by Mark Twain
About this time or a little later, Captain McGregor, by permission of Captain Johnson, was starting out spying again. He hid himself in his usual lair, and at ten Billy’s crackling bark began once more to rise upon his listening ear out of the murky remotenesses of the prairie. By and by it ceased, and Captain McGregor betook himself to Captain Johnson’s pit, sat down on the medicine case, and reported.
“I have just come from their camp, sir, and they have contrived a fresh trick. They will try it, and they are our meat, to a certainty. At noon tomorrow all the six chiefs and thirty-five picked braves will come disguised as decrepit old squaws, under a truce-flag, and beg for leave to wail for their dead and bury them. They will have knives, tomahawks and revolvers under their ragged robes. They will offer to place half of their number in our hands on the island, to remain while the rest wail and do the burying. When the hostages have reached the island they will pull their weapons and begin the rush, and the others will raise the war-whoop and follow.”
“It ends the campaign; triumph is sure, and the merit is yours, sir. Tomorrow I shall know how to reward you to your full deserving if all goes as we now expect. For the present I will limit myself to thanking you for to-day’s high service, Colonel McGregor.”
Toward ten, next morning, the glasses showed a slow-moving and apparently bent and rickety body of ancient squaws approaching across the plain. They were expected, and their intended request would be granted. They plodded on. Some distance to their right the two renegades walked slowly along watching them, and talking, the dog Billy at their heels. One of them presently said—
“Suppose they fail?”
“But they won’t; there aren’t any spies to give it away this time, that is sure.”
“Still, I say it again: suppose they fail?”
“Well, what then?”
“Shall you want to see the inside of that Injun camp again?”
“Well—no. No, it wouldn’t do. We shouldn’t pull through alive this time, I reckon. What do you suggest?”
“I don’t quite know. How would this do? Stop where we are, and wait till they do the rush. It’ll all be over in five minutes. If we hear the victory-song, go and join them and help do the shouting. If we don’t hear it, make for the lower ford and break for a safe country.”
“That’ll answer. I’m agreed.”
They stopped. The dog trotted on ahead and sat down on a knoll a hundred yards away. One of the men said—
“There is that strange dog that is always around under our heels and has that broken-up bark.”
“Yes, and only barks at night. I’m superstitious about him, George; we’ve had worse and worse luck from the time he came.”
“It’s so, Peter. I never thought of it before. I wish we had killed him.”
“It’s not too late, yet.”
“Come, then.”
“Wait a minute—he’s trotting off. Let him settle again.” The dog disappeared beyond the hillock. The men waited a long time, scanning the region everywhere, but there was no dog to be seen. Then Peter said—
“Well, it serves us right. We had our chance and didn’t use it. He is a devil in disguise, probably, and won’t give us another; for I can tell you one thing about that kind of evil spirits, they—”
A distant crash of guns broke the sentence in two. Then another and another; then an unpunctuated confusion of popping shots and war-whoops which continued during several minutes, then died down, and silence ensued. The two men waited, breathless, for the victory-song. In place of it rose the white man’s hurrah.
“It’s all up!” said Peter. “Come—no time to waste!”
“Wait—there’s that dog-bark again.”
“Come along! If—”
“Wait, I tell you—I’ve got the secret. I’ve been a telegraph operator; he’s barking the Morse system.”
“Bosh! Come—we must be moving!”
“Listen! ‘G-u-a-r-d l-o-w-e-r f-o-r-d—r-e-n-e-g-a-d-e-s—’ What did I tell you? He has blocked the lower ford against us. We must make for the upper one. Come along.”
They started on a run.
“Hi—yonder’s the dog!”
“In range, too—let him have it!”
Billy was running. The third shot brought him down with a broken leg. They were soon out of sight, and safe to make the ford if not interrupted. Billy tried to correct his recent telegram, but his pains broke up his message and he had to give it up.
In the white camp all was joy and gladness; victory was with the flag, and the perilous campaign was over. Captain Johnson called all the survivors before him, and in their presence conferred upon Colonel McGregor the rank of Major General in the Regular Army.
The Tenth Cavalry arrived before night, and the happiness of the brave little band was complete.
Toward noon the next day the little dog appeared upon the bank of the stream and lay down there, exhausted with pain and the slow labor of dragging himself so far. He was afraid to go nearer the camp anyway until he should get a pardon, for he knew that he was under sentence of death, and that military customs are strict. He hoped for a pardon, though, and expected it, and was soldier enough to wait patiently.
Major General McGregor sent for him and would have pardoned him; but when he saw that his leg was broken it seemed best to shoot him; which he did, and Billy died licking his hand and looking his love for him out of his fading eyes.
THE AMERICAN PRESS
Goethe says somewhere that “the thrill of awe”—that is to say, REVERENCE—“is the best thing humanity has.”
—MATTHEW ARNOLD.
I should say that if one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of respect, one could not do better than take the American newspapers.
—MATTHEW ARNOLD.
RESPONSE.
