The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature)

by Mark Twain

  "Oh, what a pretty name!" she cried; "is it mine for sure enough, and may I keep it? Where did you get it?"

  "I don't know-the magician hooked it from somewhere, he is always at that, and it just happened to come into my mind at the psychological moment, and I'm glad it did, for your sake, for it's a dandy! Turn in, now, Baker G., and make yourself entirely at home."

  "You are so good, dear Duplicate, and I am just as grateful as I can be, but-but-well, you see how it is. I have never roomed with any person not of my own sex, and-"

  "You will be perfectly safe here, Mary, I assure you, and-"

  "I should be an ingrate to doubt it, and I do not doubt it, be sure of that; but at this particular time-at this time of all others-erwell, you know, for a smaller matter than this, Miss Marget is already compromised beyond repair, I fear, and if I-"

  "Say no more, Mary Florence, you are perfectly right, perfectly. My dressing-room is large and comfortable, I can get along quite well without it, and I will carry your bed in there. Come along . . . Now then, there you are! Snug and nice and all right, isn't it? Contemplate that! Satisfactory?-yes?"

  She cordially confessed that it was. So I sat down and chatted along while she went around and examined that place all over, and pawed everything and sampled the smell of each separate detail, like an old hand, for she was getting the hang of her trade by now; then she made a final and special examination of the button on our communicating-door, and stretched herself up on her hind-toes and fingered it till she got the trick of buttoning-out inquisitives and undesirables down fine and ship-shape, then she thanked me hand somely for fetching the bed and taking so much trouble; and gave me good-night, and when I asked if it would disturb her if I talked a while with my guest, she said no, talk as much as we pleased, she was tired enough to sleep through thunderstorms and earthquakes. So I said, right cordially-

  "Good-night, Mary G., and schlafen Sie wohl!" and passed out and left her to her slumbers. As delicate-minded a cat as ever I've struck, and I've known a many of them.

  Chapter 29

  I STIRRED my brother up, and we talked the time away while waiting for the magician to come. I said his coming was a most uncertain thing, for he was irregular, and not at all likely to come when wanted, but Schwarz was anxious to stay and take the chances; so we did as I have said-talked and waited. He told me a great deal about his life and ways as a dream-sprite, and did it in a skipping and disconnected fashion proper to his species. He would side-track a subject right in the middle of a sentence if another subject attracted him, and he did this without apology or explanation-well, just as a dream would, you know. His talk was scatteringly seasoned with strange words and phrases, picked up in a thousand worlds, for he had been everywhere. Sometimes he could tell me their meaning and where he got them, but not always; in fact not very often, the dream-memory being pretty capricious, he said-sometimes good, oftener bad, and always flighty. "Side-track," for instance. He was not able to remember where he had picked that up, but thought it was in a star in the belt of Orion where he had spent a summer one night with some excursionists from Sirius whom he had met in space. That was as far as he could remember with anything like certainty; as to when it was, that was a blank with him; perhaps it was in the past, maybe it was in the future, he couldn't tell which it was, and probably didn't know, at the time it happened. Couldn't know, in fact, for Past and Future were human terms and not comprehendable by him, past and future being all one thing to a dream-sprite, and not distinguishable the one from the other. "And not important, anyway." How natural that sounded, coming from him! His notions of the important were just simply elementary, as you may say.

  He often dropped phrases which had clear meanings to him, but which he labored in vain to make comprehensible by me. It was because they came from countries where none of the conditions resembled the conditions I had been used to; some from comets where nothing was solid, and nobody had legs; some from our sun, where nobody was comfortable except when white-hot, and where you needn't talk to people about cold and darkness, for you would not be able to explain the words so that they could understand what you were talking about; some from invisible black planets swimming in eternal midnight and thick-armored in perpetual ice, where the people have no eyes, nor any use for them, and where you might wear yourself out trying to make them understand what you meant by such words as warmth and light, you wouldn't ever succeed; and some from general space-that sea of ether which has no shores, and stretches on, and on, and arrives nowhere; which is a waste of black gloom and thick darkness through which you may rush forever at thought-speed, encountering at weary long intervals spirit-cheering archipelagoes of suns which rise sparkling far in front of you, and swiftly grow and swell, and burst into blinding glories of light, apparently measureless in extent, but you plunge through and in a moment they are far behind, a twinkling archipelago again, and in another moment they are blotted out in darkness; constellations, these? yes; and the earliest of them the property of your own solar system; the rest of that unending flight is through solar systems not known to men.

