We talked together, and I had the idea of trying to reform Satan and

persuade him to lead a better life. I told him about all those things he

had been doing, and begged him to be more considerate and stop making

people unhappy. I said I knew he did not mean any harm, but that he

ought to stop and consider the possible consequences of a thing before

launching it in that impulsive and random way of his; then he would not

make so much trouble. He was not hurt by this plain speech; he only

looked amused and surprised, and said:

"What? I do random things? Indeed, I never do. I stop and consider

possible consequences? Where is the need? I know what the consequences

are going to be--always."

"Oh, Satan, then how could you do these things?"

"Well, I will tell you, and you must understand if you can. You

belong to a singular race. Every man is a suffering-machine and a

happiness-machine combined. The two functions work together

harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take

principle. For every happiness turned out in the one department the

other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or a pain--maybe a dozen.

In most cases the man's life is about equally divided between happiness

and unhappiness. When this is not the case the unhappiness predominates

--always; never the other. Sometimes a man's make and disposition are

such that his misery-machine is able to do nearly all the business. Such

a man goes through life almost ignorant of what happiness is. Everything

he touches, everything he does, brings a misfortune upon him. You have

seen such people? To that kind of a person life is not an advantage, is

it? It is only a disaster. Sometimes for an hour's happiness a man's

machinery makes him pay years of misery. Don't you know that? It

happens every now and then. I will give you a case or two presently. Now

the people of your village are nothing to me--you know that, don't you?"

I did not like to speak out too flatly, so I said I had suspected it.

"Well, it is true that they are nothing to me. It is not possible that

they should be. The difference between them and me is abysmal,

immeasurable. They have no intellect."

"No intellect?"

"Nothing that resembles it. At a future time I will examine what man

calls his mind and give you the details of that chaos, then you will see

and understand. Men have nothing in common with me--there is no point of

contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities

and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a

laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the Moral

Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so big as

a pin's head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him

--caring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor,

or whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, or whether his mother

is sick or well, or whether he is looked up to in society or not, or

whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, or whether

his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, or whether

he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a

foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they

are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic

size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The

elephant has nothing against the spider--he cannot get down to that

remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I

am indifferent. The elephant would not take the trouble to do the spider

an ill turn; if he took the notion he might do him a good turn, if it

came in his way and cost nothing. I have done men good service, but no

ill turns.

"The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power, intellect,

and dignity the one creature is separated from the other by a distance

which is simply astronomical. Yet in these, as in all qualities, man is

immeasurably further below me than is the wee spider below the elephant.

"Man's mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little

trivialities together and gets a result--such as it is. My mind creates!

Do you get the force of that? Creates anything it desires--and in a

moment. Creates without material. Creates fluids, solids, colors

--anything, everything--out of the airy nothing which is called Thought.

A man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine to make it, imagines a

picture, then by weeks of labor embroiders it on canvas with the thread.

I think the whole thing, and in a moment it is before you--created.

"I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chess--anything--and it

is there. This is the immortal mind--nothing is beyond its reach.

Nothing can obstruct my vision; the rocks are transparent to me, and

darkness is daylight. I do not need to open a book; I take the whole of

its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover; and in a

million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its place in the

volume. Nothing goes on in the skull of man, bird, fish, insect, or

other creature which can be hidden from me. I pierce the learned man's

brain with a single glance, and the treasures which cost him threescore

years to accumulate are mine; he can forget, and he does forget, but I

retain.

"Now, then, I perceive by your thoughts that you are understanding me

fairly well. Let us proceed. Circumstances might so fall out that the

elephant could like the spider--supposing he can see it--but he could not

love it. His love is for his own kind--for his equals. An angel's love

is sublime, adorable, divine, beyond the imagination of man--infinitely

beyond it! But it is limited to his own august order. If it fell upon

one of your race for only an instant, it would consume its object to

ashes. No, we cannot love men, but we can be harmlessly indifferent to

them; we can also like them, sometimes. I like you and the boys, I like

Father Peter, and for your sakes I am doing all these things for the

villagers."

He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his position.

"I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look like it

on the surface. Your race never know good fortune from ill. They are

always mistaking the one for the other. It is because they cannot see

into the future. What I am doing for the villagers will bear good fruit

some day; in some cases to themselves; in others, to unborn generations

of men. No one will ever know that I was the cause, but it will be none

the less true, for all that. Among you boys you have a game: you stand a

row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its

neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the next brick--and so on till

all the row is prostrate. That is human life. A child's first act

knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably. If

you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that

was going to happen to that creature; for nothing can change the order of

its life after the first event has determined it. That is, nothing will

change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets

another, and so on to the end, and the seer can look forward down the

line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave."

"Does God order the career?"

"Foreordain it? No. The man's circumstances and environment order it.

His first act determines the second and all that follow after. But

suppose, for argument's sake, that the man should skip one of these acts;

an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had been

appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second

and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn't go.

That man's career would change utterly, from that moment; thence to the

grave it would be wholly different from the career which his first act as

a child had arranged for him. Indeed, it might be that if he had gone to

the well he would have ended his career on a throne, and that omitting to

do it would set him upon a career that would lead to beggary and a

pauper's grave. For instance: if at any time--say in boyhood--Columbus

had skipped the triflingest little link in the chain of acts projected

and made inevitable by his first childish act, it would have changed his

whole subsequent life, and he would have become a priest and died obscure

in an Italian village, and America would not have been discovered for two

centuries afterward. I know this. To skip any one of the billion acts

in Columbus's chain would have wholly changed his life. I have examined

his billion of possible careers, and in only one of them occurs the

discovery of America. You people do not suspect that all of your acts

are of one size and importance, but it is true; to snatch at an appointed

fly is as big with fate for you as is any other appointed act--"

"As the conquering of a continent, for instance?"

"Yes. Now, then, no man ever does drop a link--the thing has never

happened! Even when he is trying to make up his mind as to whether he

will do a thing or not, that itself is a link, an act, and has its proper

place in his chain; and when he finally decides an act, that also was the

thing which he was absolutely certain to do. You see, now, that a man

will never drop a link in his chain. He cannot. If he made up his mind

to try, that project would itself be an unavoidable link--a thought bound

to occur to him at that precise moment, and made certain by the first act

of his babyhood."

It seemed so dismal!

"He is a prisoner for life," I said sorrowfully, "and cannot get free."

"No, of himself he cannot get away from the consequences of his first

childish act. But I can free him."

I looked up wistfully.

"I have changed the careers of a number of your villagers."

I tried to thank him, but found it difficult, and let it drop.

"I shall make some other changes. You know that little Lisa Brandt?"

"Oh yes, everybody does. My mother says she is so sweet and so lovely

that she is not like any other child. She says she will be the pride of

the village when she grows up; and its idol, too, just as she is now."

"I shall change her future."

"Make it better?" I asked.

"Yes. And I will change the future of Nikolaus."

I was glad, this time, and said, "I don't need to ask about his case; you

will be sure to do generously by him."

"It is my intention."

Straight off I was building that great future of Nicky's in my

imagination, and had already made a renowned general of him and

hofmeister at the court, when I noticed that Satan was waiting for me to

get ready to listen again. I was ashamed of having exposed my cheap

imaginings to him, and was expecting some sarcasms, but it did not

happen. He proceeded with his subject:

"Nicky's appointed life is sixty-two years."

