on, verse after verse, sketching his humble lost home, and the joys of his childhood, and the black faces that had been dear to him, and which he would look upon no more—and there he sat lost in it, with his face lifted up that way, and there was never anything so beautiful, never anything so heart-breaking, oh, never any music like it below the skies! and by the magic of it that uncouth figure lost its uncouthness and became lovely like the song, because it so fitted the song, so belonged to it, and was such a part of it, so helped to body forth the feeling of it and make it visible, as it were, whereas a silken dress and a white face and white graces would have profaned it, and cheapened its noble pathos.

  I closed my eyes, to try if I could picture to myself that lost home; and when the last notes were dying away, and apparently receding into the distance, I opened them again: the singer was gone, my room was gone, but afar off the home was there, a cabin of logs nestling under spreading trees, a soft vision steeped in a mellow summer twilight—and steeped in that music, too, which was dying, dying, fading, fading; and with it faded the vision, like a dream, and passed away; and as it faded and passed, my room and my furniture began to dimly reappear—spectrally, with the perishing home showing vaguely, through it, as through a veil; and when the transformation was accomplished my room was its old self again, my lights were burning, and in the black man’s place sat Forty-Four beaming a self-complimenting smile. He said—

  “Your eyes are wet; it’s the right applause. But it’s nothing, I could fetch that effect if they were glass. Glass? I could do it if they were knot-holes. Get up, and let’s feed.”

  I was so glad to see him again! The very sight of him was enough to drive away my terrors and despairs and make me forget my deplorable situation. And then there was that mysterious soul-refreshment, too, that always charged the atmosphere as with wine and set one’s spirits a-buzzing whenever he came about, and made you perceive that he was come, whether he was visible or not.

  ***When we had finished feeding, he lit his smoke-factory and we drew up to the fire to discuss my unfortunate situation and see what could be done about it. We examined it all around, and I said it seemed to me that the first and most urgent thing to be done was to stop the lady’s-maid’s gossiping mouth and keep her from compromising Marget; I said the master hadn’t a doubt that she would spread the fact of the unpleasant incident of an hour or two ago. Next, I thought we ought to stop that marriage, if possibl
e. I concluded with—

  “Now, 44, the case is full of intolerable difficulties, as you see, but do try and think of some way out of them, won’t you?”

  To my grief I soon saw that he was settling down into one of his leather-headed moods. Ah, how often they came upon him when there was a crisis and his very brightest intelligence was needed!

  He said he saw no particular difficulties in the situation if I was right about it: the first and main necessity was to silence the maid and stop Schwarz from proceeding with his marriage—and then blandly proposed that we kill both of them!

  It almost made me jump out of my clothes. I said it was a perfectly insane idea, and if he was actually in earnest—

  He stopped me there, and the argument-lust rose in his dull eye. It always made me feel depressed to see that look, because he loved to get a chance to show off how he could argue, and it was so dreary to listen to him—dreary and irritating, for when he was in one of his muddy-minded moods he couldn’t argue any more than a clam. He said, big-eyed and asinine—

  “What makes you think it insane, August?”

  What a hopeless question! what could a person answer to such a foolishness as that?

  “Oh, dear, me,” I said, “can’t you see that it’s insane?”

  He looked surprised, puzzled, pathetically mystified for a little while, then said—

  “Why, I don’t see how you make it out, August. We don’t need those people, you know. No one needs them, so far as I can see. There’s a plenty of them around, you can get as many as you want. Why, August, you don’t seem to have any practical ideas—business ideas. You stay shut up here, and you don’t know about these things. There’s dozens and dozens of those people. I can turn out and in a couple of hours I can fetch a whole swarm of—”

  “Oh, wait, 44! Dear me, is supplying their places the whole thing? is it the important thing? Don’t you suppose they would like to have something to say about it?”

  That simple aspect of it did seem to work its way into his head—after boring and tugging a moment or two—and he said, as one who had received light—

  “Oh, I didn’t think of that. Yes—yes, I see now.” Then he brightened, and said, “but you know, they’ve got to die anyway, and so the when isn’t any matter. Human beings aren’t of any particular consequence; there’s plenty more, plenty. Now then, after we’ve got them killed—”

  “Damnation, we are not going to kill them!—now don’t say another word about it; it’s a perfectly atrocious idea; I should think you would be ashamed of it; and ashamed to hang to it and stick to it the way you do, and be so reluctant to give it up. Why, you act as if it was a child, and the first one you ever had.”

  He was crushed, and looked it. It hurt me to see him look cowed, that way; it made me feel mean, and as if I had struck a dumb animal that had been doing the best it knew how, and not meaning any harm; and at bottom I was vexed at myself for being so rough with him at such a time; for I know at a glance when he has a leather-headed mood on, and that he is not responsible when his brains have gone mushy; but I just couldn’t pull myself together right off and say the gentle word and pet away the hurt I had given. I had to take time to it and work down to it gradually. But I managed it, and by and by his smiles came back, and his cheer, and then he was all right again, and as grateful as a child to see me friends with him once more.