  And he said that in that flight one came across such interesting dream-sprites! coming from a billion worlds, bound for a billion others; always friendly, always glad to meet up with you, always full of where they'd been and what they'd seen, and dying to tell you about it; doing it in a million foreign languages, which sometimes you understood and sometimes you didn't, and the tongue you understood to-day you forgot to-morrow, there being nothing permanent about a dream-sprite's character, constitution, beliefs, opinions, intentions, likes, dislikes, or anything else; all he cares for is to travel, and talk, and see wonderful things and have a good time. Schwarz said dream-sprites are well-disposed toward their fleshly brothers, and did what they could to make them partakers of the wonders of their travels, but it couldn't be managed except on a poor and not-worth-while scale, because they had to communicate through the flesh-brothers' Waking-Self imagination, and that medium-oh, well, it was like "emptying rainbows down a rat-hole."

  His tone was not offensive. I think his tone was never that, and was never meant to be that; it was all right enough, but his phrasing was often hurtful, on account of the ideal frankness of it. He said he was once out on an excursion to Jupiter with some fellows about a million years ago, when—

  I stopped him there, and said-

  "I am only seventeen, and you said you were born with me."

  "Yes," he said, "I've been with you only about two million years, I believe-counting as you count; we don't measure time at all. Many a time I've been abroad five or ten or twenty thousand years in a single night; I'm always abroad when you are asleep; I always leave, the moment you fall asleep, and I never return until you wake up. You are dreaming all the time I am gone, but you get little or nothing of what I see-never more than some cheap odds and ends, such as your groping Mortal Mind is competent to perceive-and sometimes there's nothing for you at all, in a whole night's adventures, covering many centuries; it's all above your dull Mortal Mind's reach."

  Then he dropped into his "chances." That is to say, he went to discussing my health-as coldly as if I had been a piece of mere property that he was commercially interested in, and which ought to be thoughtfully and prudently taken care of for his sake. And he even went into particulars, by gracious! advising me to be very careful about my diet, and to take a good deal of exercise, and keep regular hours, and avoid dissipation and religion, and not get married, because a family brought love, and distributed it among many objects, and intensified it, and this engendered wearing cares and anxieties, and when the objects suffered or died the miseries and anxieties multiplied and broke the heart and shortened life; whereas if I took good care of myself and avoided these indiscretions, there was no reason why he should not live ten million years and be hap-

  I broke in and changed the subject, so as to keep from getting inhospitable and saying language; for really I was a good deal tried. I started him on the heavens, for
he had been to a good many of them and liked ours the best, on account of there not being any Sunday there. They kept Saturday, and it was very pleasant: plenty of rest for the tired, and plenty of innocent good times for the others. But no Sunday, he said; the Sunday-Sabbath was a commercial invention and quite local, having been devised by Constantine to equalize prosperities in this world between the Jews and the Christians. The government statistics of that period showed that a Jew could make as much money in five days as a Christian could in six; and so Constantine saw that at this rate the Jews would by and by have all the wealth and the Christians all the poverty. There was nothing fair nor right about this, a righteous government should have equal laws for all, and take just as much care of the incompetent as of the competent-more, if anything. So he added the Sunday-Sabbath, and it worked just right, because it equalized the prosperities. After that, the Jew had to lie idle 104 days in the year, the Christian only 52, and this enabled the Christian to catch up. But my brother said there was now talk among Constantine and other early Christians up there, of some more equalizing; because, in looking forward a few centuries they could notice that along in the twentieth century somewhere it was going to be necessary to furnish the Jews another Sabbath to keep, so as to save what might be left of Christian property at that time. Schwarz said he had been down into the first quarter of the twentieth century lately, and it looked so to him.

