fought in 1881 and the two fought by Jameson, the British loss in killed,
wounded, and prisoners, was substantially 1,300 men; the Boer loss, as
far as is ascertainable, eras about 30 men. These figures show that
there was a defect somewhere. It was not in the absence of courage. I
think it lay in the absence of discretion. The Briton should have done
one thing or the other: discarded British methods and fought the Boer
with Boer methods, or augmented his own force until--using British
methods--it should be large enough to equalize results with the Boer.
To retain the British method requires certain things, determinable by
arithmetic. If, for argument's sake, we allow that the aggregate of
1,716 British soldiers engaged in the 4 early battles was opposed by the
same aggregate of Boers, we have this result: the British loss of 700 and
the Boer loss of 23 argues that in order to equalize results in future
battles you must make the British force thirty times as strong as the
Boer force. Mr. Garrett shows that the Boer force immediately opposed to
Jameson was 2,000, and that there were 6,000 more on hand by the evening
of the second day. Arithmetic shows that in order to make himself the
equal of the 8,000 Boers, Jameson should have had 240,000 men, whereas he
merely had 530 boys. From a military point of view, backed by the facts
of history, I conceive that Jameson's military judgment was at fault.
Another thing.--Jameson was encumbered by artillery, ammunition, and
rifles. The facts of the battle show that he should have had none of
those things along. They were heavy, they were in his way, they impeded
his march. There was nothing to shoot at but rocks--he knew quite well
that there would be nothing to shoot at but rocks--and he knew that
artillery and rifles have no effect upon rocks. He was badly overloaded
with unessentials. He had 8 Maxims--a Maxim is a kind of Gatling, I
believe, and shoots about 500 bullets per minute; he had one
12 1/2-pounder cannon and two 7-pounders; also, 145,000 rounds of
ammunition. He worked the Maxims so hard upon the rocks that five of them
became disabled--five of the Maxims, not the rocks. It is believed that
upwards of 100,000 rounds of ammunition of the various kinds were fired
during the 21 hours that the battles lasted. One man killed. He must
have been much mutilated. It was a pity to bring those futile Maxims
along. Jameson should have furnished himself with a battery of Pudd'nhead
Wilson maxims instead, They are much more deadly than those others, and
they are easily carried, because they have no weight.
Mr. Garrett--not very carefully concealing a smile--excuses the presence
of the Maxims by saying that they were of very substantial use because
their sputtering disordered the aim of the Boers, and in that way saved
lives.
Three cannon, eight Maxims, and five hundred rifles yielded a result
which emphasized a fact which had already been established--that the
British system of standing out in the open to fight Boers who are behind
rocks is not wise, not excusable, and ought to be abandoned for something
more efficacious. For the purpose of war is to kill, not merely to waste
ammunition.
If I could get the management of one of those campaigns, I would know
what to do, for I have studied the Boer. He values the Bible above every
other thing. The most delicious edible in South Africa is "biltong."
You will have seen it mentioned in Olive Schreiner's books. It is what
our plainsmen call "jerked beef." It is the Boer's main standby. He has
a passion for it, and he is right.
If I had the command of the campaign I would go with rifles only, no
cumbersome Maxims and cannon to spoil good rocks with. I would move
surreptitiously by night to a point about a quarter of a mile from the
Boer camp, and there I would build up a pyramid of biltong and Bibles
fifty feet high, and then conceal my men all about. In the morning the
Boers would send out spies, and then the rest would come with a rush.
I would surround them, and they would have to fight my men on equal
terms, in the open. There wouldn't be any Amajuba results.
--[Just as I am finishing this book an unfortunate dispute has sprung up
between Dr. Jameson and his officers, on the one hand, and Colonel Rhodes
on the other, concerning the wording of a note which Colonel Rhodes sent
from Johannesburg by a cyclist to Jameson just before hostilities began
on the memorable New Year's Day. Some of the fragments of this note were
found on the battlefield after the fight, and these have been pieced
together; the dispute is as to what words the lacking fragments
contained. Jameson says the note promised him a reinforcement of 300 men
from Johannesburg. Colonel Rhodes denies this, and says he merely
promised to send out "some" men "to meet you."]
[It seems a pity that these friends should fall out over so little a
thing. If the 300 had been sent, what good would it have done? In 21
hours of industrious fighting, Jameson's 530 men, with 8 Maxims, 3
cannon, and 145,000 rounds of ammunition, killed an aggregate of 1.
Boer. These statistics show that a reinforcement of 300 Johannesburgers,
armed merely with muskets, would have killed, at the outside, only a
little over a half of another Boer. This would not have saved the day.
It would not even have seriously affected the general result. The
figures show clearly, and with mathematical violence, that the only way
to save Jameson, or even give him a fair and equal chance with the enemy,
was for Johannesburg to send him 240 Maxims, 90 cannon, 600 carloads of
ammunition, and 240,000 men. Johannesburg was not in a position to do
this. Johannesburg has been called very hard names for not reinforcing
Jameson. But in every instance this has been done by two classes of
persons--people who do not read history, and people, like Jameson, who do
not understand what it means, after they have read it.]
CHAPTER LXVIII.
None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its
cussedness; but we can try.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
The Duke of Fife has borne testimony that Mr. Rhodes deceived him. That
is also what Mr. Rhodes did with the Reformers. He got them into
trouble, and then stayed out himself. A judicious man. He has always
been that. As to this there was a moment of doubt, once. It was when he
was out on his last pirating expedition in the Matabele country. The
cable shouted out that he had gone unarmed, to visit a party of hostile
chiefs. It was true, too; and this dare-devil thing came near fetching
another indiscretion out of the poet laureate. It would have been too
bad, for when the facts were all in, it turned out that there was a lady
along, too, and she also was unarmed.
In the opinion of many people Mr. Rhodes is South Africa; others think he
is only a large part of it. These latter consider that South Africa
consists of Table Mountain, the diamond mines, the Johannesburg gold
fields, and Cecil Rhodes. The gold fields are wonderful in every way.
In seven or eight years they built up, in a desert, a city of a hundred
thousand inhabitants, counting white and black together; and not the
ordinary mining city of wooden shanties, but a city made out of lasting
material. Nowhere in the world is there such a concentration of rich
mines as at Johannesburg. Mr. Bonamici, my manager there, gave me a
small gold brick with some statistics engraved upon it which record the
output of gold from the early days to July, 1895, and exhibit the strides
which have been made in the development of the industry; in 1888 the
output was $4,162,440; the output of the next five and a half years was
(total: $17,585,894); for the single year ending with June, 1895, it was
$45,553,700.
The capital which has developed the mines came from England, the mining
engineers from America. This is the case with the diamond mines also.
South Africa seems to be the heaven of the American scientific mining
engineer. He gets the choicest places, and keeps them. His salary is
not based upon what he would get in America, but apparently upon what a
whole family of him would get there.
The successful mines pay great dividends, yet the rock is not rich, from
a Californian point of view. Rock which yields ten or twelve dollars a
ton is considered plenty rich enough. It is troubled with base metals to
such a degree that twenty years ago it would have been only about half as
valuable as it is now; for at that time there was no paying way of
getting anything out of such rock but the coarser-grained "free" gold; but
the new cyanide process has changed all that, and the gold fields of the
world now deliver up fifty million dollars' worth of gold per year which
would have gone into the tailing-pile under the former conditions.
The cyanide process was new to me, and full of interest; and among the
costly and elaborate mining machinery there were fine things which were
new to me, but I was already familiar with the rest of the details of the
gold-mining industry. I had been a gold miner myself, in my day, and
knew substantially everything that those people knew about it, except how
to make money at it. But I learned a good deal about the Boers there,
and that was a fresh subject. What I heard there was afterwards repeated
to me in other parts of South Africa. Summed up--according to the
information thus gained--this is the Boer:
He is deeply religious, profoundly ignorant, dull, obstinate, bigoted,
uncleanly in his habits, hospitable, honest in his dealings with the
whites, a hard master to his black servant, lazy, a good shot, good
horseman, addicted to the chase, a lover of political independence, a
good husband and father, not fond of herding together in towns, but
liking the seclusion and remoteness and solitude and empty vastness and
silence of the veldt; a man of a mighty appetite, and not delicate about
what he appeases it with--well-satisfied with pork and Indian corn and
biltong, requiring only that the quantity shall not be stinted; willing
to ride a long journey to take a hand in a rude all-night dance
interspersed with vigorous feeding and boisterous jollity, but ready to
ride twice as far for a prayer-meeting; proud of his Dutch and Huguenot
origin and its religious and military history; proud of his race's
achievements in South Africa, its bold plunges into hostile and uncharted
deserts in search of free solitudes unvexed by the pestering and detested
English, also its victories over the natives and the British; proudest of
all, of the direct and effusive personal interest which the Deity has
always taken in its affairs. He cannot read, he cannot write; he has one
or two newspapers, but he is, apparently, not aware of it; until latterly
he had no schools, and taught his children nothing, news is a term which
has no meaning to him, and the thing itself he cares nothing about. He
hates to be taxed and resents it. He has stood stock still in South
Africa for two centuries and a half, and would like to stand still till
the end of time, for he has no sympathy with Uitlander notions of
progress. He is hungry to be rich, for he is human; but his preference
has been for riches in cattle, not in fine clothes and fine houses and
gold and diamonds. The gold and the diamonds have brought the godless
stranger within his gates, also contamination and broken repose, and he
wishes that they had never been discovered.
I think that the bulk of those details can be found in Olive Schreiner's
books, and she would not be accused of sketching the Boer's portrait with
an unfair hand.
Now what would you expect from that unpromising material? What ought you
to expect from it? Laws inimical to religious liberty? Yes. Laws
denying, representation and suffrage to the intruder? Yes. Laws
unfriendly to educational institutions? Yes. Laws obstructive of gold
production? Yes. Discouragement of railway expansion? Yes. Laws heavily
taxing the intruder and overlooking the Boer? Yes.
The Uitlander seems to have expected something very different from all
that. I do not know why. Nothing different from it was rationally to be
expected. A round man cannot be expected to fit a square hole right
away. He must have time to modify his shape. The modification had begun
in a detail or two, before the Raid, and was making some progress. It
has made further progress since. There are wise men in the Boer
government, and that accounts for the modification; the modification of
the Boer mass has probably not begun yet. If the heads of the Boer
government had not been wise men they would have hanged Jameson, and thus
turned a very commonplace pirate into a holy martyr. But even their
wisdom has its limits, and they will hang Mr. Rhodes if they ever catch
him. That will round him and complete him and make him a saint. He has
already been called by all other titles that symbolize human grandeur,
and he ought to rise to this one, the grandest of all. It will be a
dizzy jump from where he is now, but that is nothing, it will land him in
good company and be a pleasant change for him.
Some of the things demanded by the Johannesburgers' Manifesto have been
conceded since the days of the Raid, and the others will follow in time,
no doubt. It was most fortunate for the miners of Johannesburg that the
taxes which distressed them so much were levied by the Boer government,
instead of by their friend Rhodes and his Chartered Company of
highwaymen, for these latter take half of whatever their mining victims
find, they do not stop at a mere percentage. If the Johannesburg miners
were under their jurisdiction they would be in the poorhouse in twelve
months.
I have been under the impression all along that I had an unpleasant
paragraph about the Boers somewhere in my notebook, and also a pleasant
one. I have found them now. The unpleasant one is dated at an interior
village, and says--
"Mr. Z. called. He is an English Afrikander; is an old resident, and has
a Boer wife. He speaks the language, and his professional business is
with the Boers exclusively. He told me that the ancient Boer families in
the great region of which this village is the commercial center are
falling victims to their inherited indolence and dullness in the
materialistic latter-day race and struggle, and are dropping one by one
into the grip of the usurer--getting hopelessly in debt--and are losing
their high place and retiring to second and lower. The Boer's farm does
not go to another Boer when he loses it, but to a foreigner. Some have
fallen so low that they sell their daughters to the blacks."
Under date of another South African town I find the note which is
creditable to the Boers:
"Dr. X. told me that in the Kafir war 1,500 Kafirs took refuge in a great
cave in the mountains about 90 miles north of Johannesburg, and the Boers
blocked up the entrance and smoked them to death. Dr. X. has been in
there and seen the great array of bleached skeletons--one a woman with
the skeleton of a child hugged to her breast."
The great bulk of the savages must go. The white man wants their lands,
and all must go excepting such percentage of them as he will need to do
his work for him upon terms to be determined by himself. Since history
has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it
certainty, the humanest way of diminishing the black population should be
adopted, not the old cruel ways of the past. Mr. Rhodes and his gang
have been following the old ways.--They are chartered to rob and slay,
and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and Christian spirit.
They rob the Mashonas and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories
in the hallowed old style of "purchase!" for a song, and then they force
a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand. They rob the natives of
their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country
belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. They issue
"regulations" requiring the incensed and harassed natives to work for the
white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery,
and is several times worse than was the American slavery which used to
pain England so much; for when this Rhodesian slave is sick,
super-annuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself
or starve--his master is under no obligation to support him.
The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit
is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a
discredited time and a crude "civilization." We humanely reduce an
overplus of dogs by swift chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an
overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted
Australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors
by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. All these
are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I would rather suffer either
of these deaths thirty times over in thirty successive days than linger
out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of
insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the
victim hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and
pillage, and puts the right stain upon it.