Mr. Arnold judged of our newspapers without stopping to consider what their mission was. He judged them from the European standpoint; and he could not have found an improperer one to judge an American newspaper from.
Take the most important function of a journal in any country, and what is it? To furnish the news? No—that is secondary. Its first function is the guiding and moulding of public opinion, the propagating of national feeling, and pride in the national name—in a word, the keeping the people in love with their country and its institutions, and shielded from the allurements of alien and inimical systems. If this premiss be granted—and certainly none will deny it—Mr. Arnold mis-took for a flaw in our journalism a thing which is not a flaw at all, but its supremest merit.
In Constantinople there was a newspaper some years ago—a kind of a newspaper—and it may be there yet, though the climate was pretty rugged for it. That little paper could shout as vigorously as it wanted to when it was praising our Holy Established Church of Mahomet; or lauding the sublimities of the Sultan’s character and virtues; or describing how the nation adored the dust he walked upon; or what grief and dismay swept the land when he was ill for a couple of days; and it could branch out and tell tales and invent stories—pious, guileful, goody-goody nursery tales showing how odious and awful are all forms of human liberty, and how holy and healthy and beautiful is the only right government, the only true and beneficent government for human beings—a despotism; a despotism invented by God, conferred directly by the grace of God, nourished, watched over, by God; and to criticise which, is to utter blasphemy. It was working its function, you see—keeping the people’s ideas in the right shape. But there were things which it might not shout about—things concerning which it must be judiciously blind, and deaf, and most respectfully quiet. Now would you look for a joke, or lightsome chaff, or a frivolous remark, in that journalistic hearse? You would be disappointed; it was not the place for it. An Arctic gravity, decorum, reverence, was its appointed gait: for the devil’s aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despot’s dread of a newspaper that laughs. Does this description describe the Turkish journal? It
does. Does it describe the Russian journal? It does. Does it describe the German journal? It does. Does it describe the English journal? With unimportant modifications, it does. If the flies in a spider’s web had a journal, would it describe that one, too? It would. By the language of that journal you would get the idea that to a fly’s mind—a fly in a web—there is nothing in the world that is quite so winsome, and gracious, and provocative of gushing and affectionate reverence, as a great gilt-backed, steel-fanged, well-intrenched spider.
The chief function of an English journal is that of all other journals the world over: it must keep the public eye fixed admiringly upon certain things, and keep it diligently diverted from certain others. For instance, it must keep the public eye fixed admiringly upon the glories of England, a processional splendor stretching its receding line down the hazy vistas of time, with the mellowed lights of a thousand years glinting from its banners; and it must keep it diligently diverted from the fact that all these glories were for the enrichment and aggrandizement of the petted and privileged few, at cost of the blood and sweat and poverty of the unconsidered masses who achieved them but might not enter in and partake of them. It must keep the public eye fixed in loving and awful reverence upon the throne, as a sacred thing, and diligently divert it from the fact that no throne was ever set up by the unhampered vote of a majority of any nation, and that hence no throne exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of it, flying from any flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull and cross-bones of that kindred industry which differs from royalty only business-wise—merely as retail differs from wholesale. It must keep the citizen’s eye fixed in reverent docility upon that curious invention of machine politics, an Established Church, and upon that bald contradiction of common justice, a hereditary nobility; and diligently divert it from the fact that the one damns him if he doesn’t wear its collar, and robs him under the gentle name of taxation whether he wears it or not, and the other gets all the honors while he does all the work.
Dear me, the dignity, the austerity, the petrified solemnity which Mr. Arnold admired and estimated as a merit in the English press, is not a merit, it is inseparable from the situation. Necessarily, journalism under a monarchy can do its hard duty and perform its grotesque function with but one mien—a graveyard gravity of countenance: to laugh would expose the whole humbug. For the very existence of a sham depends upon this cast-iron law—that it shall not be laughed at. And its prosperity depends upon this other law—that men shall speak of it with bated breath, respectfully, reverently: according to the gospel of Matthew Arnold and Goethe the poet.
Mr. Arnold, with his trained eye and intelligent observation, ought to have perceived that the very quality which he so regretfully missed from our press—respectfulness, reverence—is exactly the thing which would make our press useless to us if it had it—rob it of the very thing which differentiates it from all other journalism on the globe and makes it distinctively and preciously American. Its frank and cheerful irreverence is by all odds the most valuable quality it possesses. For its mission—overlooked by Mr. Arnold—is to stand guard over a nation’s liberties, not its humbugs and shams. And so it must be armed with ridicule, not reverence. If during fifty years you could impose the blight of English journalistic solemnity and timid respect for stately shams upon our press, it is within the possibilities that the republic would perish; and if during fifty years you could expose the stately and moss-grown shams of Europe to the fire of a flouting and scoffing press like ours, it is almost a moral certainty that monarchy and its attendant crimes would disappear from Christendom.