  Then he "side-tracked" in his abrupt way, and looked avidly at my head and said he did wish he was back in my skull, he would sail out the first time I fell asleep and have a scandalous good time! -wasn't that magician ever coming back?

  "And oh," he said, "what wouldn't I see! wonders, spectacles, splendors which your fleshly eyes couldn't endure; and what wouldn't I hear! the music of the spheres-no mortal could live through five minutes of that ecstasy! If he would only come! If he .. .." He stopped, with his lips parted and his eyes fixed, like one rapt. After a moment he whispered, "do you feel that?"

  I recognized it; it was that life-giving, refreshing, mysterious something which invaded the air when 44 was around. But I dissembled, and said-

  "What is it?"

  "It's the magician; he's coming. He doesn't always let that influence go out from him, and so we dream-sprites took him for an ordinary necromancer for a while; but when he burnt 44 we were all there and close by, and he let it out then, and in an instant we knew what he was! We knew he was a . . . we knew he was a a . . . a . . . how curious!-my tongue won't say it!"

  Yes, you see, 44 wouldn't let him say it-and I so near to getting that secret at last! It was a sorrowful disappointment.

  FortyFour entered, still in the disguise of the magician, and Schwarz flung himself on his knees and began to beg passionately for release, and I put in my voice and helped. Schwarz said-

  "Oh, mighty one, you imprisoned me, you can set me free, and no other can. You have the power; you possess all the powers, all the forces that defy Nature, nothing is impossible to you, for you are a a .. .

  So there it was again-he couldn't say it. I was that close to it a second time, you see; 44 wouldn't let him say that word, and I would have given anything in the world to hear it. It's the way we are made, you know: if we can get a thing, we don't want it, but if we can't get it, why-well, it changes the whole aspect of it, you see.

  FortyFour was very good about it. He said he would let this one go-Schwarz was hugging him around the knees and lifting up the hem of his robe and kissing it and kissing it before he could get any further with his remark-yes, he would let this one go, and make some fresh ones for the wedding, the family could get along very well that way. So he told Schwarz to stand up and melt. Schwarz did it, and it was very pretty. First, his clothes thinned out so you could see him through them, then they floated off like shreds of vapor, leaving him naked, then the cat looked in, but scrambled out again; next, the flesh fell to thinning, and you could see the skeleton through it, very neat and trim, a good skeleton; next the bones disappeared and nothing was left but the empty form-just a statue, perfect and beautiful, made out of the delicatest soap-bubble stuff, with rainbow-hues dreaming around over it and the furniture showing through it the same as it would through a bubble; thenpoof! and it was gone!

  Chapter 30

  THE CAT walked in, waving her tail, then gathered it up in her right arm, as she might a train, and minced her way to the middle of the room, where she faced the magician and rose up and bent low and spread her hands wide apart, as if it was a gown she was spreading, then sank her body grandly rearward-certainly the neatest thing you ever saw, considering the limitedness of the materials. I think a curtsy is the very prettiest thing a woman ever does, and I think a lady's-maid's curtsy is prettier than any one else's; which is because they get more practice than the others, on account of being at it all the time when there's nobody looking. When she had finished her work of art she smiled quite Cheshirely (my dream-brother's word, he knew it was foreign and thought it was future, he couldn't be sure), and said, very engagingly-

  "Do you think I could have a bite now, without waiting for the second table, there'll be such goings-on this morning, and I would just give a whole basket of rats to be in it! and if I-"

  At that moment the wee-wee'est little bright-eyed mousie you ever saw went scrabbling across the floor, and Baker G. gave a skip and let out a scream and landed in the highest chair in the room and gathered up her imaginary skirts and stood there trembling. Also at that moment her breakfast came floating out of the cupboard on a silver tray, and she asked that it come to the chair, which it did, and she took a hurried bite or two to stay her stomach, then rushed away to get her share of the excitements, saying she would like the rest of her breakfast to be kept for her till she got back.

  Now then, draw up to the table," said 44. "We'll have Vienna coffee of two centuries hence-it is the best in the world-buckwheat cakes from Missouri, vintage of 1845, French eggs of last century, and deviled breakfast-whale of the post-pliocene, when he was whitebait size, and just too delicious!"

  By now I was used to these alien meals, raked up from countries I had never heard of and out of seasons a million years apart, and was getting indifferent about their age and nationalities, seeing that they always turned out to be fresh and good. At first I couldn't stand eggs a hundred years old and canned manna of Moses's time, but that effect came from habit and prejudiced imagination, and I soon got by it, and enjoyed what came, asking few or no questions. At first I would not have touched whale, the very thought of it would have turned my stomach, but now I ate a hundred and sixty of then and never turned a hair. As we chatted along during breakfast, 44 talked reminiscently of dream-sprites, and said they used to be important in the carrying of messages where secrecy and dispatch were a desideratum. He said they took a pride in doing their work well, in old times; that they conveyed messages with perfect verbal accuracy, and that in the matter of celerity they were up to the telephone and away beyond the telegraph. He instanced the Joseph-dreams, and gave it as his opinion that if they had gone per Western Union the lean kine would all have starved to death before the telegrams arrived. He said the business went to pot in Roman times, but that was the fault of the interpreters, not of the dream-sprites, and remarked-

  "You can easily see that accurate interpreting was as necessary as accurate wording. For instance, suppose the Founder sends a tele gram in the Christian Silence dialect, what are you going to do? Why, there's nothing to do but guess the best you can, and take the chances, because there isn't anybody in heaven or earth that can understand both ends of it, and so, there you are, you see! Up a stump."

  "LIP a which;"

  "Stump. American phrase. Not discovered yet. It means defeated. You are bound to misinterpret the end you do not understand, and so the matter which was to have been accomplished by the message miscarries, fails, and vast damage is done. Take a specific example, then you will get my meaning. Here is a telegram from the Founder to her disciples. Date, June 27, four hund
red and thirteen years hence; it's in the paper-Boston paper-I fetched it this morning."

  "What is a Boston paper?"

  "It can't be described in just a mouthful of words-pictures, scare-heads and all. You wait, I'll tell you all about it another time; I want to read the telegram, now."

  "Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord God is one Lord.

  "I now request that the members of my Church cease special prayer for the peace of nations, and cease in full faith that God does not hear our prayers only because of oft speaking; but that lie will bless all the inhabitants of the earth, and 'none can stay His hand nor say unto Him what doest thou.' Out of His allness hie must bless all with His own truth and love.

  "MARY BAKER C. EDDY."

  "Pleasant View, Concord, N.H., June 27, 1905."

  "You see? Down to the word `nations' anybody can understand it. There's been a prodigious war going on for about seventeen months, with destruction of whole fleets and armies, and in seventeen words she indicates certain things, to-wit: I believed we could squelch the war with prayer, therefore I ordered it; it was an error of Mortal Mind, whereas I had supposed it was an inspiration; I now order you to cease from praying for peace and take hold of something nearer our size, such as strikes and insurrections. The rest seems to mean-seems to mean . . . . Let me study it a minute. It seems to mean that He does not listen to our prayers any more because we pester Him too much. This carries us to the phrase 'oft-speaking.' At that point the fog shuts down, black and impenetrable, it solidifies into uninterpretable irrelevancies. Now then, you add up, and get these results: the praying must be stopped-which is clear and definite; the reason for the stoppage is-well, uncertain. Don't you know that the incomprehensible and uninterpretable remaining half of the message may be of actual importance? we may be even sure of it, I think, because the first half wasn't; then what are we confronted with? what is the world confronted with? Why, possible disaster-isn't it so? Possible disaster, absolutely impossible to avoid; and all because one cannot get at the meaning of the words intended to describe it and tell how to prevent it. You now understand how important is the interpreter's share in these matters. If you put part of the message in school-girl and the rest in Choctaw, the interpreter is going to be defeated, and colossal harm can come of it."