Several long journeys--gave us experience of the Cape Colony railways;
easy-riding, fine cars; all the conveniences; thorough cleanliness;
comfortable beds furnished for the night trains. It was in the first
days of June, and winter; the daytime was pleasant, the nighttime nice
and cold. Spinning along all day in the cars it was ecstasy to breathe
the bracing air and gaze out over the vast brown solitudes of the velvet
plains, soft and lovely near by, still softer and lovelier further away,
softest and loveliest of all in the remote distances, where dim
island-hills seemed afloat, as in a sea--a sea made of dream-stuff and
flushed with colors faint and rich; and dear me, the depth of the sky,
and the beauty of the strange new cloud-forms, and the glory of the
sunshine, the lavishness, the wastefulness of it! The vigor and
freshness and inspiration of the air and the sunwell, it was all
just as Olive Schreiner had made it in her books.
To me the veldt, in its sober winter garb, was surpassingly beautiful.
There were unlevel stretches where it was rolling and swelling, and
rising and subsiding, and sweeping superbly on and on, and still on and
on like an ocean, toward the faraway horizon, its pale brown deepening by
delicately graduated shades to rich orange, and finally to purple and
crimson where it washed against the wooded hills and naked red crags at
the base of the sky.
Everywhere, from Cape Town to Kimberley and from Kimberley to Port
Elizabeth and East London, the towns were well populated with tamed
blacks; tamed and Christianized too, I suppose, for they wore the dowdy
clothes of our Christian civilization. But for that, many of them would
have been remarkably handsome. These fiendish clothes, together with the
proper lounging gait, good-natured face, happy air, and easy laugh, made
them precise counterparts of our American blacks; often where all the
other aspects were strikingly and harmoniously and thrillingly African, a
flock of these natives would intrude, looking wholly out of place, and
spoil it all, making the thing a grating discord, half African and half
American.
One Sunday in King William's Town a score of colored women came mincing
across the great barren square dressed--oh, in the last perfection of
fashion, and newness, and expensiveness, and showy mixture of unrelated
colors,--all just as I had seen it so often at home; and in their faces
and their gait was that languishing, aristocratic, divine delight in
their finery which was so familiar to me, and had always been such a
satisfaction to my eye and my heart. I seemed among old, old friends;
friends of fifty years, and I stopped and cordially greeted them. They
broke into a good-fellowship laugh, flashing their white teeth upon me,
and all answered at once. I did not understand a word they said. I was
astonished; I was not dreaming that they would answer in anything but
American.
The voices, too, of the African women, were familiar to me sweet and
musical, just like those of the slave women of my early days. I followed
a couple of them all over the Orange Free State--no, over its capital
--Bloemfontein, to hear their liquid voices and the happy ripple of their
laughter. Their language was a large improvement upon American. Also
upon the Zulu. It had no Zulu clicks in it; and it seemed to have no
angles or corners, no roughness, no vile s's or other hissing sounds, but
was very, very mellow and rounded and flowing.
In moving about the country in the trains, I had opportunity to see a
good many Boers of the veldt. One day at a village station a hundred of
them got out of the third-class cars to feed.
Their clothes were very interesting. For ugliness of shapes, and for
miracles of ugly colors inharmoniously associated, they were a record.
The effect was nearly as exciting and interesting as that produced by the
brilliant and beautiful clothes and perfect taste always on view at the
Indian railway stations. One man had corduroy trousers of a faded
chewing gum tint. And they were new--showing that this tint did not come
by calamity, but was intentional; the very ugliest color I have ever
seen. A gaunt, shackly country lout six feet high, in battered gray
slouched hat with wide brim, and old resin-colored breeches, had on a
hideous brand-new woolen coat which was imitation tiger skin wavy broad
stripes of dazzling yellow and deep brown. I thought he ought to be
hanged, and asked the station-master if it could be arranged. He said
no; and not only that, but said it rudely; said it with a quite
unnecessary show of feeling. Then he muttered something about my being a
jackass, and walked away and pointed me out to people, and did everything
he could to turn public sentiment against me. It is what one gets for
trying to do good.
In the train that day a passenger told me some more about Boer life out
in the lonely veldt. He said the Boer gets up early and sets his
"niggers" at their tasks (pasturing the cattle, and watching them); eats,
smokes, drowses, sleeps; toward evening superintends the milking, etc.;
eats, smokes, drowses; goes to bed at early candlelight in the fragrant
clothes he (and she) have worn all day and every week-day for years. I
remember that last detail, in Olive Schreiner's "Story of an African
Farm." And the passenger told me that the Boers were justly noted for
their hospitality. He told me a story about it. He said that his grace
the Bishop of a certain See was once making a business-progress through
the tavernless veldt, and one night he stopped with a Boer; after supper
was shown to bed; he undressed, weary and worn out, and was soon sound
asleep; in the night he woke up feeling crowded and suffocated, and found
the old Boer and his fat wife in bed with him, one on each side, with all
their clothes on, and snoring. He had to stay there and stand it--awake
and suffering--until toward dawn, when sleep again fell upon him for an
hour. Then he woke again. The Boer was gone, but the wife was still at
his side.
Those Reformers detested that Boer prison; they were not used to cramped
quarters and tedious hours, and weary idleness, and early to bed, and
limited movement, and arbitrary and irritating rules, and the absence of
the luxuries which wealth comforts the day and the night with. The
confinement told upon their bodies and their spirits; still, they were
superior men, and they made the best that was to be made of the
circumstances. Their wives smuggled delicacies to them, which helped to
smooth the way down for the prison fare.
In the train Mr. B. told me that the Boer jail-guards treated the black
prisoners--even political ones--mercilessly. An African chief and his
following had been kept there nine months without trial, and during all
that time they had been without shelter from rain and sun. He said that
one day the guards put a big black in the stocks for dashing his soup on
the ground; they stretched his legs painfully wide apart, and set him
with his back down hill; he could not endure it, and put back his hands
upon the slope for a support. The guard ordered him to withdraw the
support and kicked him in the back. "Then," said Mr. B., "'the powerful
black wrenched the stocks asunder and went for the guard; a Reform
prisoner pulled him off, and thrashed the guard himself."
CHAPTER LXIX.
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
--Pudd'nhead Wilsons's New Calendar.
There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the
Equator if it had had its rights.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Next to Mr. Rhodes, to me the most interesting convulsion of nature in
South Africa was the diamond-crater. The Rand gold fields are a
stupendous marvel, and they make all other gold fields small, but I was
not a stranger to gold-mining; the veldt was a noble thing to see, but it
was only another and lovelier variety of our Great Plains; the natives
were very far from being uninteresting, but they were not new; and as for
the towns, I could find my way without a guide through the most of them
because I had learned the streets, under other names, in towns just like
them in other lands; but the diamond mine was a wholly fresh thing, a
splendid and absorbing novelty. Very few people in the world have seen
the diamond in its home. It has but three or four homes in the world,
whereas gold has a million. It is worth while to journey around the
globe to see anything which can truthfully be called a novelty, and the
diamond mine is the greatest and most select and restricted novelty which
the globe has in stock.
The Kimberley diamond deposits were discovered about 1869, I think. When
everything is taken into consideration, the wonder is that they were not
discovered five thousand years ago and made familiar to the African world
for the rest of time. For this reason the first diamonds were found on
the surface of the ground. They were smooth and limpid, and in the
sunlight they vomited fire. They were the very things which an African
savage of any era would value above every other thing in the world
excepting a glass bead. For two or three centuries we have been buying
his lands, his cattle, his neighbor, and any other thing he had for sale,
for glass beads and so it is strange that he was indifferent to the
diamonds--for he must have pickets them up many and many a time. It
would not occur to him to try to sell them to whites, of course, since
the whites already had plenty of glass beads, and more fashionably
shaped, too, than these; but one would think that the poorer sort of
black, who could not afford real glass, would have been humbly content to
decorate himself with the imitation, and that presently the white trader
would notice the things, and dimly suspect, and carry some of them home,
and find out what they were, and at once empty a multitude of
fortune-hunters into Africa. There are many strange things in human
history; one of the strangest is that the sparkling diamonds laid there
so long without exciting any one's interest.
The revelation came at last by accident. In a Boer's hut out in the wide
solitude of the plains, a traveling stranger noticed a child playing with
a bright object, and was told it was a piece of glass which had been
found in the veldt. The stranger bought it for a trifle and carried it
away; and being without honor, made another stranger believe it was a
diamond, and so got $125 out of him for it, and was as pleased with
himself as if he had done a righteous thing. In Paris the wronged
stranger sold it to a pawnshop for $10,000, who sold it to a countess for
$90,000, who sold it to a brewer for $800;000, who traded it to a king
for a dukedom and a pedigree, and the king "put it up the spout."
--[handwritten note: "From the Greek meaning 'pawned it.'" M.T.]--I know
these particulars to be correct.
The news flew around, and the South African diamond-boom began. The
original traveler--the dishonest one--now remembered that he had once
seen a Boer teamster chocking his wagon-wheel on a steep grade with a
diamond as large as a football, and he laid aside his occupations and
started out to hunt for it, but not with the intention of cheating
anybody out of $125 with it, for he had reformed.
We now come to matters more didactic. Diamonds are not imbedded in rock
ledges fifty miles long, like the Johannesburg gold, but are distributed
through the rubbish of a filled-up well, so to speak. The well is rich,
its walls are sharply defined; outside of the walls are no diamonds. The
well is a crater, and a large one. Before it had been meddled with, its
surface was even with the level plain, and there was no sign to suggest
that it was there. The pasturage covering the surface of the Kimberley
crater was sufficient for the support of a cow, and the pasturage
underneath was sufficient for the support of a kingdom; but the cow did
not know it, and lost her chance.
The Kimberley crater is roomy enough to admit the Roman Coliseum; the
bottom of the crater has not been reached, and no one can tell how far
down in the bowels of the earth it goes. Originally, it was a
perpendicular hole packed solidly full of blue rock or cement, and
scattered through that blue mass, like raisins in a pudding, were the
diamonds. As deep down in the earth as the blue stuff extends, so deep
will the diamonds be found.
There are three or four other celebrated craters near by a circle three
miles in diameter would enclose them all. They are owned by the De Beers
Company, a consolidation of diamond properties arranged by Mr. Rhodes
twelve or fourteen years ago. The De Beers owns other craters; they are
under the grass, but the De Beers knows where they are, and will open
them some day, if the market should require it.
Originally, the diamond deposits were the property of the Orange Free
State; but a judicious "rectification" of the boundary line shifted them
over into the British territory of Cape Colony. A high official of the
Free State told me that the sum of $4,00,000 was handed to his
commonwealth as a compromise, or indemnity, or something of the sort, and
that he thought his commonwealth did wisely to take the money and keep
out of a dispute, since the power was all on the one side and the
weakness all on the other. The De Beers Company dig out $400,000 worth
of diamonds per week, now. The Cape got the territory, but no profit;
for Mr. Rhodes and the Rothschilds and the other De Beers people own the
mines, and they pay no taxes.
In our day the mines are worked upon scientific principles, under the
guidance of the ablest mining-engineering talent procurable in America.
There are elaborate works for reducing the blue rock and passing it
through one process after another until every diamond it contains has
been hunted down and secured. I watched the "concentrators" at work big
tanks containing mud and water and invisible diamonds--and was told that
each could stir and churn and properly treat 300 car-loads of mud per day
1,600 pounds to the car-load--and reduce it to 3 car-loads of slush. I
saw the 3 carloads of slush taken to the "pulsators" and there reduced to
quarter of a load of nice clean dark-colored sand. Then I followed it to
the sorting tables and saw the men deftly and swiftly spread it out and
brush it about and seize the diamonds as they showed up. I assisted, and
once I found a diamond half as large as an almond. It is an exciting
kind of fishing, and you feel a fine thrill of pleasure every time you
detect the glow of one of those limpid pebbles through the veil of dark
sand. I would like to spend my Saturday holidays in that charming sport
every now and then. Of course there are disappointments. Sometimes you
find a diamond which is not a diamond; it is only a quartz crystal or
some such worthless thing. The expert can generally distinguish it from
the precious stone which it is counterfeiting; but if he is in doubt he
lays it on a flatiron and hits it with a sledgehammer. If it is a
diamond it holds its own; if it is anything else, it is reduced to
powder. I liked that experiment very much, and did not tire of
repetitions of it. It was full of enjoyable apprehensions, unmarred by
any personal sense of risk. The De Beers concern treats 8;000 carloads
--about 6,000 tons--of blue rock per day, and the result is three pounds of
diamonds. Value, uncut, $50,000 to $70,000. After cutting, they will
weigh considerably less than a pound, but will be worth four or five
times as much as they were before.
All the plain around that region is spread over, a foot deep, with blue
rock, placed there by the Company, and looks like a plowed field.
Exposure for a length of time make the rock easier to work than it is
when it comes out of the mine. If mining should cease now, the supply of
rock spread over those fields would furnish the usual 8,000 car-loads per
day to the separating works during three years. The fields are fenced
and watched; and at night they are under the constant inspection of lofty
electric searchlight. They contain fifty or sixty million dollars'
worth' of diamonds, and there is an abundance of enterprising thieves
around.
In the dirt of the Kimberley streets there is much hidden wealth. Some
time ago the people were granted the privilege of a free wash-up. There
was a general rush, the work was done with thoroughness, and a good
harvest of diamonds was gathered.
The deep mining is done by natives. There are many hundreds of them.
They live in quarters built around the inside of a great compound. They
are a jolly and good-natured lot, and accommodating. They performed a
war-dance for us, which was the wildest exhibition I have ever seen.
They are not allowed outside of the compound during their term of service
three months, I think it, is, as a rule. They go down the shaft, stand
their watch, come up again, are searched, and go to bed or to their
amusements in the compound; and this routine they repeat, day in and day
out.
It is thought that they do not now steal many diamonds successfully.
They used to swallow them, and find other ways of concealing them, but
the white man found ways of beating their various games. One man cut his
leg and shoved a diamond into the wound, but even that project did not
succeed. When they find a fine large diamond they are more likely to
report it than to steal it, for in the former case they get a reward, and
in the latter they are quite apt to merely get into trouble. Some years
ago, in a mine not owned by the De Beers, a black found what has been
claimed to be the largest diamond known to the world's history; and, as a
reward he was released from service and given a blanket, a horse, and
five hundred dollars. It made him a Vanderbilt. He could buy four
wives, and have money left. Four wives are an ample support for a
native. With four wives he is wholly independent, and need never do a
stroke of work again.
That great diamond weighs 97l carats. Some say it is as big as a piece
of alum, others say it is as large as a bite of rock candy, but the best
authorities agree that it is almost exactly the size of a chunk of ice.
But those details are not important; and in my opinion not trustworthy.
It has a flaw in it, otherwise it would be of incredible value. As it
is, it is held to be worth $2,000,000. After cutting it ought to be
worth from $5,000,000 to $8,000,000, therefore persons desiring to save
money should buy it now. It is owned by a syndicate, and apparently
there is no satisfactory market for it. It is earning nothing; it is
eating its head off. Up to this time it has made nobody rich but the
native who found it.
He found it in a mine which was being worked by contract. That is to
say, a company had bought the privilege of taking from the mine 5,000,000
carloads of blue-rock, for a sum down and a royalty. Their speculation
had not paid; but on the very day that their privilege ran out that
native found the $2,000,000-diamond and handed it over to them. Even the
diamond culture is not without its romantic episodes.
The Koh-i-Noor is a large diamond, and valuable; but it cannot compete in
these matters with three which--according to legend--are among the crown
trinkets of Portugal and Russia. One of these is held to be worth
$20,000,000; another, $25,000,000, and the third something over
$28,000,000.
Those are truly wonderful diamonds, whether they exist or not; and yet
they are of but little importance by comparison with the one wherewith
the Boer wagoner chocked his wheel on that steep grade as heretofore
referred to. In Kimberley I had some conversation with the man who saw
the Boer do that--an incident which had occurred twenty-seven or
twenty-eight years before I had my talk with him. He assured me that
that diamond's value could have been over a billion dollars, but not
under it. I believed him, because he had devoted twenty-seven years to
hunting for it, and was, in a position to know.
A fitting and interesting finish to an examination of the tedious and
laborious and costly processes whereby the diamonds are gotten out of the
deeps of the earth and freed from the base stuffs which imprison them is
the visit to the De Beers offices in the town of Kimberley, where the
result of each day's mining is brought every day, and, weighed, assorted,
valued, and deposited in safes against shipping-day. An unknown and
unaccredited person cannot, get into that place; and it seemed apparent
from the generous supply of warning and protective and prohibitory signs
that were posted all about, that not even the known and accredited can
steal diamonds there without inconvenience.
We saw the day's output--shining little nests of diamonds, distributed a
foot apart, along a counter, each nest reposing upon a sheet of white
paper. That day's catch was about $70,000 worth. In the course of a
year half a ton of diamonds pass under the scales there and sleep on that
counter; the resulting money is $18,000,000 or $20,000,000. Profit,
about $12,000,000.
Young girls were doing the sorting--a nice, clean, dainty, and probably
distressing employment. Every day ducal incomes sift and sparkle through
the fingers of those young girls; yet they go to bed at night as poor as
they were when they got up in the morning. The same thing next day, and
all the days.
They are beautiful things, those diamonds, in their native state. They
are of various shapes; they have flat surfaces, rounded borders, and
never a sharp edge. They are of all colors and shades of color, from
dewdrop white to actual black; and their smooth and rounded surfaces and
contours, variety of color, and transparent limpidity make them look like
piles of assorted candies. A very light straw color is their commonest
tint. It seemed to me that these uncut gems must be more beautiful than
any cut ones could be; but when a collection of cut ones was brought out,
I saw my mistake. Nothing is so beautiful as a rose diamond with the
light playing through it, except that uncostly thing which is just like
it--wavy sea-water with the sunlight playing through it and striking a
white-sand bottom.
Before the middle of July we reached Cape Town, and the end of our
African journeyings. And well satisfied; for, towering above us was
Table Mountain--a reminder that we had now seen each and all of the great
features of South Africa except Mr. Cecil Rhodes. I realize that that is
a large exception. I know quite well that whether Mr. Rhodes is the
lofty and worshipful patriot and statesman that multitudes believe him to
be, or Satan come again, as the rest of the world account him, he is
still the most imposing figure in the British empire outside of England.
When he stands on the Cape of Good Hope, his shadow falls to the Zambesi.
He is the only colonial in the British dominions whose goings and comings
are chronicled and discussed under all the globe's meridians, and whose
speeches, unclipped, are cabled from the ends of the earth; and he is the
only unroyal outsider whose arrival in London can compete for attention
with an eclipse.
That he is an extraordinary man, and not an accident of fortune, not even
his dearest South African enemies were willing to deny, so far as I heard
them testify. The whole South African world seemed to stand in a kind of
shuddering awe of him, friend and enemy alike. It was as if he were
deputy-God on the one side, deputy-Satan on the other, proprietor of the
people, able to make them or ruin them by his breath, worshiped by many,
hated by many, but blasphemed by none among the judicious, and even by
the indiscreet in guarded whispers only.
What is the secret of his formidable supremacy? One says it is his
prodigious wealth--a wealth whose drippings in salaries and in other ways
support multitudes and make them his interested and loyal vassals;
another says it is his personal magnetism and his persuasive tongue, and
that these hypnotize and make happy slaves of all that drift within the
circle of their influence; another says it is his majestic ideas, his
vast schemes for the territorial aggrandizement of England, his patriotic
and unselfish ambition to spread her beneficent protection and her just
rule over the pagan wastes of Africa and make luminous the African
darkness with the glory of her name; and another says he wants the earth
and wants it for his own, and that the belief that he will get it and let
his friends in on the ground floor is the secret that rivets so many eyes
upon him and keeps him in the zenith where the view is unobstructed.
One may take his choice. They are all the same price. One fact is sure:
he keeps his prominence and a vast following, no matter what he does. He
"deceives" the Duke of Fife--it is the Duke's word--but that does not
destroy the Duke's loyalty to him. He tricks the Reformers into immense
trouble with his Raid, but the most of them believe he meant well. He
weeps over the harshly--taxed Johannesburgers and makes them his friends;
at the same time he taxes his Charter-settlers 50 per cent., and so wins
their affection and their confidence that they are squelched with despair
at every rumor that the Charter is to be annulled. He raids and robs and
slays and enslaves the Matabele and gets worlds of Charter-Christian
applause for it. He has beguiled England into buying Charter waste paper
for Bank of England notes, ton for ton, and the ravished still burn
incense to him as the Eventual God of Plenty. He has done everything he
could think of to pull himself down to the ground; he has done more than
enough to pull sixteen common-run great men down; yet there he stands, to
this day, upon his dizzy summit under the dome of the sky, an apparent
permanency, the marvel of the time, the mystery of the age, an Archangel
with wings to half the world, Satan with a tail to the other half.
I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a
piece of the rope for a keepsake.
CONCLUSION.
I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the
angels speak English with an accent.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
I saw Table Rock, anyway--a majestic pile. It is 3,000 feet high. It is
also 17,000 feet high. These figures may be relied upon. I got them in
Cape Town from the two best-informed citizens, men who had made Table
Rock the study of their lives. And I saw Table Bay, so named for its
levelness. I saw the Castle--built by the Dutch East India Company three
hundred years ago--where the Commanding General lives; I saw St. Simon's
Bay, where the Admiral lives. I saw the Government, also the Parliament,
where they quarreled in two languages when I was there, and agreed in
none. I saw the club. I saw and explored the beautiful sea-girt drives
that wind about the mountains and through the paradise where the villas
are: Also I saw some of the fine old Dutch mansions, pleasant homes of
the early times, pleasant homes to-day, and enjoyed the privilege of
their hospitalities.
And just before I sailed I saw in one of them a quaint old picture which
was a link in a curious romance--a picture of a pale, intellectual young
man in a pink coat with a high black collar. It was a portrait of Dr.
James Barry, a military surgeon who came out to the Cape fifty years ago
with his regiment. He was a wild young fellow, and was guilty of various
kinds of misbehavior. He was several times reported to headquarters in
England, and it was in each case expected that orders would come out to
deal with him promptly and severely, but for some mysterious reason no
orders of any kind ever came back--nothing came but just an impressive
silence. This made him an imposing and uncanny wonder to the town.
Next, he was promoted-away up. He was made Medical Superintendent
General, and transferred to India. Presently he was back at the Cape
again and at his escapades once more. There were plenty of pretty girls,
but none of them caught him, none of them could get hold of his heart;
evidently he was not a marrying man. And that was another marvel,
another puzzle, and made no end of perplexed talk. Once he was called in
the night, an obstetric service, to do what he could for a woman who was
believed to be dying. He was prompt and scientific, and saved both
mother and child. There are other instances of record which testify to
his mastership of his profession; and many which testify to his love of
it and his devotion to it. Among other adventures of his was a duel of a
desperate sort, fought with swords, at the Castle. He killed his man.
The child heretofore mentioned as having been saved by Dr. Barry so long
ago, was named for him, and still lives in Cape Town. He had Dr.
Barry's portrait painted, and gave it to the gentleman in whose old Dutch
house I saw it--the quaint figure in pink coat and high black collar.
The story seems to be arriving nowhere. But that is because I have not
finished. Dr. Barry died in Cape Town 30 years ago. It was then
discovered that he was a woman.
The legend goes that enquiries--soon silenced--developed the fact that
she was a daughter of a great English house, and that that was why her
Cape wildnesses brought no punishment and got no notice when reported to
the government at home. Her name was an alias. She had disgraced
herself with her people; so she chose to change her name and her sex and
take a new start in the world.
We sailed on the 15th of July in the Norman, a beautiful ship, perfectly
appointed. The voyage to England occupied a short fortnight, without a
stop except at Madeira. A good and restful voyage for tired people, and
there were several of us. I seemed to have been lecturing a thousand
years, though it was only a twelvemonth, and a considerable number of the
others were Reformers who were fagged out with their five months of
seclusion in the Pretoria prison.
Our trip around the earth ended at the Southampton pier, where we
embarked thirteen months before. It seemed a fine and large thing to
have accomplished--the circumnavigation of this great globe in that
little time, and I was privately proud of it. For a moment.
Then came one of those vanity-snubbing astronomical reports from the
Observatory-people, whereby it appeared that another great body of light
had lately flamed up in the remotenesses of space which was traveling at
a gait which would enable it to do all that I had done in a minute and a
half. Human pride is not worth while; there is always something lying in
wait to take the wind out of it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG AND OTHER STORIES
By Mark Twain
CONTENTS:
THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG
MY FIRST LIE, AND HOW I GOT OUT OF IT
THE ESQUIMAUX MAIDEN'S ROMANCE
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY
IS HE LIVING OR IS HE DEAD?
MY DEBUT AS A LITERARY PERSON
AT THE APPETITE-CURE
CONCERNING THE JEWS
FROM THE 'LONDON TIMES' OF 1904
ABOUT PLAY-ACTING
TRAVELLING WITH A REFORMER
DIPLOMATIC PAY AND CLOTHES
LUCK
THE CAPTAIN'S STORY
STIRRING TIMES IN AUSTRIA
MEISTERSCHAFT
MY BOYHOOD DREAMS
TO THE ABOVE OLD PEOPLE
IN MEMORIAM--OLIVIA SUSAN CLEMENS
THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG
It was many years ago. Hadleyburg was the most honest and upright town
in all the region round about. It had kept that reputation unsmirched
during three generations, and was prouder of it than of any other of its
possessions. It was so proud of it, and so anxious to insure its
perpetuation, that it began to teach the principles of honest dealing to
its babies in the cradle, and made the like teachings the staple of their
culture thenceforward through all the years devoted to their education.
Also, throughout the formative years temptations were kept out of the way
of the young people, so that their honesty could have every chance to
harden and solidify, and become a part of their very bone. The
neighbouring towns were jealous of this honourable supremacy, and
affected to sneer at Hadleyburg's pride in it and call it vanity; but all
the same they were obliged to acknowledge that Hadleyburg was in reality
an incorruptible town; and if pressed they would also acknowledge that
the mere fact that a young man hailed from Hadleyburg was all the
recommendation he needed when he went forth from his natal town to seek
for responsible employment.
But at last, in the drift of time, Hadleyburg had the ill luck to offend
a passing stranger--possibly without knowing it, certainly without
caring, for Hadleyburg was sufficient unto itself, and cared not a rap
for strangers or their opinions. Still, it would have been well to make
an exception in this one's case, for he was a bitter man, and revengeful.
All through his wanderings during a whole year he kept his injury in
mind, and gave all his leisure moments to trying to invent a compensating
satisfaction for it. He contrived many plans, and all of them were good,
but none of them was quite sweeping enough: the poorest of them would
hurt a great many individuals, but what he wanted was a plan which would
comprehend the entire town, and not let so much as one person escape
unhurt. At last he had a fortunate idea, and when it fell into his brain
it lit up his whole head with an evil joy. He began to form a plan at
once, saying to himself "That is the thing to do--I will corrupt the
town."
Six months later he went to Hadleyburg, and arrived in a buggy at the
house of the old cashier of the bank about ten at night. He got a sack
out of the buggy, shouldered it, and staggered with it through the
cottage yard, and knocked at the door. A woman's voice said "Come in,"
and he entered, and set his sack behind the stove in the parlour, saying
politely to the old lady who sat reading the "Missionary Herald" by the
lamp:
"Pray keep your seat, madam, I will not disturb you. There--now it is
pretty well concealed; one would hardly know it was there. Can I see
your husband a moment, madam?"
No, he was gone to Brixton, and might not return before morning.
"Very well, madam, it is no matter. I merely wanted to leave that sack
in his care, to be delivered to the rightful owner when he shall be
found. I am a stranger; he does not know me; I am merely passing through
the town to-night to discharge a matter which has been long in my mind.
My errand is now completed, and I go pleased and a little proud, and you
will never see me again. There is a paper attached to the sack which
will explain everything. Good-night, madam."
The old lady was afraid of the mysterious big stranger, and was glad to
see him go. But her curiosity was roused, and she went straight to the
sack and brought away the paper. It began as follows:
"TO BE PUBLISHED, or, the right man sought out by private inquiry
--either will answer. This sack contains gold coin weighing a hundred
and sixty pounds four ounces--"
"Mercy on us, and the door not locked!"
Mrs. Richards flew to it all in a tremble and locked it, then pulled down
the window-shades and stood frightened, worried, and wondering if there
was anything else she could do toward making herself and the money more
safe. She listened awhile for burglars, then surrendered to curiosity,
and went back to the lamp and finished reading the paper:
"I am a foreigner, and am presently going back to my own country, to
remain there permanently. I am grateful to America for what I have
received at her hands during my long stay under her flag; and to one of
her citizens--a citizen of Hadleyburg--I am especially grateful for a
great kindness done me a year or two ago. Two great kindnesses in fact.
I will explain. I was a gambler. I say I WAS. I was a ruined gambler.
I arrived in this village at night, hungry and without a penny. I asked
for help--in the dark; I was ashamed to beg in the light. I begged of
the right man. He gave me twenty dollars--that is to say, he gave me
life, as I considered it. He also gave me fortune; for out of that money
I have made myself rich at the gaming-table. And finally, a remark which
he made to me has remained with me to this day, and has at last conquered
me; and in conquering has saved the remnant of my morals: I shall gamble
no more. Now I have no idea who that man was, but I want him found, and
I want him to have this money, to give away, throw away, or keep, as he
pleases. It is merely my way of testifying my gratitude to him. If I
could stay, I would find him myself; but no matter, he will be found.
This is an honest town, an incorruptible town, and I know I can trust it
without fear. This man can be identified by the remark which he made to
me; I feel persuaded that he will remember it.
"And now my plan is this: If you prefer to conduct the inquiry
privately, do so. Tell the contents of this present writing to any one
who is likely to be the right man. If he shall answer, 'I am the man;
the remark I made was so-and-so,' apply the test--to wit: open the sack,
and in it you will find a sealed envelope containing that remark. If the
remark mentioned by the candidate tallies with it, give him the money,
and ask no further questions, for he is certainly the right man.
"But if you shall prefer a public inquiry, then publish this present
writing in the local paper--with these instructions added, to wit: Thirty
days from now, let the candidate appear at the town-hall at eight in the
evening (Friday), and hand his remark, in a sealed envelope, to the Rev.
Mr. Burgess (if he will be kind enough to act); and let Mr. Burgess there
and then destroy the seals of the sack, open it, and see if the remark is
correct: if correct, let the money be delivered, with my sincere
gratitude, to my benefactor thus identified."
Mrs. Richards sat down, gently quivering with excitement, and was soon
lost in thinkings--after this pattern: "What a strange thing it is!
. . . And what a fortune for that kind man who set his bread afloat upon
the waters! . . . If it had only been my husband that did it!--for we are
so poor, so old and poor! . . ." Then, with a sigh--"But it was not my
Edward; no, it was not he that gave a stranger twenty dollars. It is a
pity too; I see it now. . . " Then, with a shudder--"But it is GAMBLERS'
money! the wages of sin; we couldn't take it; we couldn't touch it. I
don't like to be near it; it seems a defilement." She moved to a farther
chair. . . "I wish Edward would come, and take it to the bank; a burglar
might come at any moment; it is dreadful to be here all alone with it."
At eleven Mr. Richards arrived, and while his wife was saying "I am SO
glad you've come!" he was saying, "I am so tired--tired clear out; it is
dreadful to be poor, and have to make these dismal journeys at my time of
life. Always at the grind, grind, grind, on a salary--another man's
slave, and he sitting at home in his slippers, rich and comfortable."
"I am so sorry for you, Edward, you know that; but be comforted; we have
our livelihood; we have our good name--"
"Yes, Mary, and that is everything. Don't mind my talk--it's just a
moment's irritation and doesn't mean anything. Kiss me--there, it's all
gone now, and I am not complaining any more. What have you been getting?
What's in the sack?"
Then his wife told him the great secret. It dazed him for a moment; then
he said:
"It weighs a hundred and sixty pounds? Why, Mary, it's for-ty thousand
dollars--think of it--a whole fortune! Not ten men in this village are
worth that much. Give me the paper."
He skimmed through it and said:
"Isn't it an adventure! Why, it's a romance; it's like the impossible
things one reads about in books, and never sees in life." He was well
stirred up now; cheerful, even gleeful. He tapped his old wife on the
cheek, and said humorously, "Why, we're rich, Mary, rich; all we've got
to do is to bury the money and burn the papers. If the gambler ever comes
to inquire, we'll merely look coldly upon him and say: 'What is this
nonsense you are talking? We have never heard of you and your sack of
gold before;' and then he would look foolish, and--"
"And in the meantime, while you are running on with your jokes, the money
is still here, and it is fast getting along toward burglar-time."
"True. Very well, what shall we do--make the inquiry private? No, not
that; it would spoil the romance. The public method is better. Think
what a noise it will make! And it will make all the other towns jealous;
for no stranger would trust such a thing to any town but Hadleyburg, and
they know it. It's a great card for us. I must get to the
printing-office now, or I shall be too late."
"But stop--stop--don't leave me here alone with it, Edward!"
But he was gone. For only a little while, however. Not far from his own
house he met the editor--proprietor of the paper, and gave him the
document, and said "Here is a good thing for you, Cox--put it in."
"It may be too late, Mr. Richards, but I'll see."
At home again, he and his wife sat down to talk the charming mystery
over; they were in no condition for sleep. The first question was, Who
could the citizen have been who gave the stranger the twenty dollars? It
seemed a simple one; both answered it in the same breath--
"Barclay Goodson."
"Yes," said Richards, "he could have done it, and it would have been like
him, but there's not another in the town."
"Everybody will grant that, Edward--grant it privately, anyway. For six
months, now, the village has been its own proper self once more--honest,
narrow, self-righteous, and stingy."
"It is what he always called it, to the day of his death--said it right
out publicly, too."
"Yes, and he was hated for it."
"Oh, of course; but he didn't care. I reckon he was the best-hated man
among us, except the Reverend Burgess."
"Well, Burgess deserves it--he will never get another congregation here.
Mean as the town is, it knows how to estimate HIM. Edward, doesn't it
seem odd that the stranger should appoint Burgess to deliver the money?"
"Well, yes--it does. That is--that is--"
"Why so much that-IS-ing? Would YOU select him?"
"Mary, maybe the stranger knows him better than this village does."
"Much THAT would help Burgess!"
The husband seemed perplexed for an answer; the wife kept a steady eye
upon him, and waited. Finally Richards said, with the hesitancy of one
who is making a statement which is likely to encounter doubt,
"Mary, Burgess is not a bad man."
His wife was certainly surprised.
"Nonsense!" she exclaimed.
"He is not a bad man. I know. The whole of his unpopularity had its
foundation in that one thing--the thing that made so much noise."
"That 'one thing,' indeed! As if that 'one thing' wasn't enough, all by
itself."
"Plenty. Plenty. Only he wasn't guilty of it."
"How you talk! Not guilty of it! Everybody knows he WAS guilty."
"Mary, I give you my word--he was innocent."
"I can't believe it and I don't. How do you know?"
"It is a confession. I am ashamed, but I will make it. I was the only
man who knew he was innocent. I could have saved him, and--and--well,
you know how the town was wrought up--I hadn't the pluck to do it. It
would have turned everybody against me. I felt mean, ever so mean; ut I
didn't dare; I hadn't the manliness to face that."
Mary looked troubled, and for a while was silent. Then she said
stammeringly:
"I--I don't think it would have done for you to--to--One mustn't
--er--public opinion--one has to be so careful--so--" It was a difficult
road, and she got mired; but after a little she got started again. "It
was a great pity, but--Why, we couldn't afford it, Edward--we couldn't
indeed. Oh, I wouldn't have had you do it for anything!"
"It would have lost us the good-will of so many people, Mary; and
then--and then--"
"What troubles me now is, what HE thinks of us, Edward."
"He? HE doesn't suspect that I could have saved him."
"Oh," exclaimed the wife, in a tone of relief, "I am glad of that. As
long as he doesn't know that you could have saved him, he--he--well that
makes it a great deal better. Why, I might have known he didn't know,
because he is always trying to be friendly with us, as little
encouragement as we give him. More than once people have twitted me with
it. There's the Wilsons, and the Wilcoxes, and the Harknesses, they take
a mean pleasure in saying 'YOUR FRIEND Burgess,' because they know it
pesters me. I wish he wouldn't persist in liking us so; I can't think
why he keeps it up."
"I can explain it. It's another confession. When the thing was new and
hot, and the town made a plan to ride him on a rail, my conscience hurt
me so that I couldn't stand it, and I went privately and gave him notice,
and he got out of the town and stayed out till it was safe to come back."
"Edward! If the town had found it out--"
"DON'T! It scares me yet, to think of it. I repented of it the minute
it was done; and I was even afraid to tell you lest your face might
betray it to somebody. I didn't sleep any that night, for worrying. But
after a few days I saw that no one was going to suspect me, and after
that I got to feeling glad I did it. And I feel glad yet, Mary--glad
through and through."
"So do I, now, for it would have been a dreadful way to treat him. Yes,
I'm glad; for really you did owe him that, you know. But, Edward,
suppose it should come out yet, some day!"
"It won't."
"Why?"
"Because everybody thinks it was Goodson."
"Of course they would!"
"Certainly. And of course HE didn't care. They persuaded poor old
Sawlsberry to go and charge it on him, and he went blustering over there
and did it. Goodson looked him over, like as if he was hunting for a
place on him that he could despise the most; then he says, 'So you are
the Committee of Inquiry, are you?' Sawlsberry said that was about what
he was. 'H'm. Do they require particulars, or do you reckon a kind of a
GENERAL answer will do?' 'If they require particulars, I will come back,
Mr. Goodson; I will take the general answer first.' 'Very well, then,
tell them to go to hell--I reckon that's general enough. And I'll give
you some advice, Sawlsberry; when you come back for the particulars,
fetch a basket to carry what is left of yourself home in.'"
"Just like Goodson; it's got all the marks. He had only one vanity; he
thought he could give advice better than any other person."
"It settled the business, and saved us, Mary. The subject was dropped."
"Bless you, I'm not doubting THAT."
Then they took up the gold-sack mystery again, with strong interest. Soon
the conversation began to suffer breaks--interruptions caused by absorbed
thinkings. The breaks grew more and more frequent. At last Richards
lost himself wholly in thought. He sat long, gazing vacantly at the
floor, and by-and-by he began to punctuate his thoughts with little
nervous movements of his hands that seemed to indicate vexation.
Meantime his wife too had relapsed into a thoughtful silence, and her
movements were beginning to show a troubled discomfort. Finally Richards
got up and strode aimlessly about the room, ploughing his hands through
his hair, much as a somnambulist might do who was having a bad dream.
Then he seemed to arrive at a definite purpose; and without a word he put
on his hat and passed quickly out of the house. His wife sat brooding,
with a drawn face, and did not seem to be aware that she was alone. Now
and then she murmured, "Lead us not into t . . . but--but--we are so
poor, so poor! . . . Lead us not into . . . Ah, who would be hurt by
it?--and no one would ever know . . . Lead us . . . " The voice died out
in mumblings. After a little she glanced up and muttered in a
half-frightened, half-glad way--
"He is gone! But, oh dear, he may be too late--too late . . . Maybe
not--maybe there is still time." She rose and stood thinking, nervously
clasping and unclasping her hands. A slight shudder shook her frame, and
she said, out of a dry throat, "God forgive me--it's awful to think such
things--but . . . Lord, how we are made--how strangely we are made!"
She turned the light low, and slipped stealthily over and knelt down by
the sack and felt of its ridgy sides with her hands, and fondled them
lovingly; and there was a gloating light in her poor old eyes. She fell
into fits of absence; and came half out of them at times to mutter "If we
had only waited!--oh, if we had only waited a little, and not been in
such a hurry!"
Meantime Cox had gone home from his office and told his wife all about
the strange thing that had happened, and they had talked it over eagerly,
and guessed that the late Goodson was the only man in the town who could
have helped a suffering stranger with so noble a sum as twenty dollars.
Then there was a pause, and the two became thoughtful and silent. And
by-and-by nervous and fidgety. At last the wife said, as if to herself,
"Nobody knows this secret but the Richardses . . . and us . . . nobody."
The husband came out of his thinkings with a slight start, and gazed
wistfully at his wife, whose face was become very pale; then he
hesitatingly rose, and glanced furtively at his hat, then at his wife--a
sort of mute inquiry. Mrs. Cox swallowed once or twice, with her hand at
her throat, then in place of speech she nodded her head. In a moment she
was alone, and mumbling to herself.
And now Richards and Cox were hurrying through the deserted streets, from
opposite directions. They met, panting, at the foot of the
printing-office stairs; by the night-light there they read each other's
face. Cox whispered:
"Nobody knows about this but us?"
The whispered answer was:
"Not a soul--on honour, not a soul!"
"If it isn't too late to--"
The men were starting up-stairs; at this moment they were overtaken by a
boy, and Cox asked,
"Is that you, Johnny?"
"Yes, sir."
"You needn't ship the early mail--nor ANY mail; wait till I tell you."
"It's already gone, sir."
"GONE?" It had the sound of an unspeakable disappointment in it.
"Yes, sir. Time-table for Brixton and all the towns beyond changed
to-day, sir--had to get the papers in twenty minutes earlier than common.
I had to rush; if I had been two minutes later--"
The men turned and walked slowly away, not waiting to hear the rest.
Neither of them spoke during ten minutes; then Cox said, in a vexed tone,
"What possessed you to be in such a hurry, I can't make out."
The answer was humble enough:
"I see it now, but somehow I never thought, you know, until it was too
late. But the next time--"
"Next time be hanged! It won't come in a thousand years."
Then the friends separated without a good-night, and dragged themselves
home with the gait of mortally stricken men. At their homes their wives
sprang up with an eager "Well?"--then saw the answer with their eyes and
sank down sorrowing, without waiting for it to come in words. In both
houses a discussion followed of a heated sort--a new thing; there had
been discussions before, but not heated ones, not ungentle ones. The
discussions to-night were a sort of seeming plagiarisms of each other.
Mrs. Richards said:
"If you had only waited, Edward--if you had only stopped to think; but
no, you must run straight to the printing-office and spread it all over
the world."
"It SAID publish it."
"That is nothing; it also said do it privately, if you liked. There,
now--is that true, or not?"
"Why, yes--yes, it is true; but when I thought what a stir it would make,
and what a compliment it was to Hadleyburg that a stranger should trust
it so--"
"Oh, certainly, I know all that; but if you had only stopped to think,
you would have seen that you COULDN'T find the right man, because he is
in his grave, and hasn't left chick nor child nor relation behind him;
and as long as the money went to somebody that awfully needed it, and
nobody would be hurt by it, and--and--"
She broke down, crying. Her husband tried to think of some comforting
thing to say, and presently came out with this:
"But after all, Mary, it must be for the best--it must be; we know that.
And we must remember that it was so ordered--"
"Ordered! Oh, everything's ORDERED, when a person has to find some way
out when he has been stupid. Just the same, it was ORDERED that the money
should come to us in this special way, and it was you that must take it
on yourself to go meddling with the designs of Providence--and who gave
you the right? It was wicked, that is what it was--just blasphemous
presumption, and no more becoming to a meek and humble professor of--"
"But, Mary, you know how we have been trained all our lives long, like
the whole village, till it is absolutely second nature to us to stop not
a single moment to think when there's an honest thing to be done--"
"Oh, I know it, I know it--it's been one everlasting training and
training and training in honesty--honesty shielded, from the very cradle,
against every possible temptation, and so it's ARTIFICIAL honesty, and
weak as water when temptation comes, as we have seen this night. God
knows I never had shade nor shadow of a doubt of my petrified and
indestructible honesty until now--and now, under the very first big and
real temptation, I--Edward, it is my belief that this town's honesty is
as rotten as mine is; as rotten as yours. It is a mean town, a hard,
stingy town, and hasn't a virtue in the world but this honesty it is so
celebrated for and so conceited about; and so help me, I do believe that
if ever the day comes that its honesty falls under great temptation, its
grand reputation will go to ruin like a house of cards. There, now, I've
made confession, and I feel better; I am a humbug, and I've been one all
my life, without knowing it. Let no man call me honest again--I will not
have it."
"I--Well, Mary, I feel a good deal as you do: I certainly do. It seems
strange, too, so strange. I never could have believed it--never."
A long silence followed; both were sunk in thought. At last the wife
looked up and said:
"I know what you are thinking, Edward."
Richards had the embarrassed look of a person who is caught.
"I am ashamed to confess it, Mary, but--"
"It's no matter, Edward, I was thinking the same question myself."
"I hope so. State it."
"You were thinking, if a body could only guess out WHAT THE REMARK WAS
that Goodson made to the stranger."
"It's perfectly true. I feel guilty and ashamed. And you?"
"I'm past it. Let us make a pallet here; we've got to stand watch till
the bank vault opens in the morning and admits the sack. . . Oh dear, oh
dear--if we hadn't made the mistake!"
The pallet was made, and Mary said:
"The open sesame--what could it have been? I do wonder what that remark
could have been. But come; we will get to bed now."
"And sleep?"
"No; think."
"Yes; think."
By this time the Coxes too had completed their spat and their
reconciliation, and were turning in--to think, to think, and toss, and
fret, and worry over what the remark could possibly have been which
Goodson made to the stranded derelict; that golden remark; that remark
worth forty thousand dollars, cash.
The reason that the village telegraph-office was open later than usual
that night was this: The foreman of Cox's paper was the local
representative of the Associated Press. One might say its honorary
representative, for it wasn't four times a year that he could furnish
thirty words that would be accepted. But this time it was different.
His despatch stating what he had caught got an instant answer:
"Send the whole thing--all the details--twelve hundred words."
A colossal order! The foreman filled the bill; and he was the proudest
man in the State. By breakfast-time the next morning the name of
Hadleyburg the Incorruptible was on every lip in America, from Montreal
to the Gulf, from the glaciers of Alaska to the orange-groves of Florida;
and millions and millions of people were discussing the stranger and his
money-sack, and wondering if the right man would be found, and hoping
some more news about the matter would come soon--right away.
II
Hadleyburg village woke up world-celebrated--astonished--happy--vain.
Vain beyond imagination. Its nineteen principal citizens and their wives
went about shaking hands with each other, and beaming, and smiling, and
congratulating, and saying THIS thing adds a new word to the
dictionary--HADLEYBURG, synonym for INCORRUPTIBLE--destined to live in
dictionaries for ever! And the minor and unimportant citizens and their
wives went around acting in much the same way. Everybody ran to the bank
to see the gold-sack; and before noon grieved and envious crowds began to
flock in from Brixton and all neighbouring towns; and that afternoon and
next day reporters began to arrive from everywhere to verify the sack and
its history and write the whole thing up anew, and make dashing free-hand
pictures of the sack, and of Richards's house, and the bank, and the
Presbyterian church, and the Baptist church, and the public square, and
the town-hall where the test would be applied and the money delivered;
and damnable portraits of the Richardses, and Pinkerton the banker, and
Cox, and the foreman, and Reverend Burgess, and the postmaster--and even
of Jack Halliday, who was the loafing, good-natured, no-account,
irreverent fisherman, hunter, boys' friend, stray-dogs' friend, typical
"Sam Lawson" of the town. The little mean, smirking, oily Pinkerton
showed the sack to all comers, and rubbed his sleek palms together
pleasantly, and enlarged upon the town's fine old reputation for honesty
and upon this wonderful endorsement of it, and hoped and believed that
the example would now spread far and wide over the American world, and be
epoch-making in the matter of moral regeneration. And so on, and so on.
By the end of a week things had quieted down again; the wild intoxication
of pride and joy had sobered to a soft, sweet, silent delight--a sort of
deep, nameless, unutterable content. All faces bore a look of peaceful,
holy happiness.
Then a change came. It was a gradual change; so gradual that its
beginnings were hardly noticed; maybe were not noticed at all, except by
Jack Halliday, who always noticed everything; and always made fun of it,
too, no matter what it was. He began to throw out chaffing remarks about
people not looking quite so happy as they did a day or two ago; and next
he claimed that the new aspect was deepening to positive sadness; next,
that it was taking on a sick look; and finally he said that everybody was
become so moody, thoughtful, and absent-minded that he could rob the
meanest man in town of a cent out of the bottom of his breeches pocket
and not disturb his reverie.
At this stage--or at about this stage--a saying like this was dropped at
bedtime--with a sigh, usually--by the head of each of the nineteen
principal households:
"Ah, what COULD have been the remark that Goodson made?"
And straightway--with a shudder--came this, from the man's wife:
"Oh, DON'T! What horrible thing are you mulling in your mind? Put it
away from you, for God's sake!"
But that question was wrung from those men again the next night--and got
the same retort. But weaker.
And the third night the men uttered the question yet again--with anguish,
and absently. This time--and the following night--the wives fidgeted
feebly, and tried to say something. But didn't.
And the night after that they found their tongues and responded
--longingly:
"Oh, if we COULD only guess!"
Halliday's comments grew daily more and more sparklingly disagreeable and
disparaging. He went diligently about, laughing at the town,
individually and in mass. But his laugh was the only one left in the
village: it fell upon a hollow and mournful vacancy and emptiness. Not
even a smile was findable anywhere. Halliday carried a cigar-box around
on a tripod, playing that it was a camera, and halted all passers and
aimed the thing and said "Ready!--now look pleasant, please," but not
even this capital joke could surprise the dreary faces into any
softening.
So three weeks passed--one week was left. It was Saturday evening after
supper. Instead of the aforetime Saturday-evening flutter and bustle and
shopping and larking, the streets were empty and desolate. Richards and
his old wife sat apart in their little parlour--miserable and thinking.
This was become their evening habit now: the life-long habit which had
preceded it, of reading, knitting, and contented chat, or receiving or
paying neighbourly calls, was dead and gone and forgotten, ages ago--two
or three weeks ago; nobody talked now, nobody read, nobody visited--the
whole village sat at home, sighing, worrying, silent. Trying to guess
out that remark.
The postman left a letter. Richards glanced listlessly at the
superscription and the post-mark--unfamiliar, both--and tossed the letter
on the table and resumed his might-have-beens and his hopeless dull
miseries where he had left them off. Two or three hours later his wife
got wearily up and was going away to bed without a good-night--custom
now--but she stopped near the letter and eyed it awhile with a dead
interest, then broke it open, and began to skim it over. Richards,
sitting there with his chair tilted back against the wall and his chin
between his knees, heard something fall. It was his wife. He sprang to
her side, but she cried out:
"Leave me alone, I am too happy. Read the letter--read it!"
He did. He devoured it, his brain reeling. The letter was from a
distant State, and it said:
"I am a stranger to you, but no matter: I have something to tell. I
have just arrived home from Mexico, and learned about that episode. Of
course you do not know who made that remark, but I know, and I am the
only person living who does know. It was GOODSON. I knew him well, many
years ago. I passed through your village that very night, and was his
guest till the midnight train came along. I overheard him make that
remark to the stranger in the dark--it was in Hale Alley. He and I
talked of it the rest of the way home, and while smoking in his house.
He mentioned many of your villagers in the course of his talk--most of
them in a very uncomplimentary way, but two or three favourably: among
these latter yourself. I say 'favourably'--nothing stronger. I remember
his saying he did not actually LIKE any person in the town--not one; but
that you--I THINK he said you--am almost sure--had done him a very great
service once, possibly without knowing the full value of it, and he
wished he had a fortune, he would leave it to you when he died, and a
curse apiece for the rest of the citizens. Now, then, if it was you that
did him that service, you are his legitimate heir, and entitled to the
sack of gold. I know that I can trust to your honour and honesty, for in
a citizen of Hadleyburg these virtues are an unfailing inheritance, and
so I am going to reveal to you the remark, well satisfied that if you are
not the right man you will seek and find the right one and see that poor
Goodson's debt of gratitude for the service referred to is paid. This is
the remark 'YOU ARE FAR FROM BEING A BAD MAN: GO, AND REFORM.'
"HOWARD L. STEPHENSON."
"Oh, Edward, the money is ours, and I am so grateful, OH, so
grateful,--kiss me, dear, it's for ever since we kissed--and we needed it
so--the money--and now you are free of Pinkerton and his bank, and
nobody's slave any more; it seems to me I could fly for joy."
It was a happy half-hour that the couple spent there on the settee
caressing each other; it was the old days come again--days that had begun
with their courtship and lasted without a break till the stranger brought
the deadly money. By-and-by the wife said:
"Oh, Edward, how lucky it was you did him that grand service, poor
Goodson! I never liked him, but I love him now. And it was fine and
beautiful of you never to mention it or brag about it." Then, with a
touch of reproach, "But you ought to have told ME, Edward, you ought to
have told your wife, you know."
"Well, I--er--well, Mary, you see--"
"Now stop hemming and hawing, and tell me about it, Edward. I always
loved you, and now I'm proud of you. Everybody believes there was only
one good generous soul in this village, and now it turns out that
you--Edward, why don't you tell me?"
"Well--er--er--Why, Mary, I can't!"
"You CAN'T? WHY can't you?"
"You see, he--well, he--he made me promise I wouldn't."
The wife looked him over, and said, very slowly:
"Made--you--promise? Edward, what do you tell me that for?"
"Mary, do you think I would lie?"
She was troubled and silent for a moment, then she laid her hand within
his and said:
"No . . . no. We have wandered far enough from our bearings--God spare
us that! In all your life you have never uttered a lie. But now--now
that the foundations of things seem to be crumbling from under us,
we--we--" She lost her voice for a moment, then said, brokenly, "Lead us
not into temptation. . . I think you made the promise, Edward. Let it
rest so. Let us keep away from that ground. Now--that is all gone by;
let us be happy again; it is no time for clouds."
Edward found it something of an effort to comply, for his mind kept
wandering--trying to remember what the service was that he had done
Goodson.
The couple lay awake the most of the night, Mary happy and busy, Edward
busy, but not so happy. Mary was planning what she would do with the
money. Edward was trying to recall that service. At first his
conscience was sore on account of the lie he had told Mary--if it was a
lie. After much reflection--suppose it WAS a lie? What then? Was it
such a great matter? Aren't we always ACTING lies? Then why not tell
them? Look at Mary--look what she had done. While he was hurrying off on
his honest errand, what was she doing? Lamenting because the papers
hadn't been destroyed and the money kept. Is theft better than lying?
THAT point lost its sting--the lie dropped into the background and left
comfort behind it. The next point came to the front: HAD he rendered
that service? Well, here was Goodson's own evidence as reported in
Stephenson's letter; there could be no better evidence than that--it was
even PROOF that he had rendered it. Of course. So that point was
settled. . . No, not quite. He recalled with a wince that this unknown
Mr. Stephenson was just a trifle unsure as to whether the performer of it
was Richards or some other--and, oh dear, he had put Richards on his
honour! He must himself decide whither that money must go--and Mr.
Stephenson was not doubting that if he was the wrong man he would go
honourably and find the right one. Oh, it was odious to put a man in
such a situation--ah, why couldn't Stephenson have left out that doubt?
What did he want to intrude that for?
Further reflection. How did it happen that RICHARDS'S name remained in
Stephenson's mind as indicating the right man, and not some other man's
name? That looked good. Yes, that looked very good. In fact it went on
looking better and better, straight along--until by-and-by it grew into
positive PROOF. And then Richards put the matter at once out of his
mind, for he had a private instinct that a proof once established is
better left so.
He was feeling reasonably comfortable now, but there was still one other
detail that kept pushing itself on his notice: of course he had done
that service--that was settled; but what WAS that service? He must recall
it--he would not go to sleep till he had recalled it; it would make his
peace of mind perfect. And so he thought and thought. He thought of a
dozen things--possible services, even probable services--but none of them
seemed adequate, none of them seemed large enough, none of them seemed
worth the money--worth the fortune Goodson had wished he could leave in
his will. And besides, he couldn't remember having done them, anyway.
Now, then--now, then--what KIND of a service would it be that would make
a man so inordinately grateful? Ah--the saving of his soul! That must
be it. Yes, he could remember, now, how he once set himself the task of
converting Goodson, and laboured at it as much as--he was going to say
three months; but upon closer examination it shrunk to a month, then to a
week, then to a day, then to nothing. Yes, he remembered now, and with
unwelcome vividness, that Goodson had told him to go to thunder and mind
his own business--HE wasn't hankering to follow Hadleyburg to heaven!
So that solution was a failure--he hadn't saved Goodson's soul. Richards
was discouraged. Then after a little came another idea: had he saved
Goodson's property? No, that wouldn't do--he hadn't any. His life?
That is it! Of course. Why, he might have thought of it before. This
time he was on the right track, sure. His imagination-mill was hard at
work in a minute, now.
Thereafter, during a stretch of two exhausting hours, he was busy saving
Goodson's life. He saved it in all kinds of difficult and perilous ways.
In every case he got it saved satisfactorily up to a certain point; then,
just as he was beginning to get well persuaded that it had really
happened, a troublesome detail would turn up which made the whole thing
impossible. As in the matter of drowning, for instance. In that case he
had swum out and tugged Goodson ashore in an unconscious state with a
great crowd looking on and applauding, but when he had got it all thought
out and was just beginning to remember all about it, a whole swarm of
disqualifying details arrived on the ground: the town would have known
of the circumstance, Mary would have known of it, it would glare like a
limelight in his own memory instead of being an inconspicuous service
which he had possibly rendered "without knowing its full value." And at
this point he remembered that he couldn't swim anyway.
Ah--THERE was a point which he had been overlooking from the start: it
had to be a service which he had rendered "possibly without knowing the
full value of it." Why, really, that ought to be an easy hunt--much
easier than those others. And sure enough, by-and-by he found it.
Goodson, years and years ago, came near marrying a very sweet and pretty
girl, named Nancy Hewitt, but in some way or other the match had been
broken off; the girl died, Goodson remained a bachelor, and by-and-by
became a soured one and a frank despiser of the human species. Soon
after the girl's death the village found out, or thought it had found
out, that she carried a spoonful of negro blood in her veins. Richards
worked at these details a good while, and in the end he thought he
remembered things concerning them which must have gotten mislaid in his
memory through long neglect. He seemed to dimly remember that it was HE
that found out about the negro blood; that it was he that told the
village; that the village told Goodson where they got it; that he thus
saved Goodson from marrying the tainted girl; that he had done him this
great service "without knowing the full value of it," in fact without
knowing that he WAS doing it; but that Goodson knew the value of it, and
what a narrow escape he had had, and so went to his grave grateful to his
benefactor and wishing he had a fortune to leave him. It was all clear
and simple, now, and the more he went over it the more luminous and
certain it grew; and at last, when he nestled to sleep, satisfied and
happy, he remembered the whole thing just as if it had been yesterday.
In fact, he dimly remembered Goodson's TELLING him his gratitude once.
Meantime Mary had spent six thousand dollars on a new house for herself
and a pair of slippers for her pastor, and then had fallen peacefully to
rest.
That same Saturday evening the postman had delivered a letter to each of
the other principal citizens--nineteen letters in all. No two of the
envelopes were alike, and no two of the superscriptions were in the same
hand, but the letters inside were just like each other in every detail
but one. They were exact copies of the letter received by
Richards--handwriting and all--and were all signed by Stephenson, but in
place of Richards's name each receiver's own name appeared.
All night long eighteen principal citizens did what their caste-brother
Richards was doing at the same time--they put in their energies trying to
remember what notable service it was that they had unconsciously done
Barclay Goodson. In no case was it a holiday job; still they succeeded.
And while they were at this work, which was difficult, their wives put in
the night spending the money, which was easy. During that one night the
nineteen wives spent an average of seven thousand dollars each out of the
forty thousand in the sack--a hundred and thirty-three thousand
altogether.
Next day there was a surprise for Jack Halliday. He noticed that the
faces of the nineteen chief citizens and their wives bore that expression
of peaceful and holy happiness again. He could not understand it,
neither was he able to invent any remarks about it that could damage it
or disturb it. And so it was his turn to be dissatisfied with life. His
private guesses at the reasons for the happiness failed in all instances,
upon examination. When he met Mrs. Wilcox and noticed the placid ecstasy
in her face, he said to himself, "Her cat has had kittens"--and went and
asked the cook; it was not so, the cook had detected the happiness, but
did not know the cause. When Halliday found the duplicate ecstasy in the
face of "Shadbelly" Billson (village nickname), he was sure some
neighbour of Billson's had broken his leg, but inquiry showed that this
had not happened. The subdued ecstasy in Gregory Yates's face could mean
but one thing--he was a mother-in-law short; it was another mistake.
"And Pinkerton--Pinkerton--he has collected ten cents that he thought he
was going to lose." And so on, and so on. In some cases the guesses had
to remain in doubt, in the others they proved distinct errors. In the
end Halliday said to himself, "Anyway it roots up that there's nineteen
Hadleyburg families temporarily in heaven: I don't know how it happened;
I only know Providence is off duty to-day."
An architect and builder from the next State had lately ventured to set
up a small business in this unpromising village, and his sign had now
been hanging out a week. Not a customer yet; he was a discouraged man,
and sorry he had come. But his weather changed suddenly now. First one
and then another chief citizen's wife said to him privately:
"Come to my house Monday week--but say nothing about it for the present.
We think of building."
He got eleven invitations that day. That night he wrote his daughter and
broke off her match with her student. He said she could marry a mile
higher than that.
Pinkerton the banker and two or three other well-to-do men planned
country-seats--but waited. That kind don't count their chickens until
they are hatched.
The Wilsons devised a grand new thing--a fancy-dress ball. They made no
actual promises, but told all their acquaintanceship in confidence that
they were thinking the matter over and thought they should give it--"and
if we do, you will be invited, of course." People were surprised, and
said, one to another, "Why, they are crazy, those poor Wilsons, they
can't afford it." Several among the nineteen said privately to their
husbands, "It is a good idea, we will keep still till their cheap thing
is over, then WE will give one that will make it sick."
The days drifted along, and the bill of future squanderings rose higher
and higher, wilder and wilder, more and more foolish and reckless. It
began to look as if every member of the nineteen would not only spend his
whole forty thousand dollars before receiving-day, but be actually in
debt by the time he got the money. In some cases light-headed people did
not stop with planning to spend, they really spent--on credit. They
bought land, mortgages, farms, speculative stocks, fine clothes, horses,
and various other things, paid down the bonus, and made themselves liable
for the rest--at ten days. Presently the sober second thought came, and
Halliday noticed that a ghastly anxiety was beginning to show up in a
good many faces. Again he was puzzled, and didn't know what to make of
it. "The Wilcox kittens aren't dead, for they weren't born; nobody's
broken a leg; there's no shrinkage in mother-in-laws; NOTHING has
happened--it is an insolvable mystery."
There was another puzzled man, too--the Rev. Mr. Burgess. For days,
wherever he went, people seemed to follow him or to be watching out for
him; and if he ever found himself in a retired spot, a member of the
nineteen would be sure to appear, thrust an envelope privately into his
hand, whisper "To be opened at the town-hall Friday evening," then vanish
away like a guilty thing. He was expecting that there might be one
claimant for the sack--doubtful, however, Goodson being dead--but it
never occurred to him that all this crowd might be claimants. When the
great Friday came at last, he found that he had nineteen envelopes.
III
The town-hall had never looked finer. The platform at the end of it was
backed by a showy draping of flags; at intervals along the walls were
festoons of flags; the gallery fronts were clothed in flags; the
supporting columns were swathed in flags; all this was to impress the
stranger, for he would be there in considerable force, and in a large
degree he would be connected with the press. The house was full. The
412 fixed seats were occupied; also the 68 extra chairs which had been
packed into the aisles; the steps of the platform were occupied; some
distinguished strangers were given seats on the platform; at the
horseshoe of tables which fenced the front and sides of the platform sat
a strong force of special correspondents who had come from everywhere.
It was the best-dressed house the town had ever produced. There were
some tolerably expensive toilets there, and in several cases the ladies
who wore them had the look of being unfamiliar with that kind of clothes.
At least the town thought they had that look, but the notion could have
arisen from the town's knowledge of the fact that these ladies had never
inhabited such clothes before.
The gold-sack stood on a little table at the front of the platform where
all the house could see it. The bulk of the house gazed at it with a
burning interest, a mouth-watering interest, a wistful and pathetic
interest; a minority of nineteen couples gazed at it tenderly, lovingly,
proprietarily, and the male half of this minority kept saying over to
themselves the moving little impromptu speeches of thankfulness for the
audience's applause and congratulations which they were presently going
to get up and deliver. Every now and then one of these got a piece of
paper out of his vest pocket and privately glanced at it to refresh his
memory.
Of course there was a buzz of conversation going on--there always is; but
at last, when the Rev. Mr. Burgess rose and laid his hand on the sack, he
could hear his microbes gnaw, the place was so still. He related the
curious history of the sack, then went on to speak in warm terms of
Hadleyburg's old and well-earned reputation for spotless honesty, and of
the town's just pride in this reputation. He said that this reputation
was a treasure of priceless value; that under Providence its value had
now become inestimably enhanced, for the recent episode had spread this
fame far and wide, and thus had focussed the eyes of the American world
upon this village, and made its name for all time, as he hoped and
believed, a synonym for commercial incorruptibility. [Applause.] "And
who is to be the guardian of this noble fame--the community as a whole?
No! The responsibility is individual, not communal. From this day forth
each and every one of you is in his own person its special guardian, and
individually responsible that no harm shall come to it. Do you--does
each of you--accept this great trust? [Tumultuous assent.] Then all is
well. Transmit it to your children and to your children's children.
To-day your purity is beyond reproach--see to it that it shall remain so.
To-day there is not a person in your community who could be beguiled to
touch a penny not his own--see to it that you abide in this grace. ["We
will! we will!"] This is not the place to make comparisons between
ourselves and other communities--some of them ungracious towards us; they
have their ways, we have ours; let us be content. [Applause.] I am
done. Under my hand, my friends, rests a stranger's eloquent recognition
of what we are; through him the world will always henceforth know what we
are. We do not know who he is, but in your name I utter your gratitude,
and ask you to raise your voices in indorsement."
The house rose in a body and made the walls quake with the thunders of
its thankfulness for the space of a long minute. Then it sat down, and
Mr. Burgess took an envelope out of his pocket. The house held its
breath while he slit the envelope open and took from it a slip of paper.
He read its contents--slowly and impressively--the audience listening
with tranced attention to this magic document, each of whose words stood
for an ingot of gold:
"'The remark which I made to the distressed stranger was this: "You are
very far from being a bad man; go, and reform."' Then he continued:--'We
shall know in a moment now whether the remark here quoted corresponds
with the one concealed in the sack; and if that shall prove to be so--and
it undoubtedly will--this sack of gold belongs to a fellow-citizen who
will henceforth stand before the nation as the symbol of the special
virtue which has made our town famous throughout the land--Mr. Billson!'"
The house had gotten itself all ready to burst into the proper tornado of
applause; but instead of doing it, it seemed stricken with a paralysis;
there was a deep hush for a moment or two, then a wave of whispered
murmurs swept the place--of about this tenor: "BILLSON! oh, come, this is
TOO thin! Twenty dollars to a stranger--or ANYBODY--BILLSON! Tell it
to the marines!" And now at this point the house caught its breath all
of a sudden in a new access of astonishment, for it discovered that
whereas in one part of the hall Deacon Billson was standing up with his
head weekly bowed, in another part of it Lawyer Wilson was doing the
same. There was a wondering silence now for a while. Everybody was
puzzled, and nineteen couples were surprised and indignant.
Billson and Wilson turned and stared at each other. Billson asked,
bitingly:
"Why do YOU rise, Mr. Wilson?"
"Because I have a right to. Perhaps you will be good enough to explain
to the house why YOU rise."
"With great pleasure. Because I wrote that paper."
"It is an impudent falsity! I wrote it myself."
It was Burgess's turn to be paralysed. He stood looking vacantly at
first one of the men and then the other, and did not seem to know what to
do. The house was stupefied. Lawyer Wilson spoke up now, and said:
"I ask the Chair to read the name signed to that paper."
That brought the Chair to itself, and it read out the name:
"John Wharton BILLSON."
"There!" shouted Billson, "what have you got to say for yourself now?
And what kind of apology are you going to make to me and to this insulted
house for the imposture which you have attempted to play here?"
"No apologies are due, sir; and as for the rest of it, I publicly charge
you with pilfering my note from Mr. Burgess and substituting a copy of it
signed with your own name. There is no other way by which you could have
gotten hold of the test-remark; I alone, of living men, possessed the
secret of its wording."
There was likely to be a scandalous state of things if this went on;
everybody noticed with distress that the shorthand scribes were
scribbling like mad; many people were crying "Chair, chair! Order!
order!" Burgess rapped with his gavel, and said:
"Let us not forget the proprieties due. There has evidently been a
mistake somewhere, but surely that is all. If Mr. Wilson gave me an
envelope--and I remember now that he did--I still have it."
He took one out of his pocket, opened it, glanced at it, looked surprised
and worried, and stood silent a few moments. Then he waved his hand in a
wandering and mechanical way, and made an effort or two to say something,
then gave it up, despondently. Several voices cried out:
"Read it! read it! What is it?"
So he began, in a dazed and sleep-walker fashion:
"'The remark which I made to the unhappy stranger was this: "You are far
from being a bad man. [The house gazed at him marvelling.] Go, and
reform."'" [Murmurs: "Amazing! what can this mean?"] "This one," said
the Chair, "is signed Thurlow G. Wilson."
"There!" cried Wilson, "I reckon that settles it! I knew perfectly well
my note was purloined."
"Purloined!" retorted Billson. "I'll let you know that neither you nor
any man of your kidney must venture to--"
The Chair: "Order, gentlemen, order! Take your seats, both of you,
please."
They obeyed, shaking their heads and grumbling angrily. The house was
profoundly puzzled; it did not know what to do with this curious
emergency. Presently Thompson got up. Thompson was the hatter. He
would have liked to be a Nineteener; but such was not for him; his stock
of hats was not considerable enough for the position. He said:
"Mr. Chairman, if I may be permitted to make a suggestion, can both of
these gentlemen be right? I put it to you, sir, can both have happened
to say the very same words to the stranger? It seems to me--"
The tanner got up and interrupted him. The tanner was a disgruntled man;
he believed himself entitled to be a Nineteener, but he couldn't get
recognition. It made him a little unpleasant in his ways and speech.
Said he:
"Sho, THAT'S not the point! THAT could happen--twice in a hundred
years--but not the other thing. NEITHER of them gave the twenty
dollars!" [A ripple of applause.]
Billson. "I did!"
Wilson. "I did!"
Then each accused the other of pilfering.
The Chair. "Order! Sit down, if you please--both of you. Neither of
the notes has been out of my possession at any moment."
A Voice. "Good--that settles THAT!"
The Tanner. "Mr. Chairman, one thing is now plain: one of these men has
been eavesdropping under the other one's bed, and filching family
secrets. If it is not unparliamentary to suggest it, I will remark that
both are equal to it. [The Chair. "Order! order!"] I withdraw the
remark, sir, and will confine myself to suggesting that IF one of them
has overheard the other reveal the test-remark to his wife, we shall
catch him now."
A Voice. "How?"
The Tanner. "Easily. The two have not quoted the remark in exactly the
same words. You would have noticed that, if there hadn't been a
considerable stretch of time and an exciting quarrel inserted between the
two readings."
A Voice. "Name the difference."
The Tanner. "The word VERY is in Billson's note, and not in the other."
Many Voices. "That's so--he's right!"
The Tanner. "And so, if the Chair will examine the test-remark in the
sack, we shall know which of these two frauds--[The Chair.
"Order!"]--which of these two adventurers--[The Chair. "Order!
order!"]--which of these two gentlemen--[laughter and applause]--is
entitled to wear the belt as being the first dishonest blatherskite ever
bred in this town--which he has dishonoured, and which will be a sultry
place for him from now out!" [Vigorous applause.]
Many Voices. "Open it!--open the sack!"
Mr. Burgess made a slit in the sack, slid his hand in, and brought out an
envelope. In it were a couple of folded notes. He said:
"One of these is marked, 'Not to be examined until all written
communications which have been addressed to the Chair--if any--shall have
been read.' The other is marked 'THE TEST.' Allow me. It is worded--to
wit:
"'I do not require that the first half of the remark which was made to me
by my benefactor shall be quoted with exactness, for it was not striking,
and could be forgotten; but its closing fifteen words are quite striking,
and I think easily rememberable; unless THESE shall be accurately
reproduced, let the applicant be regarded as an impostor. My benefactor
began by saying he seldom gave advice to anyone, but that it always bore
the hallmark of high value when he did give it. Then he said this--and
it has never faded from my memory: 'YOU ARE FAR FROM BEING A BAD MAN--'"
Fifty Voices. "That settles it--the money's Wilson's! Wilson! Wilson!
Speech! Speech!"
People jumped up and crowded around Wilson, wringing his hand and
congratulating fervently--meantime the Chair was hammering with the gavel
and shouting:
"Order, gentlemen! Order! Order! Let me finish reading, please." When
quiet was restored, the reading was resumed--as follows:
"'GO, AND REFORM--OR, MARK MY WORDS--SOME DAY, FOR YOUR SINS YOU WILL DIE
AND GO TO HELL OR HADLEYBURG--TRY AND MAKE IT THE FORMER.'"
A ghastly silence followed. First an angry cloud began to settle darkly
upon the faces of the citizenship; after a pause the cloud began to rise,
and a tickled expression tried to take its place; tried so hard that it
was only kept under with great and painful difficulty; the reporters, the
Brixtonites, and other strangers bent their heads down and shielded their
faces with their hands, and managed to hold in by main strength and
heroic courtesy. At this most inopportune time burst upon the stillness
the roar of a solitary voice--Jack Halliday's:
"THAT'S got the hall-mark on it!"
Then the house let go, strangers and all. Even Mr. Burgess's gravity
broke down presently, then the audience considered itself officially
absolved from all restraint, and it made the most of its privilege. It
was a good long laugh, and a tempestuously wholehearted one, but it
ceased at last--long enough for Mr. Burgess to try to resume, and for the
people to get their eyes partially wiped; then it broke out again, and
afterward yet again; then at last Burgess was able to get out these
serious words:
"It is useless to try to disguise the fact--we find ourselves in the
presence of a matter of grave import. It involves the honour of your
town--it strikes at the town's good name. The difference of a single
word between the test-remarks offered by Mr. Wilson and Mr. Billson was
itself a serious thing, since it indicated that one or the other of these
gentlemen had committed a theft--"
The two men were sitting limp, nerveless, crushed; but at these words
both were electrified into movement, and started to get up.
"Sit down!" said the Chair, sharply, and they obeyed. "That, as I have
said, was a serious thing. And it was--but for only one of them. But
the matter has become graver; for the honour of BOTH is now in formidable
peril. Shall I go even further, and say in inextricable peril? BOTH
left out the crucial fifteen words." He paused. During several moments
he allowed the pervading stillness to gather and deepen its impressive
effects, then added: "There would seem to be but one way whereby this
could happen. I ask these gentlemen--Was there COLLUSION?--AGREEMENT?"
A low murmur sifted through the house; its import was, "He's got them
both."
Billson was not used to emergencies; he sat in a helpless collapse. But
Wilson was a lawyer. He struggled to his feet, pale and worried, and
said:
"I ask the indulgence of the house while I explain this most painful
matter. I am sorry to say what I am about to say, since it must inflict
irreparable injury upon Mr. Billson, whom I have always esteemed and
respected until now, and in whose invulnerability to temptation I
entirely believed--as did you all. But for the preservation of my own
honour I must speak--and with frankness. I confess with shame--and I now
beseech your pardon for it--that I said to the ruined stranger all of the
words contained in the test-remark, including the disparaging fifteen.
[Sensation.] When the late publication was made I recalled them, and I
resolved to claim the sack of coin, for by every right I was entitled to
it. Now I will ask you to consider this point, and weigh it well; that
stranger's gratitude to me that night knew no bounds; he said himself
that he could find no words for it that were adequate, and that if he
should ever be able he would repay me a thousandfold. Now, then, I ask
you this; could I expect--could I believe--could I even remotely imagine
--that, feeling as he did, he would do so ungrateful a thing as to add
those quite unnecessary fifteen words to his test?--set a trap for
me?--expose me as a slanderer of my own town before my own people
assembled in a public hall? It was preposterous; it was impossible. His
test would contain only the kindly opening clause of my remark. Of that I
had no shadow of doubt. You would have thought as I did. You would not
have expected a base betrayal from one whom you had befriended and
against whom you had committed no offence. And so with perfect
confidence, perfect trust, I wrote on a piece of paper the opening
words--ending with "Go, and reform,"--and signed it. When I was about to
put it in an envelope I was called into my back office, and without
thinking I left the paper lying open on my desk." He stopped, turned his
head slowly toward Billson, waited a moment, then added: "I ask you to
note this; when I returned, a little latter, Mr. Billson was retiring by
my street door." [Sensation.]
In a moment Billson was on his feet and shouting:
"It's a lie! It's an infamous lie!"
The Chair. "Be seated, sir! Mr. Wilson has the floor."
Billson's friends pulled him into his seat and quieted him, and Wilson
went on:
"Those are the simple facts. My note was now lying in a different place
on the table from where I had left it. I noticed that, but attached no
importance to it, thinking a draught had blown it there. That Mr. Billson
would read a private paper was a thing which could not occur to me; he
was an honourable man, and he would be above that. If you will allow me
to say it, I think his extra word 'VERY' stands explained: it is
attributable to a defect of memory. I was the only man in the world who
could furnish here any detail of the test-mark--by HONOURABLE means. I
have finished."
There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the
mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an
audience not practised in the tricks and delusions of oratory. Wilson sat
down victorious. The house submerged him in tides of approving applause;
friends swarmed to him and shook him by the hand and congratulated him,
and Billson was shouted down and not allowed to say a word. The Chair
hammered and hammered with its gavel, and kept shouting:
"But let us proceed, gentlemen, let us proceed!"
At last there was a measurable degree of quiet, and the hatter said:
"But what is there to proceed with, sir, but to deliver the money?"
Voices. "That's it! That's it! Come forward, Wilson!"