"That's grand!" I said.

"Lisa's, thirty-six. But, as I told you, I shall change their lives and

those ages. Two minutes and a quarter from now Nikolaus will wake out of

his sleep and find the rain blowing in. It was appointed that he should

turn over and go to sleep again. But I have appointed that he shall get

up and close the window first. That trifle will change his career

entirely. He will rise in the morning two minutes later than the chain

of his life had appointed him to rise. By consequence, thenceforth

nothing will ever happen to him in accordance with the details of the old

chain." He took out his watch and sat looking at it a few moments, then

said: "Nikolaus has risen to close the window. His life is changed, his

new career has begun. There will be consequences."

It made me feel creepy; it was uncanny.

"But for this change certain things would happen twelve days from now.

For instance, Nikolaus would save Lisa from drowning. He would arrive

on the scene at exactly the right moment--four minutes past ten, the

long-ago appointed instant of time--and the water would be shoal, the

achievement easy and certain. But he will arrive some seconds too late,

now; Lisa will have struggled into deeper water. He will do his best,

but both will drown."

"Oh, Satan! Oh, dear Satan!" I cried, with the tears rising in my eyes,

"save them! Don't let it happen. I can't bear to lose Nikolaus, he is

my loving playmate and friend; and think of Lisa's poor mother!"

I clung to him and begged and pleaded, but he was not moved. He made me

sit down again, and told me I must hear him out.

"I have changed Nikolaus's life, and this has changed Lisa's. If I had

not done this, Nikolaus would save Lisa, then he would catch cold from

his drenching; one of your race's fantastic and desolating scarlet fevers

would follow, with pathetic after-effects; for forty-six years he would

lie in his bed a paralytic log, deaf, dumb, blind, and praying night and

day for the blessed relief of death. Shall I change his life back?"

"Oh no! Oh, not for the world! In charity and pity leave it as it is."

"It is best so. I could not have changed any other link in his life and

done him so good a service. He had a billion possible careers, but not

one of them was worth living; they were charged full with miseries and

disasters. But for my intervention he would do his brave deed twelve

days from now--a deed begun and ended in six minutes--and get for all

reward those forty-six years of sorrow and suffering I told you of. It

is one of the cases I was thinking of awhile ago when I said that

sometimes an act which brings the actor an hour's happiness and

self-satisfaction is paid for--or punished--by years of suffering."

I wondered what poor little Lisa's early death would save her from. He

answered the thought:

"From ten years of pain and slow recovery from an accident, and then from

nineteen years' pollution, shame, depravity, crime, ending with death at

the hands of the executioner. Twelve days hence she will die; her mother

would save her life if she could. Am I not kinder than her mother?"

"Yes--oh, indeed yes; and wiser."

"Father Peter's case is coming on presently. He will be acquitted,

through unassailable proofs of his innocence."

"Why, Satan, how can that be? Do you really think it?"

"Indeed, I know it. His good name will be restored, and the rest of his

life will be happy."

"I can believe it. To restore his good name will have that effect."

"His happiness will not proceed from that cause. I shall change his life

that day, for his good. He will never know his good name has been

restored."

In my mind--and modestly--I asked for particulars, but Satan paid no

attention to my thought. Next, my mind wandered to the astrologer, and I

wondered where he might be.

"In the moon," said Satan, with a fleeting sound which I believed was a

chuckle. "I've got him on the cold side of it, too. He doesn't know

where he is, and is not having a pleasant time; still, it is good enough

for him, a good place for his star studies. I shall need him presently;

then I shall bring him back and possess him again. He has a long and

cruel and odious life before him, but I will change that, for I have no

feeling against him and am quite willing to do him a kindness. I think I

shall get him burned."

He had such strange notions of kindness! But angels are made so, and do

not know any better. Their ways are not like our ways; and, besides,

human beings are nothing to them; they think they are only freaks. It

seems to me odd that he should put the astrologer so far away; he could

have dumped him in Germany just as well, where he would be handy.

"Far away?" said Satan. "To me no place is far away; distance does not

exist for me. The sun is less than a hundred million miles from here,

and the light that is falling upon us has taken eight minutes to come;

but I can make that flight, or any other, in a fraction of time so minute

that it cannot be measured by a watch. I have but to think the journey,

and it is accomplished."

I held out my hand and said, "The light lies upon it; think it into a

glass of wine, Satan."

He did it. I drank the wine.

"Break the glass," he said.

I broke it.

"There--you see it is real. The villagers thought the brass balls were

magic stuff and as perishable as smoke. They were afraid to touch them.

You are a curious lot--your race. But come along; I have business. I

will put you to bed." Said and done. Then he was gone; but his voice

came back to me through the rain and darkness saying, "Yes, tell Seppi,

but no other."

It was the answer to my thought.

Chapter 8

Sleep would not come. It was not because I was proud of my travels and

excited about having been around the big world to China, and feeling

contemptuous of Bartel Sperling, "the traveler," as he called himself,

and looked down upon us others because he had been to Vienna once and was

the only Eseldorf boy who had made such a journey and seen the world's

wonders. At another time that would have kept me awake, but it did not

affect me now. No, my mind was filled with Nikolaus, my thoughts ran

upon him only, and the good days we had seen together at romps and

frolics in the woods and the fields and the river in the long summer

days, and skating and sliding in the winter when our parents thought we

were in school. And now he was going out of this young life, and the

summers and winters would come and go, and we others would rove and play

as before, but his place would be vacant; we should see him no more.

To-morrow he would not suspect, but would be as he had always been, and

it would shock me to hear him laugh, and see him do lightsome and

frivolous things, for to me he would be a corpse, with waxen hands and

dull eyes, and I should see the shroud around his face; and next day he

would not suspect, nor the next, and all the time his handful of days

would be wasting swiftly away and that awful thing coming nearer and

nearer, his fate closing steadily around him and no one knowing it but

Seppi and me. Twelve days--only twelve days. It was awful to think of.

I noticed that in my thoughts I was not calling him by his familiar

names, Nick and Nicky, but was speaking of him by his full name, and

reverently, as one speaks of the dead. Also, as incident after incident

of our comradeship came thronging into my mind out of the past, I noticed

that they were mainly cases where I had wronged him or hurt him, and they

rebuked me and reproached me, and my heart was wrung with remorse, just

as it is when we remember our unkindnesses to friends who have passed

beyond the veil, and we wish we could have them back again, if only for a

moment, so that we could go on our knees to them and say, "Have pity, and

forgive."

Once when we were nine years old he went a long errand of nearly two

miles for the fruiterer, who gave him a splendid big apple for reward,

and he was flying home with it, almost beside himself with astonishment

and delight, and I met him, and he let me look at the apple, not thinking

of treachery, and I ran off with it, eating it as I ran, he following me

and begging; and when he overtook me I offered him the core, which was

all that was left; and I laughed. Then he turned away, crying, and said

he had meant to give it to his little sister. That smote me, for she was

slowly getting well of a sickness, and it would have been a proud moment

for him, to see her joy and surprise and have her caresses. But I was

ashamed to say I was ashamed, and only said something rude and mean, to

pretend I did not care, and he made no reply in words, but there was a

wounded look in his face as he turned away toward his home which rose

before me many times in after years, in the night, and reproached me and

made me ashamed again. It had grown dim in my mind, by and by, then it

disappeared; but it was back now, and not dim.

Once at school, when we were eleven, I upset my ink and spoiled four

copy-books, and was in danger of severe punishment; but I put it upon

him, and he got the whipping.

And only last year I had cheated him in a trade, giving him a large

fish-hook which was partly broken through for three small sound ones.

The first fish he caught broke the hook, but he did not know I was

blamable, and he refused to take back one of the small hooks which my

conscience forced me to offer him, but said, "A trade is a trade; the

hook was bad, but that was not your fault."

No, I could not sleep. These little, shabby wrongs upbraided me and

tortured me, and with a pain much sharper than one feels when the wrongs

have been done to the living. Nikolaus was living, but no matter; he was

to me as one already dead. The wind was still moaning about the eaves,

the rain still pattering upon the panes.

In the morning I sought out Seppi and told him. It was down by the

river. His lips moved, but he did not say anything, he only looked dazed

and stunned, and his face turned very white. He stood like that a few

moments, the tears welling into his eyes, then he turned away and I

locked my arm in his and we walked along thinking, but not speaking. We

crossed the bridge and wandered through the meadows and up among the

hills and the woods, and at last the talk came and flowed freely, and it

was all about Nikolaus and was a recalling of the life we had lived with

him. And every now and then Seppi said, as if to himself:

"Twelve days!--less than twelve days."

We said we must be with him all the time; we must have all of him we

could; the days were precious now. Yet we did not go to seek him. It

would be like meeting the dead, and we were afraid. We did not say it,

but that was what we were feeling. And so it gave us a shock when we

turned a curve and came upon Nikolaus face to face. He shouted, gaily:

"Hi-hi! What is the matter? Have you seen a ghost?"

We couldn't speak, but there was no occasion; he was willing to talk for

us all, for he had just seen Satan and was in high spirits about it.

Satan had told him about our trip to China, and he had begged Satan to

take him a journey, and Satan had promised. It was to be a far journey,

and wonderful and beautiful; and Nikolaus had begged him to take us, too,

but he said no, he would take us some day, maybe, but not now. Satan

would come for him on the 13th, and Nikolaus was already counting the

hours, he was so impatient.

That was the fatal day. We were already counting the hours, too.

We wandered many a mile, always following paths which had been our

favorites from the days when we were little, and always we talked about

the old times. All the blitheness was with Nikolaus; we others could not

shake off our depression. Our tone toward Nikolaus was so strangely

gentle and tender and yearning that he noticed it, and was pleased; and

we were constantly doing him deferential little offices of courtesy, and

saying, "Wait, let me do that for you," and that pleased him, too. I

gave him seven fish-hooks--all I had--and made him take them; and Seppi

gave him his new knife and a humming-top painted red and yellow

--atonements for swindles practised upon him formerly, as I learned

later, and probably no longer remembered by Nikolaus now. These things

touched him, and he could not have believed that we loved him so; and his

pride in it and gratefulness for it cut us to the heart, we were so

undeserving of them. When we parted at last, he was radiant, and said he

had never had such a happy day.

As we walked along homeward, Seppi said, "We always prized him, but never

so much as now, when we are going to lose him."

Next day and every day we spent all of our spare time with Nikolaus; and

also added to it time which we (and he) stole from work and other duties,

and this cost the three of us some sharp scoldings, and some threats of

punishment. Every morning two of us woke with a start and a shudder,

saying, as the days flew along, "Only ten days left;" "only nine days

left;" "only eight;" "only seven." Always it was narrowing. Always

Nikolaus was gay and happy, and always puzzled because we were not. He

wore his invention to the bone trying to invent ways to cheer us up, but

it was only a hollow success; he could see that our jollity had no heart

in it, and that the laughs we broke into came up against some obstruction

or other and suffered damage and decayed into a sigh. He tried to find

out what the matter was, so that he could help us out of our trouble or

make it lighter by sharing it with us; so we had to tell many lies to

deceive him and appease him.

But the most distressing thing of all was that he was always making

plans, and often they went beyond the 13th! Whenever that happened it

made us groan in spirit. All his mind was fixed upon finding some way to

conquer our depression and cheer us up; and at last, when he had but

three days to live, he fell upon the right idea and was jubilant over it

--a boys-and-girls' frolic and dance in the woods, up there where we

first met Satan, and this was to occur on the 14th. It was ghastly, for

that was his funeral day. We couldn't venture to protest; it would only

have brought a "Why?" which we could not answer. He wanted us to help

him invite his guests, and we did it--one can refuse nothing to a dying

friend. But it was dreadful, for really we were inviting them to his

funeral.

It was an awful eleven days; and yet, with a lifetime stretching back

between to-day and then, they are still a grateful memory to me, and

beautiful. In effect they were days of companionship with one's sacred

dead, and I have known no comradeship that was so close or so precious.

We clung to the hours and the minutes, counting them as they wasted away,

and parting with them with that pain and bereavement which a miser feels

who sees his hoard filched from him coin by coin by robbers and is

helpless to prevent it.

When the evening of the last day came we stayed out too long; Seppi and I

were in fault for that; we could not bear to part with Nikolaus; so it

was very late when we left him at his door. We lingered near awhile,

listening; and that happened which we were fearing. His father gave him

the promised punishment, and we heard his shrieks. But we listened only

a moment, then hurried away, remorseful for this thing which we had

caused. And sorry for the father, too; our thought being, "If he only

knew--if he only knew!"

In the morning Nikolaus did not meet us at the appointed place, so we

went to his home to see what the matter was. His mother said:

"His father is out of all patience with these goings-on, and will not

have any more of it. Half the time when Nick is needed he is not to be

found; then it turns out that he has been gadding around with you two.

His father gave him a flogging last night. It always grieved me before,

and many's the time I have begged him off and saved him, but this time he

appealed to me in vain, for I was out of patience myself."

"I wish you had saved him just this one time," I said, my voice trembling

a little; "it would ease a pain in your heart to remember it some day."

She was ironing at the time, and her back was partly toward me. She

turned about with a startled or wondering look in her face and said,

"What do you mean by that?"

I was not prepared, and didn't know anything to say; so it was awkward,

for she kept looking at me; but Seppi was alert and spoke up:

"Why, of course it would be pleasant to remember, for the very reason we

were out so late was that Nikolaus got to telling how good you are to

him, and how he never got whipped when you were by to save him; and he

was so full of it, and we were so full of the interest of it, that none

of us noticed how late it was getting."

"Did he say that? Did he?" and she put her apron to her eyes.

"You can ask Theodor--he will tell you the same."

"It is a dear, good lad, my Nick," she said. "I am sorry I let him get

whipped; I will never do it again. To think--all the time I was sitting

here last night, fretting and angry at him, he was loving me and praising

me! Dear, dear, if we could only know! Then we shouldn't ever go wrong;

but we are only poor, dumb beasts groping around and making mistakes. I

shan't ever think of last night without a pang."

She was like all the rest; it seemed as if nobody could open a mouth, in

these wretched days, without saying something that made us shiver. They

were "groping around," and did not know what true, sorrowfully true

things they were saying by accident.

Seppi asked if Nikolaus might go out with us.

"I am sorry," she answered, "but he can't. To punish him further, his

father doesn't allow him to go out of the house to-day."

We had a great hope! I saw it in Seppi's eyes. We thought, "If he

cannot leave the house, he cannot be drowned." Seppi asked, to make

sure:

"Must he stay in all day, or only the morning?"

"All day. It's such a pity, too; it's a beautiful day, and he is so

unused to being shut up. But he is busy planning his party, and maybe

that is company for him. I do hope he isn't too lonesome."

Seppi saw that in her eye which emboldened him to ask if we might go up

and help him pass his time.

"And welcome!" she said, right heartily. "Now I call that real

friendship, when you might be abroad in the fields and the woods, having

a happy time. You are good boys, I'll allow that, though you don't

always find satisfactory ways of improving it. Take these cakes--for

yourselves--and give him this one, from his mother."

The first thing we noticed when we entered Nikolaus's room was the time

--a quarter to 10. Could that be correct? Only such a few minutes to

live! I felt a contraction at my heart. Nikolaus jumped up and gave us

a glad welcome. He was in good spirits over his plannings for his party

and had not been lonesome.

"Sit down," he said, "and look at what I've been doing. And I've

finished a kite that you will say is a beauty. It's drying, in the

kitchen; I'll fetch it."

He had been spending his penny savings in fanciful trifles of various

kinds, to go as prizes in the games, and they were marshaled with fine

and showy effect upon the table. He said:

"Examine them at your leisure while I get mother to touch up the kite

with her iron if it isn't dry enough yet."

Then he tripped out and went clattering down-stairs, whistling.

We did not look at the things; we couldn't take any interest in anything

but the clock. We sat staring at it in silence, listening to the

ticking, and every time the minute-hand jumped we nodded recognition--one

minute fewer to cover in the race for life or for death. Finally Seppi

drew a deep breath and said:

"Two minutes to ten. Seven minutes more and he will pass the

death-point. Theodor, he is going to be saved! He's going to--"

"Hush! I'm on needles. Watch the clock and keep still."

Five minutes more. We were panting with the strain and the excitement.

Another three minutes, and there was a footstep on the stair.

"Saved!" And we jumped up and faced the door.

The old mother entered, bringing the kite. "Isn't it a beauty?" she

said. "And, dear me, how he has slaved over it--ever since daylight, I

think, and only finished it awhile before you came." She stood it

against the wall, and stepped back to take a view of it. "He drew the

pictures his own self, and I think they are very good. The church isn't

so very good, I'll have to admit, but look at the bridge--any one can

recognize the bridge in a minute. He asked me to bring it up.... Dear

me! it's seven minutes past ten, and I--"

"But where is he?"

"He? Oh, he'll be here soon; he's gone out a minute."

"Gone out?"

"Yes. Just as he came down-stairs little Lisa's mother came in and said

the child had wandered off somewhere, and as she was a little uneasy I

told Nikolaus to never mind about his father's orders--go and look her

up.... Why, how white you two do look! I do believe you are sick. Sit

down; I'll fetch something. That cake has disagreed with you. It is a

little heavy, but I thought--"

She disappeared without finishing her sentence, and we hurried at once to

the back window and looked toward the river. There was a great crowd at

the other end of the bridge, and people were flying toward that point

from every direction.

"Oh, it is all over--poor Nikolaus! Why, oh, why did she let him get out

of the house!"

"Come away," said Seppi, half sobbing, "come quick--we can't bear to meet

her; in five minutes she will know."

But we were not to escape. She came upon us at the foot of the stairs,

with her cordials in her hands, and made us come in and sit down and take

the medicine. Then she watched the effect, and it did not satisfy her;

so she made us wait longer, and kept upbraiding herself for giving us the

unwholesome cake.

Presently the thing happened which we were dreading. There was a sound

of tramping and scraping outside, and a crowd came solemnly in, with

heads uncovered, and laid the two drowned bodies on the bed.

"Oh, my God!" that poor mother cried out, and fell on her knees, and put

her arms about her dead boy and began to cover the wet face with kisses.

"Oh, it was I that sent him, and I have been his death. If I had obeyed,

and kept him in the house, this would not have happened. And I am

rightly punished; I was cruel to him last night, and him begging me, his

own mother, to be his friend."

And so she went on and on, and all the women cried, and pitied her, and

tried to comfort her, but she could not forgive herself and could not be

comforted, and kept on saying if she had not sent him out he would be

alive and well now, and she was the cause of his death.

It shows how foolish people are when they blame themselves for anything

they have done. Satan knows, and he said nothing happens that your first

act hasn't arranged to happen and made inevitable; and so, of your own

motion you can't ever alter the scheme or do a thing that will break a

link. Next we heard screams, and Frau Brandt came wildly plowing and

plunging through the crowd with her dress in disorder and hair flying

loose, and flung herself upon her dead child with moans and kisses and

pleadings and endearments; and by and by she rose up almost exhausted

with her outpourings of passionate emotion, and clenched her fist and

lifted it toward the sky, and her tear-drenched face grew hard and

resentful, and she said:

"For nearly two weeks I have had dreams and presentiments and warnings

that death was going to strike what was most precious to me, and day and

night and night and day I have groveled in the dirt before Him praying

Him to have pity on my innocent child and save it from harm--and here is

His answer!"

Why, He had saved it from harm--but she did not know.

She wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks, and stood awhile gazing

down at the child and caressing its face and its hair with her hands;

then she spoke again in that bitter tone: "But in His hard heart is no

compassion. I will never pray again."

She gathered her dead child to her bosom and strode away, the crowd

falling back to let her pass, and smitten dumb by the awful words they

had heard. Ah, that poor woman! It is as Satan said, we do not know

good fortune from bad, and are always mistaking the one for the other.

Many a time since I have heard people pray to God to spare the life of

sick persons, but I have never done it.

Both funerals took place at the same time in our little church next day.

Everybody was there, including the party guests. Satan was there, too;

which was proper, for it was on account of his efforts that the funerals

had happened. Nikolaus had departed this life without absolution, and a

collection was taken up for masses, to get him out of purgatory. Only

two-thirds of the required money was gathered, and the parents were going

to try to borrow the rest, but Satan furnished it. He told us privately

that there was no purgatory, but he had contributed in order that

Nikolaus's parents and their friends might be saved from worry and

distress. We thought it very good of him, but he said money did not cost

him anything.

At the graveyard the body of little Lisa was seized for debt by a

carpenter to whom the mother owed fifty groschen for work done the year

before. She had never been able to pay this, and was not able now. The

carpenter took the corpse home and kept it four days in his cellar, the

mother weeping and imploring about his house all the time; then he buried

it in his brother's cattle-yard, without religious ceremonies. It drove

the mother wild with grief and shame, and she forsook her work and went

daily about the town, cursing the carpenter and blaspheming the laws of

the emperor and the church, and it was pitiful to see. Seppi asked Satan

to interfere, but he said the carpenter and the rest were members of the

human race and were acting quite neatly for that species of animal. He

would interfere if he found a horse acting in such a way, and we must

inform him when we came across that kind of horse doing that kind of

human thing, so that he could stop it. We believed this was sarcasm, for

of course there wasn't any such horse.

But after a few days we found that we could not abide that poor woman's

distress, so we begged Satan to examine her several possible careers, and

see if he could not change her, to her profit, to a new one. He said the

longest of her careers as they now stood gave her forty-two years to

live, and her shortest one twenty-nine, and that both were charged with

grief and hunger and cold and pain. The only improvement he could make

would be to enable her to skip a certain three minutes from now; and he

asked us if he should do it. This was such a short time to decide in

that we went to pieces with nervous excitement, and before we could pull

ourselves together and ask for particulars he said the time would be up

in a few more seconds; so then we gasped out, "Do it!"

"It is done," he said; "she was going around a corner; I have turned her

back; it has changed her career."

"Then what will happen, Satan?"

"It is happening now. She is having words with Fischer, the weaver. In

his anger Fischer will straightway do what he would not have done but for

this accident. He was present when she stood over her child's body and

uttered those blasphemies."

"What will he do?"

"He is doing it now--betraying her. In three days she will go to the

stake."

We could not speak; we were frozen with horror, for if we had not meddled

with her career she would have been spared this awful fate. Satan

noticed these thoughts, and said:

"What you are thinking is strictly human-like--that is to say, foolish.

The woman is advantaged. Die when she might, she would go to heaven. By

this prompt death she gets twenty-nine years more of heaven than she is

entitled to, and escapes twenty-nine years of misery here."

A moment before we were bitterly making up our minds that we would ask no

more favors of Satan for friends of ours, for he did not seem to know any

way to do a person a kindness but by killing him; but the whole aspect of

the case was changed now, and we were glad of what we had done and full

of happiness in the thought of it.

After a little I began to feel troubled about Fischer, and asked,

timidly, "Does this episode change Fischer's life-scheme, Satan?"

"Change it? Why, certainly. And radically. If he had not met Frau

Brandt awhile ago he would die next year, thirty-four years of age. Now

he will live to be ninety, and have a pretty prosperous and comfortable

life of it, as human lives go."

We felt a great joy and pride in what we had done for Fischer, and were

expecting Satan to sympathize with this feeling; but he showed no sign

and this made us uneasy. We waited for him to speak, but he didn't; so,

to assuage our solicitude we had to ask him if there was any defect in

Fischer's good luck. Satan considered the question a moment, then said,

with some hesitation:

"Well, the fact is, it is a delicate point. Under his several former

possible life-careers he was going to heaven."

We were aghast. "Oh, Satan! and under this one--"

"There, don't be so distressed. You were sincerely trying to do him a

kindness; let that comfort you."

"Oh, dear, dear, that cannot comfort us. You ought to have told us what

we were doing, then we wouldn't have acted so."

But it made no impression on him. He had never felt a pain or a sorrow,

and did not know what they were, in any really informing way. He had no

knowledge of them except theoretically--that is to say, intellectually.

And of course that is no good. One can never get any but a loose and

ignorant notion of such things except by experience. We tried our best

to make him comprehend the awful thing that had been done and how we were

compromised by it, but he couldn't seem to get hold of it. He said he

did not think it important where Fischer went to; in heaven he would not

be missed, there were "plenty there." We tried to make him see that he

was missing the point entirely; that Fischer, and not other people, was

the proper one to decide about the importance of it; but it all went for

nothing; he said he did not care for Fischer--there were plenty more

Fischers.

The next minute Fischer went by on the other side of the way, and it made

us sick and faint to see him, remembering the doom that was upon him, and

we the cause of it. And how unconscious he was that anything had

happened to him! You could see by his elastic step and his alert manner

that he was well satisfied with himself for doing that hard turn for poor

Frau Brandt. He kept glancing back over his shoulder expectantly. And,

sure enough, pretty soon Frau Brandt followed after, in charge of the

officers and wearing jingling chains. A mob was in her wake, jeering and

shouting, "Blasphemer and heretic!" and some among them were neighbors

and friends of her happier days. Some were trying to strike her, and the

officers were not taking as much trouble as they might to keep them from

it.

"Oh, stop them, Satan!" It was out before we remembered that he could not

interrupt them for a moment without changing their whole after-lives. He

puffed a little puff toward them with his lips and they began to reel and

stagger and grab at the empty air; then they broke apart and fled in

every direction, shrieking, as if in intolerable pain. He had crushed a

rib of each of them with that little puff. We could not help asking if

their life-chart was changed.

"Yes, entirely. Some have gained years, some have lost them. Some few

will profit in various ways by the change, but only that few."

We did not ask if we had brought poor Fischer's luck to any of them. We

did not wish to know. We fully believed in Satan's desire to do us

kindnesses, but we were losing confidence in his judgment. It was at

this time that our growing anxiety to have him look over our life-charts

and suggest improvements began to fade out and give place to other

interests.

For a day or two the whole village was a chattering turmoil over Frau

Brandt's case and over the mysterious calamity that had overtaken the

mob, and at her trial the place was crowded. She was easily convicted of

her blasphemies, for she uttered those terrible words again and said she

would not take them back. When warned that she was imperiling her life,

she said they could take it in welcome, she did not want it, she would

rather live with the professional devils in perdition than with these

imitators in the village. They accused her of breaking all those ribs by

witchcraft, and asked her if she was not a witch? She answered

scornfully:

"No. If I had that power would any of you holy hypocrites be alive five

minutes? No; I would strike you all dead. Pronounce your sentence and

let me go; I am tired of your society."

So they found her guilty, and she was excommunicated and cut off from the

joys of heaven and doomed to the fires of hell; then she was clothed in a

coarse robe and delivered to the secular arm, and conducted to the

market-place, the bell solemnly tolling the while. We saw her chained to

the stake, and saw the first film of blue smoke rise on the still air.

Then her hard face softened, and she looked upon the packed crowd in

front of her and said, with gentleness:

"We played together once, in long-agone days when we were innocent little

creatures. For the sake of that, I forgive you."

We went away then, and did not see the fires consume her, but we heard

the shrieks, although we put our fingers in our ears. When they ceased

we knew she was in heaven, notwithstanding the excommunication; and we

were glad of her death and not sorry that we had brought it about.

One day, a little while after this, Satan appeared again. We were always

watching out for him, for life was never very stagnant when he was by.

He came upon us at that place in the woods where we had first met him.

Being boys, we wanted to be entertained; we asked him to do a show for

us.

"Very well," he said; "would you like to see a history of the progress of

the human race?--its development of that product which it calls

civilization?"

We said we should.

So, with a thought, he turned the place into the Garden of Eden, and we

saw Abel praying by his altar; then Cain came walking toward him with his

club, and did not seem to see us, and would have stepped on my foot if I

had not drawn it in. He spoke to his brother in a language which we did

not understand; then he grew violent and threatening, and we knew what

was going to happen, and turned away our heads for the moment; but we

heard the crash of the blows and heard the shrieks and the groans; then

there was silence, and we saw Abel lying in his blood and gasping out his

life, and Cain standing over him and looking down at him, vengeful and

unrepentant.

Then the vision vanished, and was followed by a long series of unknown

wars, murders, and massacres. Next we had the Flood, and the Ark tossing

around in the stormy waters, with lofty mountains in the distance showing

veiled and dim through the rain. Satan said:

"The progress of your race was not satisfactory. It is to have another

chance now."

The scene changed, and we saw Noah overcome with wine.

Next, we had Sodom and Gomorrah, and "the attempt to discover two or

three respectable persons there," as Satan described it. Next, Lot and

his daughters in the cave.

Next came the Hebraic wars, and we saw the victors massacre the survivors

and their cattle, and save the young girls alive and distribute them

around.

Next we had Jael; and saw her slip into the tent and drive the nail into

the temple of her sleeping guest; and we were so close that when the

blood gushed out it trickled in a little, red stream to our feet, and we

could have stained our hands in it if we had wanted to.

Next we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars, Roman wars, hideous drenchings of

the earth with blood; and we saw the treacheries of the Romans toward the

Carthaginians, and the sickening spectacle of the massacre of those brave

people. Also we saw Caesar invade Britain--"not that those barbarians

had done him any harm, but because he wanted their land, and desired to

confer the blessings of civilization upon their widows and orphans," as

Satan explained.

Next, Christianity was born. Then ages of Europe passed in review before

us, and we saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand through

those ages, "leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake, and

other signs of the progress of the human race," as Satan observed.

And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars--all over

Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal

families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war

started by the aggressor for any clean purpose--there is no such war in

the history of the race."

"Now," said Satan, "you have seen your progress down to the present, and

you must confess that it is wonderful--in its way. We must now exhibit

the future."

He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life, more

devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen.

"You perceive," he said, "that you have made continual progress. Cain

did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins

and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine

arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added

guns and gunpowder; a few centuries from now he will have so greatly

improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter that all

men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have

remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time."

Then he began to laugh in the most unfeeling way, and make fun of the

human race, although he knew that what he had been saying shamed us and

wounded us. No one but an angel could have acted so; but suffering is

nothing to them; they do not know what it is, except by hearsay.

More than once Seppi and I had tried in a humble and diffident way to

convert him, and as he had remained silent we had taken his silence as a

sort of encouragement; necessarily, then, this talk of his was a

disappointment to us, for it showed that we had made no deep impression

upon him. The thought made us sad, and we knew then how the missionary

must feel when he has been cherishing a glad hope and has seen it

blighted. We kept our grief to ourselves, knowing that this was not the

time to continue our work.

Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: "It is a

remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high

civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world,

then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest

ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did

their best--to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the

earliest incident in its history--but only the Christian civilization has

scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will

be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the

pagan world will go to school to the Christian--not to acquire his

religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those to kill

missionaries and converts with."

By this time his theater was at work again, and before our eyes nation

after nation drifted by, during two or three centuries, a mighty

procession, an endless procession, raging, struggling, wallowing through

seas of blood, smothered in battle-smoke through which the flags glinted

and the red jets from the cannon darted; and always we heard the thunder

of the guns and the cries of the dying.

"And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle.

"Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come out where you went

in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating

itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense--to what end? No

wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of

usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel

defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you

proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not

ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you

and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your

alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who

address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the

language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth,

while in your heart--if you have one--you despise yourselves for it. The

first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet

failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations

have been built. Drink to their perpetuation! Drink to their

augmentation! Drink to--" Then he saw by our faces how much we were

hurt, and he cut his sentence short and stopped chuckling, and his manner

changed. He said, gently: "No, we will drink one another's health, and

let civilization go. The wine which has flown to our hands out of space

by desire is earthly, and good enough for that other toast; but throw

away the glasses; we will drink this one in wine which has not visited

this world before."

We obeyed, and reached up and received the new cups as they descended.

They were shapely and beautiful goblets, but they were not made of any

material that we were acquainted with. They seemed to be in motion, they

seemed to be alive; and certainly the colors in them were in motion.

They were very brilliant and sparkling, and of every tint, and they were

never still, but flowed to and fro in rich tides which met and broke and

flashed out dainty explosions of enchanting color. I think it was most

like opals washing about in waves and flashing out their splendid fires.

But there is nothing to compare the wine with. We drank it, and felt a

strange and witching ecstasy as of heaven go stealing through us, and

Seppi's eyes filled and he said worshipingly:

"We shall be there some day, and then--"

He glanced furtively at Satan, and I think he hoped Satan would say,

"Yes, you will be there some day," but Satan seemed to be thinking about

something else, and said nothing. This made me feel ghastly, for I knew

he had heard; nothing, spoken or unspoken, ever escaped him. Poor Seppi

looked distressed, and did not finish his remark. The goblets rose and

clove their way into the sky, a triplet of radiant sundogs, and

disappeared. Why didn't they stay? It seemed a bad sign, and depressed

me. Should I ever see mine again? Would Seppi ever see his?

Chapter 9

It was wonderful, the mastery Satan had over time and distance. For him

they did not exist. He called them human inventions, and said they were

artificialities. We often went to the most distant parts of the globe

with him, and stayed weeks and months, and yet were gone only a fraction

of a second, as a rule. You could prove it by the clock. One day when

our people were in such awful distress because the witch commission were

afraid to proceed against the astrologer and Father Peter's household, or

against any, indeed, but the poor and the friendless, they lost patience

and took to witch-hunting on their own score, and began to chase a born

lady who was known to have the habit of curing people by devilish arts,

such as bathing them, washing them, and nourishing them instead of

bleeding them and purging them through the ministrations of a

barber-surgeon in the proper way. She came flying down, with the howling

and cursing mob after her, and tried to take refuge in houses, but the

doors were shut in her face. They chased her more than half an hour, we

following to see it, and at last she was exhausted and fell, and they

caught her. They dragged her to a tree and threw a rope over the limb,

and began to make a noose in it, some holding her, meantime, and she

crying and begging, and her young daughter looking on and weeping, but

afraid to say or do anything.

They hanged the lady, and I threw a stone at her, although in my heart I

was sorry for her; but all were throwing stones and each was watching his

neighbor, and if I had not done as the others did it would have been

noticed and spoken of. Satan burst out laughing.

All that were near by turned upon him, astonished and not pleased. It

was an ill time to laugh, for his free and scoffing ways and his

supernatural music had brought him under suspicion all over the town and

turned many privately against him. The big blacksmith called attention

to him now, raising his voice so that all should hear, and said:

"What are you laughing at? Answer! Moreover, please explain to the

company why you threw no stone."

"Are you sure I did not throw a stone?"

"Yes. You needn't try to get out of it; I had my eye on you."

"And I--I noticed you!" shouted two others.

"Three witnesses," said Satan: "Mueller, the blacksmith; Klein, the

butcher's man; Pfeiffer, the weaver's journeyman. Three very ordinary

liars. Are there any more?"

"Never mind whether there are others or not, and never mind about what

you consider us--three's enough to settle your matter for you. You'll

prove that you threw a stone, or it shall go hard with you."

"That's so!" shouted the crowd, and surged up as closely as they could to

the center of interest.

"And first you will answer that other question," cried the blacksmith,

pleased with himself for being mouthpiece to the public and hero of the

occasion. "What are you laughing at?"

Satan smiled and answered, pleasantly: "To see three cowards stoning a

dying lady when they were so near death themselves."

You could see the superstitious crowd shrink and catch their breath,

under the sudden shock. The blacksmith, with a show of bravado, said:

"Pooh! What do you know about it?"

"I? Everything. By profession I am a fortune-teller, and I read the

hands of you three--and some others--when you lifted them to stone the

woman. One of you will die to-morrow week; another of you will die

to-night; the third has but five minutes to live--and yonder is the

clock!"

It made a sensation. The faces of the crowd blanched, and turned

mechanically toward the clock. The butcher and the weaver seemed smitten

with an illness, but the blacksmith braced up and said, with spirit:

"It is not long to wait for prediction number one. If it fails, young

master, you will not live a whole minute after, I promise you that."

No one said anything; all watched the clock in a deep stillness which was

impressive. When four and a half minutes were gone the blacksmith gave a

sudden gasp and clapped his hands upon his heart, saying, "Give me

breath! Give me room!" and began to sink down. The crowd surged back,

no one offering to support him, and he fell lumbering to the ground and

was dead. The people stared at him, then at Satan, then at one another;

and their lips moved, but no words came. Then Satan said:

"Three saw that I threw no stone. Perhaps there are others; let them

speak."

It struck a kind of panic into them, and, although no one answered him,

many began to violently accuse one another, saying, "You said he didn't

throw," and getting for reply, "It is a lie, and I will make you eat it!"

And so in a moment they were in a raging and noisy turmoil, and beating

and banging one another; and in the midst was the only indifferent one

--the dead lady hanging from her rope, her troubles forgotten, her spirit

at peace.

So we walked away, and I was not at ease, but was saying to myself, "He

told them he was laughing at them, but it was a lie--he was laughing at

me."

That made him laugh again, and he said, "Yes, I was laughing at you,

because, in fear of what others might report about you, you stoned the

woman when your heart revolted at the act--but I was laughing at the

others, too."

"Why?"

"Because their case was yours."

"How is that?"

"Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had no

more desire to throw a stone than you had."

"Satan!"

"Oh, it's true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is

governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its

feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most

noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no

matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether

savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting

pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they

don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted creature

spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities

which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that

ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the

killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful

of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after

ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in

twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet

apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. Some day a

handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise--perhaps

even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do

it--and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and

witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.

"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large

defect in your race--the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his

desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's

eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and

always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always

be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the

majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these

institutions."

I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think

they were.

"Still, it is true, lamb," said Satan. "Look at you in war--what mutton

you are, and how ridiculous!"

"In war? How?"

"There has never been a just one, never an honorable one--on the part of

the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this

rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud

little handful--as usual--will shout for the war. The pulpit will

--warily and cautiously--object--at first; the great, big, dull bulk of

the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should

be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and

dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it." Then the handful will

shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason

against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and

be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them,

and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the

platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their

secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers--as earlier

--but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation--pulpit and all

--will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest

man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease

to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame

upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those

conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse

to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince

himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he

enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

Chapter 10

Days and days went by now, and no Satan. It was dull without him. But

the astrologer, who had returned from his excursion to the moon, went

about the village, braving public opinion, and getting a stone in the

middle of his back now and then when some witch-hater got a safe chance

to throw it and dodge out of sight. Meantime two influences had been

working well for Marget. That Satan, who was quite indifferent to her,

had stopped going to her house after a visit or two had hurt her pride,

and she had set herself the task of banishing him from her heart.

Reports of Wilhelm Meidling's dissipation brought to her from time to

time by old Ursula had touched her with remorse, jealousy of Satan being

the cause of it; and so now, these two matters working upon her together,

she was getting a good profit out of the combination--her interest in

Satan was steadily cooling, her interest in Wilhelm as steadily warming.

All that was needed to complete her conversion was that Wilhelm should

brace up and do something that should cause favorable talk and incline

the public toward him again.

The opportunity came now. Marget sent and asked him to defend her uncle

in the approaching trial, and he was greatly pleased, and stopped

drinking and began his preparations with diligence. With more diligence

than hope, in fact, for it was not a promising case. He had many

interviews in his office with Seppi and me, and threshed out our

testimony pretty thoroughly, thinking to find some valuable grains among

the chaff, but the harvest was poor, of course.

If Satan would only come! That was my constant thought. He could invent

some way to win the case; for he had said it would be won, so he

necessarily knew how it could be done. But the days dragged on, and

still he did not come. Of course I did not doubt that it would be won,

and that Father Peter would be happy for the rest of his life, since

Satan had said so; yet I knew I should be much more comfortable if he

would come and tell us how to manage it. It was getting high time for

Father Peter to have a saving change toward happiness, for by general

report he was worn out with his imprisonment and the ignominy that was

burdening him, and was like to die of his miseries unless he got relief

soon.

At last the trial came on, and the people gathered from all around to

witness it; among them many strangers from considerable distances. Yes,

everybody was there except the accused. He was too feeble in body for

the strain. But Marget was present, and keeping up her hope and her

spirit the best she could. The money was present, too. It was emptied

on the table, and was handled and caressed and examined by such as were

privileged.

The astrologer was put in the witness-box. He had on his best hat and

robe for the occasion.

QUESTION. You claim that this money is yours?

ANSWER. I do.

Q. How did you come by it?

A. I found the bag in the road when I was returning from a journey.

Q. When?

A. More than two years ago.

Q. What did you do with it?

A. I brought it home and hid it in a secret place in my observatory,

intending to find the owner if I could.

Q. You endeavored to find him?

A. I made diligent inquiry during several months, but nothing came of

it.

Q. And then?

A. I thought it not worth while to look further, and was minded to use

the money in finishing the wing of the foundling-asylum connected with

the priory and nunnery. So I took it out of its hiding-place and counted

it to see if any of it was missing. And then--

Q. Why do you stop? Proceed.

A. I am sorry to have to say this, but just as I had finished and was

restoring the bag to its place, I looked up and there stood Father Peter

behind me.

Several murmured, "That looks bad," but others answered, "Ah, but he is

such a liar!"

Q. That made you uneasy?

A. No; I thought nothing of it at the time, for Father Peter often came

to me unannounced to ask for a little help in his need.

Marget blushed crimson at hearing her uncle falsely and impudently

charged with begging, especially from one he had always denounced as a

fraud, and was going to speak, but remembered herself in time and held

her peace.

Q. Proceed.

A. In the end I was afraid to contribute the money to the

foundling-asylum, but elected to wait yet another year and continue my

inquiries. When I heard of Father Peter's find I was glad, and no

suspicion entered my mind; when I came home a day or two later and

discovered that my own money was gone I still did not suspect until three

circumstances connected with Father Peter's good fortune struck me as

being singular coincidences.

Q. Pray name them.

A. Father Peter had found his money in a path--I had found mine in a

road. Father Peter's find consisted exclusively of gold ducats--mine

also. Father Peter found eleven hundred and seven ducats--I exactly the

same.

This closed his evidence, and certainly it made a strong impression on

the house; one could see that.