  Then he went zealously to work on the problem again, and soon evolved another scheme. The idea this time was to turn the maid into a cat, and make some more Schwarzes, then Marget would not be able to tell t’other from which, and couldn’t choose the right one, and it wouldn’t be lawful for her to marry the whole harem. That would postpone the wedding, he thought.

  It certainly had the look of it! Any blind person could see that. So I gave praise, and was glad of the chance to do it and make up for bygones. He was as pleased as could be. In about ten minutes or so we heard a plaintive sound of meyow-yowing wandering around and about, away off somewhere, and 44 rubbed his hands joyfully and said—

  “There she is, now!”

  “Who?”

  “The lady’s-maid.”

  “No! Have you already transmuted her?”

  “Yes. She was sitting up waiting for her room-mate to come, so she could tell her. Waiting for her mate to come from larking with the porter’s new yunker. In a minute or two it would have been too late. Set the door ajar; she’ll come when she sees the light, and we’ll see what she has to say about the matter. She mustn’t recognize me; I’ll change to the magician. It will give him some more reputation. Would you like me to make you able to understand what she says?”

  “Oh, do, 44, do, please!”

  “All right. Here she is.”

  It was the magician’s voice, exactly counterfeited; and there he stood, the magician’s duplicate, official robes and all. I went invisible; I did not want to be seen in the condemned enchanter’s company, even by a cat.

  She came sauntering sadly in, a very pretty cat. But when she saw the necromancer her tail spread and her back went up and she let fly a spit or two and would have scurried away, but I flew over her head and shut the door in time. She backed into the corner and fixed her glassy eyes on 44, and said—

  “It was you who did this, and it was mean of you. I never did you any harm.”

  “No matter, you brought it on yourself.”

  “How did I bring it on myself?”

  “You were going to tell about Schwarz; you would have compromised your young mistress.”

  “It’s not so; I wish I may never die if—”

  “Nonsense! Don’t talk so. You were waiting up to tell. I know all about it.”

  The cat looked convicted. She concluded not to argue the case. After thinking a moment or two she said, with a kind of sigh—

  “Will they treat me well, do you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know they will?”

  “Yes, I know it.”

  After a pause and another sigh—

  “I would rather be a cat than a servant—a slave, that has to smile, and look cheerful, and pretend to be happy, when you are scolded for every little thing, the way Frau Stein and her daughter do, and be sneered at and insulted, and they haven’t any right to, they didn’t pay my wage, I wasn’t their slave—a hateful life, an odious life! I’d rather be a cat. Yes, I would. Will everybody treat me well?”

  “Yes, everybody.”

  “Frau Stein, too, and the daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you see that they do?”

  “I will. It’s a promise.”

  “Then I thank you. They are all afraid of you, and the most of them hate you. And it was the same with me—but not now. You seem different to me now. You have the same voice and the same clothes, but you seem different. You seem kind; I don’t know why, but you do; you seem kind and good, and I trust you; I think you will protect me.”

  “I will keep my promise.”

  “I believe it. And keep me as I am. It was a bitter life. You would think those Steins would not have been harsh with me, seeing I was a poor girl, with not a friend, nor anybody that was mine, and I never did them any harm. I was going to tell. Yes, I was. To get revenge. Because the family said I was bribed to let Schwarz in there—and it was a lie! Even Miss Marget believed that lie—I could see it, and she—well, she tried to defend me, but she let them convince her. Yes, I was going to tell. I was hot to tell. I was angry. But I am glad I didn’t get the chance, for I am not angry any more; cats do not carry anger, I see. Don’t change me back, leave me as I am. Christians go—I know where they go; some to the one place some to the other; but I think cats—where do you think cats go?”

  “Nowhere. After they die.”

  “Leave me as I am, then; don’t change me back. Could I have these leavings?”

  “And welcome—yes.”

  “Our supper was there, in our room, but the other maid was frightened of me because I was
a strange cat, and drove me out, and I didn’t get any. This is wonderful food, I wonder how it got to this room? there’s never been anything like it in this castle before. Is it enchanted food?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just guessed it was. Safe?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Do you have it here a good deal?”

  “Always—day and night.”

  “How gaudy! But this isn’t your room?”

  “No, but I’m here a great deal, and the food is here all the time. Would you like to do your feeding here?”

  “Too good to be true!”

  “Well, you can. Come whenever you like, and speak at the door.”

  “How dear and lovely! I’ve had a narrow escape—I can see it now.”

  “From what?”

  “From not getting to be a cat. It was just an accident that that idiot came blundering in there drunk; if I hadn’t been there—but I was, and never shall I get done being thankful. This is amazing good food; there’s never been anything like it in this castle before—not in my time, I can tell you. I am thankful I may come here when I’m hungry.”