The Hatter. "I move three cheers for Mr. Wilson, Symbol of the special
virtue which--"
The cheers burst forth before he could finish; and in the midst of
them--and in the midst of the clamour of the gavel also--some enthusiasts
mounted Wilson on a big friend's shoulder and were going to fetch him in
triumph to the platform. The Chair's voice now rose above the noise:
"Order! To your places! You forget that there is still a document to be
read." When quiet had been restored he took up the document, and was
going to read it, but laid it down again saying "I forgot; this is not to
be read until all written communications received by me have first been
read." He took an envelope out of his pocket, removed its enclosure,
glanced at it--seemed astonished--held it out and gazed at it--stared at
it.
Twenty or thirty voices cried out:
"What is it? Read it! read it!"
And he did--slowly, and wondering:
"'The remark which I made to the stranger--[Voices. "Hello! how's
this?"]--was this: "You are far from being a bad man. [Voices. "Great
Scott!"] Go, and reform."' [Voice. "Oh, saw my leg off!"] Signed by Mr.
Pinkerton the banker."
The pandemonium of delight which turned itself loose now was of a sort to
make the judicious weep. Those whose withers were unwrung laughed till
the tears ran down; the reporters, in throes of laughter, set down
disordered pot-hooks which would never in the world be decipherable; and
a sleeping dog jumped up scared out of its wits, and barked itself crazy
at the turmoil. All manner of cries were scattered through the din:
"We're getting rich--TWO Symbols of Incorruptibility!--without counting
Billson!" "THREE!--count Shadbelly in--we can't have too many!" "All
right--Billson's elected!" "Alas, poor Wilson! victim of TWO thieves!"
A Powerful Voice. "Silence! The Chair's fished up something more out of
its pocket."
Voices. "Hurrah! Is it something fresh? Read it! read! read!"
The Chair [reading]. "'The remark which I made,' etc. 'You are far from
being a bad man. Go,' etc. Signed, 'Gregory Yates.'"
Tornado of Voices. "Four Symbols!" "'Rah for Yates!" "Fish again!"
The house was in a roaring humour now, and ready to get all the fun out
of the occasion that might be in it. Several Nineteeners, looking pale
and distressed, got up and began to work their way towards the aisles,
but a score of shouts went up:
"The doors, the doors--close the doors; no Incorruptible shall leave this
place! Sit down, everybody!" The mandate was obeyed.
"Fish again! Read! read!"
The Chair fished again, and once more the familiar words began to fall
from its lips--"'You are far from being a bad man--'"
"Name! name! What's his name?"
"'L. Ingoldsby Sargent.'"
"Five elected! Pile up the Symbols! Go on, go on!"
"'You are far from being a bad--'"
"Name! name!"
"'Nicholas Whitworth.'"
"Hooray! hooray! it's a symbolical day!"
Somebody wailed in, and began to sing this rhyme (leaving out "it's") to
the lovely "Mikado" tune of "When a man's afraid of a beautiful maid;"
the audience joined in, with joy; then, just in time, somebody
contributed another line--
"And don't you this forget--"
The house roared it out. A third line was at once furnished--
"Corruptibles far from Hadleyburg are--"
The house roared that one too. As the last note died, Jack Halliday's
voice rose high and clear, freighted with a final line--
"But the Symbols are here, you bet!"
That was sung, with booming enthusiasm. Then the happy house started in
at the beginning and sang the four lines through twice, with immense
swing and dash, and finished up with a crashing three-times-three and a
tiger for "Hadleyburg the Incorruptible and all Symbols of it which we
shall find worthy to receive the hall-mark to-night."
Then the shoutings at the Chair began again, all over the place:
"Go on! go on! Read! read some more! Read all you've got!"
"That's it--go on! We are winning eternal celebrity!"
A dozen men got up now and began to protest. They said that this farce
was the work of some abandoned joker, and was an insult to the whole
community. Without a doubt these signatures were all forgeries--
"Sit down! sit down! Shut up! You are confessing. We'll find your
names in the lot."
"Mr. Chairman, how many of those envelopes have you got?"
The Chair counted.
"Together with those that have been already examined, there are
nineteen."
A storm of derisive applause broke out.
"Perhaps they all contain the secret. I move that you open them all and
read every signature that is attached to a note of that sort--and read
also the first eight words of the note."
"Second the motion!"
It was put and carried--uproariously. Then poor old Richards got up, and
his wife rose and stood at his side. Her head was bent down, so that
none might see that she was crying. Her husband gave her his arm, and so
supporting her, he began to speak in a quavering voice:
"My friends, you have known us two--Mary and me--all our lives, and I
think you have liked us and respected us--"
The Chair interrupted him:
"Allow me. It is quite true--that which you are saying, Mr. Richards;
this town DOES know you two; it DOES like you; it DOES respect you;
more--it honours you and LOVES you--"
Halliday's voice rang out:
"That's the hall-marked truth, too! If the Chair is right, let the house
speak up and say it. Rise! Now, then--hip! hip! hip!--all together!"
The house rose in mass, faced toward the old couple eagerly, filled the
air with a snow-storm of waving handkerchiefs, and delivered the cheers
with all its affectionate heart.
The Chair then continued:
"What I was going to say is this: We know your good heart, Mr. Richards,
but this is not a time for the exercise of charity toward offenders.
[Shouts of "Right! right!"] I see your generous purpose in your face,
but I cannot allow you to plead for these men--"
"But I was going to--"
"Please take your seat, Mr. Richards. We must examine the rest of these
notes--simple fairness to the men who have already been exposed requires
this. As soon as that has been done--I give you my word for this--you
shall be heard."
Many voices. "Right!--the Chair is right--no interruption can be
permitted at this stage! Go on!--the names! the names!--according to the
terms of the motion!"
The old couple sat reluctantly down, and the husband whispered to the
wife, "It is pitifully hard to have to wait; the shame will be greater
than ever when they find we were only going to plead for OURSELVES."
Straightway the jollity broke loose again with the reading of the names.
"'You are far from being a bad man--' Signature, 'Robert J. Titmarsh.'"
'"You are far from being a bad man--' Signature, 'Eliphalet Weeks.'"
"'You are far from being a bad man--' Signature, 'Oscar B. Wilder.'"
At this point the house lit upon the idea of taking the eight words out
of the Chairman's hands. He was not unthankful for that. Thenceforward
he held up each note in its turn and waited. The house droned out the
eight words in a massed and measured and musical deep volume of sound
(with a daringly close resemblance to a well-known church chant)--"You
are f-a-r from being a b-a-a-a-d man." Then the Chair said, "Signature,
'Archibald Wilcox.'" And so on, and so on, name after name, and
everybody had an increasingly and gloriously good time except the
wretched Nineteen. Now and then, when a particularly shining name was
called, the house made the Chair wait while it chanted the whole of the
test-remark from the beginning to the closing words, "And go to hell or
Hadleyburg--try and make it the for-or-m-e-r!" and in these special
cases they added a grand and agonised and imposing "A-a-a-a-MEN!"
The list dwindled, dwindled, dwindled, poor old Richards keeping tally of
the count, wincing when a name resembling his own was pronounced, and
waiting in miserable suspense for the time to come when it would be his
humiliating privilege to rise with Mary and finish his plea, which he was
intending to word thus: ". . . for until now we have never done any
wrong thing, but have gone our humble way unreproached. We are very
poor, we are old, and, have no chick nor child to help us; we were sorely
tempted, and we fell. It was my purpose when I got up before to make
confession and beg that my name might not be read out in this public
place, for it seemed to us that we could not bear it; but I was
prevented. It was just; it was our place to suffer with the rest. It
has been hard for us. It is the first time we have ever heard our name
fall from any one's lips--sullied. Be merciful--for the sake or the
better days; make our shame as light to bear as in your charity you can."
At this point in his reverie Mary nudged him, perceiving that his mind
was absent. The house was chanting, "You are f-a-r," etc.
"Be ready," Mary whispered. "Your name comes now; he has read eighteen."
The chant ended.
"Next! next! next!" came volleying from all over the house.
Burgess put his hand into his pocket. The old couple, trembling, began
to rise. Burgess fumbled a moment, then said:
"I find I have read them all."
Faint with joy and surprise, the couple sank into their seats, and Mary
whispered:
"Oh, bless God, we are saved!--he has lost ours--I wouldn't give this for
a hundred of those sacks!"
The house burst out with its "Mikado" travesty, and sang it three times
with ever-increasing enthusiasm, rising to its feet when it reached for
the third time the closing line--
"But the Symbols are here, you bet!"
and finishing up with cheers and a tiger for "Hadleyburg purity and our
eighteen immortal representatives of it."
Then Wingate, the saddler, got up and proposed cheers "for the cleanest
man in town, the one solitary important citizen in it who didn't try to
steal that money--Edward Richards."
They were given with great and moving heartiness; then somebody proposed
that "Richards be elected sole Guardian and Symbol of the now Sacred
Hadleyburg Tradition, with power and right to stand up and look the whole
sarcastic world in the face."
Passed, by acclamation; then they sang the "Mikado" again, and ended it
with--
"And there's ONE Symbol left, you bet!"
There was a pause; then--
A Voice. "Now, then, who's to get the sack?"
The Tanner (with bitter sarcasm). "That's easy. The money has to be
divided among the eighteen Incorruptibles. They gave the suffering
stranger twenty dollars apiece--and that remark--each in his turn--it
took twenty-two minutes for the procession to move past. Staked the
stranger--total contribution, $360. All they want is just the loan
back--and interest--forty thousand dollars altogether."
Many Voices [derisively.] "That's it! Divvy! divvy! Be kind to the
poor--don't keep them waiting!"
The Chair. "Order! I now offer the stranger's remaining document. It
says: 'If no claimant shall appear [grand chorus of groans], I desire
that you open the sack and count out the money to the principal citizens
of your town, they to take it in trust [Cries of "Oh! Oh! Oh!"], and use
it in such ways as to them shall seem best for the propagation and
preservation of your community's noble reputation for incorruptible
honesty [more cries]--a reputation to which their names and their efforts
will add a new and far-reaching lustre." [Enthusiastic outburst of
sarcastic applause.] That seems to be all. No--here is a postscript:
"'P.S.--CITIZENS OF HADLEYBURG: There IS no test-remark--nobody made
one. [Great sensation.] There wasn't any pauper stranger, nor any
twenty-dollar contribution, nor any accompanying benediction and
compliment--these are all inventions. [General buzz and hum of
astonishment and delight.] Allow me to tell my story--it will take but a
word or two. I passed through your town at a certain time, and received
a deep offence which I had not earned. Any other man would have been
content to kill one or two of you and call it square, but to me that
would have been a trivial revenge, and inadequate; for the dead do not
SUFFER. Besides I could not kill you all--and, anyway, made as I am, even
that would not have satisfied me. I wanted to damage every man in the
place, and every woman--and not in their bodies or in their estate, but
in their vanity--the place where feeble and foolish people are most
vulnerable. So I disguised myself and came back and studied you. You
were easy game. You had an old and lofty reputation for honesty, and
naturally you were proud of it--it was your treasure of treasures, the
very apple of your eye. As soon as I found out that you carefully and
vigilantly kept yourselves and your children OUT OF TEMPTATION, I knew
how to proceed. Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak
things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire. I laid a plan,
and gathered a list of names. My project was to corrupt Hadleyburg the
Incorruptible. My idea was to make liars and thieves of nearly half a
hundred smirchless men and women who had never in their lives uttered a
lie or stolen a penny. I was afraid of Goodson. He was neither born nor
reared in Hadleyburg. I was afraid that if I started to operate my
scheme by getting my letter laid before you, you would say to yourselves,
'Goodson is the only man among us who would give away twenty dollars to a
poor devil'--and then you might not bite at my bait. But heaven took
Goodson; then I knew I was safe, and I set my trap and baited it. It may
be that I shall not catch all the men to whom I mailed the pretended
test-secret, but I shall catch the most of them, if I know Hadleyburg
nature. [Voices. "Right--he got every last one of them."] I believe
they will even steal ostensible GAMBLE-money, rather than miss, poor,
tempted, and mistrained fellows. I am hoping to eternally and
everlastingly squelch your vanity and give Hadleyburg a new renown--one
that will STICK--and spread far. If I have succeeded, open the sack and
summon the Committee on Propagation and Preservation of the Hadleyburg
Reputation.'"
A Cyclone of Voices. "Open it! Open it! The Eighteen to the front!
Committee on Propagation of the Tradition! Forward--the Incorruptibles!"
The Chair ripped the sack wide, and gathered up a handful of bright,
broad, yellow coins, shook them together, then examined them.
"Friends, they are only gilded disks of lead!"
There was a crashing outbreak of delight over this news, and when the
noise had subsided, the tanner called out:
"By right of apparent seniority in this business, Mr. Wilson is Chairman
of the Committee on Propagation of the Tradition. I suggest that he step
forward on behalf of his pals, and receive in trust the money."
A Hundred Voices. "Wilson! Wilson! Wilson! Speech! Speech!"
Wilson [in a voice trembling with anger]. "You will allow me to say, and
without apologies for my language, DAMN the money!"
A Voice. "Oh, and him a Baptist!"
A Voice. "Seventeen Symbols left! Step up, gentlemen, and assume your
trust!"
There was a pause--no response.
The Saddler. "Mr. Chairman, we've got ONE clean man left, anyway, out of
the late aristocracy; and he needs money, and deserves it. I move that
you appoint Jack Halliday to get up there and auction off that sack of
gilt twenty-dollar pieces, and give the result to the right man--the man
whom Hadleyburg delights to honour--Edward Richards."