Well, the charge is, that our press has but little of that old-world quality, reverence. Let us be candidly grateful that this is so. With its limited reverence it at least reveres the things which this nation reveres, as a rule, and that is sufficient: what other people revere is fairly and properly matter of light importance to us. Our press does not reverence kings, it does not reverence so-called nobilities, it does not reverence established ecclesiastical slaveries, it does not reverence laws which rob a younger son to fatten an elder one, it does not reverence any fraud or sham or infamy, howsoever old or rotten or holy, which sets one citizen above his neighbor by accident of birth; it does not reverence any law or custom, howsoever old or decayed or sacred, which shuts against the best man in the land the best place in the land and the divine right to prove property and go up and occupy it. In the sense of the poet Goethe—that meek idolater of provincial three-carat royalty and nobility—our press is certainly bankrupt in the “thrill of awe”—otherwise reverence: reverence for nickle-plate and brummagem. Let us sincerely hope that this fact will remain a fact forever: for to my mind a discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty—even as the other thing is the creator, nurse, and steadfast protector of all forms of human slavery, bodily and mental.
I believe it is our irreverent press which has laughed away, one by one, what remained of our inherited minor shams and delusions and serfages after the Revolution, and made us the only really free people that has yet existed in the earth; and I believe we shall remain free, utterly free and unassailably free, until some alien critic with sugared speech shall persuade our journalism to forsake its scoffing ways and serve itself up on the innocuous European plan. Our press has done a worthy work; is doing a worthy work; and so, though one should prove to me—a thing easily within the possibilities—that its faults are abundant and over-abundant, I should still say, no matter: so long as it still possesses that supreme virtue in journalism, an active and discriminating irreverence, it will be entitled to hold itself the most valuable press, the most wholesome press, and the most puissant force for the nurture and protection of human freedom that either hemisphere has yet produced since the printer’s art set itself the tedious and disheartening task of righting the wrongs of men.
To gather into a sheaf the random argument which I have left scattered behind me over the field: I take issue with the old-world doctrine of Goethe and Mr. Arnold, that reverence has but one office—to elevate. It has more than one. There is a reverence which elevates, there is a reverence which degrades. To pay reverence to a man who has done sublime work for his race and his generation, even though he were born as poor and nameless as that plodding German who invented the movable types, and so by his single might lifted a flaming intellectual sun into a zenith where mental midnight had reigned before, elevates him who pays it; but to pay reverence to a mere king, or prince, or duke, or any other empty accident, must degrade and does degrade any man or nation that pays it. And I am not able to believe that any intelligent man has ever lived within this superstition-dissipating century—even Goethe—who paid it and was not secretly ashamed of it.
THE CHRISTENING YARN
The brief anecdote with a smart surprise at the end of it is common. Common and good; but it is not nearly so good nor so well worth the teller’s best art and the listener’s best attention as is the long anecdote with a smart surprise at the end. Examples of this breed are scarce—in fact very scarce. I call to mind only three, and two of the three fail oftener than they win. This is natural, for when a story is long and elaborate, a sharp listener has a chance to put this and that together as you go along and guess-out your surprise before you get to it yourself. I will not waste space on the two doubtful examples; let us take up No. 3, the infallible. Its structure is such that it is a sure card; it will catch the listener every time; there is no way for him to cipher out what the surprise is going to be. I got this one from Mr. Bram Stoker when he first came over with Mr. Irving years ago. There are two ways of telling it—the quiet way and the violent way. The former is Mr. Stoker’s way and the latter is mine. Mr. Stoker’s way requires an exact memory, for his version has humorous points scattered all through it, and of course a point that is not delivered in its own proper language is no point at all and works damage. I have a bad memory and cannot memorize things; but as this story is a speech, a
nd as I am purposely careful to make not a single point anywhere except at the tail-end, no memory is required—a new speech every time will answer every purpose.
The story is about a christening. The scene is a humble house in a village. The place is crowded with the family’s friends and neighbors. The little minister takes the baby from the father’s hands and holds it out on his palms and contemplates it some little time in silence, his inspiration-mill pumping away, meantime, and getting him ready for the greatest effort of his life. He is a spread-eagle orator with a good opinion of his powers, and he proposes to make the most of this opportunity. Now then, pupil of mine, I desire you to get up and hold out the imaginary baby on your palms and make this minister’s speech. I wish you to begin impressively, and speak slowly; warm up gradually; become fiery, impetuous; get carried clear out of yourself by your own eloquence—and so, storm along, all the way down to the climax. I wish you to be apparently absolutely serious; put in no shade or suggestion of humor anywhere. I wish you to string the speech out until you see by the faces of the audience that all expectancy of fun has faded out of their minds, and that they have come to the conclusion that no fun was intended; that you are making the speech for its own sake and are proud of it, thinking it to be noble and stirring eloquence. Within a few moments you will see another fact steal into their intent faces: the fact that they are disappointed in you; that they pity you and are ashamed of you. This is what you are after—your prey is secure, now—it is the victorious moment: strike! Cut the speech short where you are and spring the climax. You’ll see what will happen:
