The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) (53 page)

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. Ile shall marry the girl before
the sun sets!"

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

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 1 -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,

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-

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 heartbreaking, 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 FortyFour
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 Margot; 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 possible. 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 .vas a crisis and his very brightest intelligence was needed!

Ile 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?"

Ile 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.