Wilhelm Meidling asked him some questions, then called us boys, and we

told our tale. It made the people laugh, and we were ashamed. We were

feeling pretty badly, anyhow, because Wilhelm was hopeless, and showed

it. He was doing as well as he could, poor young fellow, but nothing was

in his favor, and such sympathy as there was was now plainly not with his

client. It might be difficult for court and people to believe the

astrologer's story, considering his character, but it was almost

impossible to believe Father Peter's. We were already feeling badly

enough, but when the astrologer's lawyer said he believed he would not

ask us any questions--for our story was a little delicate and it would be

cruel for him to put any strain upon it--everybody tittered, and it was

almost more than we could bear. Then he made a sarcastic little speech,

and got so much fun out of our tale, and it seemed so ridiculous and

childish and every way impossible and foolish, that it made everybody

laugh till the tears came; and at last Marget could not keep up her

courage any longer, but broke down and cried, and I was so sorry for her.

Now I noticed something that braced me up. It was Satan standing

alongside of Wilhelm! And there was such a contrast!--Satan looked so

confident, had such a spirit in his eyes and face, and Wilhelm looked so

depressed and despondent. We two were comfortable now, and judged that

he would testify and persuade the bench and the people that black was

white and white black, or any other color he wanted it. We glanced

around to see what the strangers in the house thought of him, for he was

beautiful, you know--stunning, in fact--but no one was noticing him; so

we knew by that that he was invisible.

The lawyer was saying his last words; and while he was saying them Satan

began to melt into Wilhelm. He melted into him and disappeared; and then

there was a change, when his spirit began to look out of Wilhelm's eyes.

That lawyer finished quite seriously, and with dignity. He pointed to

the money, and said:

"The love of it is the root of all evil. There it lies, the ancient

tempter, newly red with the shame of its latest victory--the dishonor of

a priest of God and his two poor juvenile helpers in crime. If it could

but speak, let us hope that it would be constrained to confess that of

all its conquests this was the basest and the most pathetic."

He sat down. Wilhelm rose and said:

"From the testimony of the accuser I gather that he found this money in a

road more than two years ago. Correct me, sir, if I misunderstood you."

The astrologer said his understanding of it was correct.

"And the money so found was never out of his hands thenceforth up to a

certain definite date--the last day of last year. Correct me, sir, if I

am wrong."

The astrologer nodded his head. Wilhelm turned to the bench and said:

"If I prove that this money here was not that money, then it is not his?"

"Certainly not; but this is irregular. If you had such a witness it was

your duty to give proper notice of it and have him here to--" He broke

off and began to consult with the other judges. Meantime that other

lawyer got up excited and began to protest against allowing new witnesses

to be brought into the case at this late stage.

The judges decided that his contention was just and must be allowed.

"But this is not a new witness," said Wilhelm. "It has already been

partly examined. I speak of the coin."

"The coin? What can the coin say?"

"It can say it is not the coin that the astrologer once possessed. It

can say it was not in existence last December. By its date it can say

this."

And it was so! There was the greatest excitement in the court while that

lawyer and the judges were reaching for coins and examining them and

exclaiming. And everybody was full of admiration of Wilhelm's brightness

in happening to think of that neat idea. At last order was called and

the court said:

"All of the coins but four are of the date of the present year. The

court tenders its sincere sympathy to the accused, and its deep regret

that he, an innocent man, through an unfortunate mistake, has suffered

the undeserved humiliation of imprisonment and trial. The case is

dismissed."

So the money could speak, after all, though that lawyer thought it

couldn't. The court rose, and almost everybody came forward to shake

hands with Marget and congratulate her, and then to shake with Wilhelm

and praise him; and Satan had stepped out of Wilhelm and was standing

around looking on full of interest, and people walking through him every

which way, not knowing he was there. And Wilhelm could not explain why

he only thought of the date on the coins at the last moment, instead of

earlier; he said it just occurred to him, all of a sudden, like an

inspiration, and he brought it right out without any hesitation, for,

although he didn't examine the coins, he seemed, somehow, to know it was

true. That was honest of him, and like him; another would have pretended

he had thought of it earlier, and was keeping it back for a surprise.

He had dulled down a little now; not much, but still you could notice

that he hadn't that luminous look in his eyes that he had while Satan was

in him. He nearly got it back, though, for a moment when Marget came and

praised him and thanked him and couldn't keep him from seeing how proud

she was of him. The astrologer went off dissatisfied and cursing, and

Solomon Isaacs gathered up the money and carried it away. It was Father

Peter's for good and all, now.

Satan was gone. I judged that he had spirited himself away to the jail

to tell the prisoner the news; and in this I was right. Marget and the

rest of us hurried thither at our best speed, in a great state of

rejoicing.

Well, what Satan had done was this: he had appeared before that poor

prisoner, exclaiming, "The trial is over, and you stand forever disgraced

as a thief--by verdict of the court!"

The shock unseated the old man's reason. When we arrived, ten minutes

later, he was parading pompously up and down and delivering commands to

this and that and the other constable or jailer, and calling them Grand

Chamberlain, and Prince This and Prince That, and Admiral of the Fleet,

Field Marshal in Command, and all such fustian, and was as happy as a

bird. He thought he was Emperor!

Marget flung herself on his breast and cried, and indeed everybody was

moved almost to heartbreak. He recognized Marget, but could not

understand why she should cry. He patted her on the shoulder and said:

"Don't do it, dear; remember, there are witnesses, and it is not becoming

in the Crown Princess. Tell me your trouble--it shall be mended; there

is nothing the Emperor cannot do." Then he looked around and saw old

Ursula with her apron to her eyes. He was puzzled at that, and said,

"And what is the matter with you?"

Through her sobs she got out words explaining that she was distressed to

see him--"so." He reflected over that a moment, then muttered, as if to

himself: "A singular old thing, the Dowager Duchess--means well, but is

always snuffling and never able to tell what it is about. It is because

she doesn't know." His eyes fell on Wilhelm. "Prince of India," he

said, "I divine that it is you that the Crown Princess is concerned

about. Her tears shall be dried; I will no longer stand between you; she

shall share your throne; and between you you shall inherit mine. There,

little lady, have I done well? You can smile now--isn't it so?"

He petted Marget and kissed her, and was so contented with himself and

with everybody that he could not do enough for us all, but began to give

away kingdoms and such things right and left, and the least that any of

us got was a principality. And so at last, being persuaded to go home,

he marched in imposing state; and when the crowds along the way saw how

it gratified him to be hurrahed at, they humored him to the top of his

desire, and he responded with condescending bows and gracious smiles, and

often stretched out a hand and said, "Bless you, my people!"

As pitiful a sight as ever I saw. And Marget, and old Ursula crying all

the way.

On my road home I came upon Satan, and reproached him with deceiving me

with that lie. He was not embarrassed, but said, quite simply and

composedly:

"Ah, you mistake; it was the truth. I said he would be happy the rest of

his days, and he will, for he will always think he is the Emperor, and

his pride in it and his joy in it will endure to the end. He is now, and

will remain, the one utterly happy person in this empire."

"But the method of it, Satan, the method! Couldn't you have done it

without depriving him of his reason?"

It was difficult to irritate Satan, but that accomplished it.

"What an ass you are!" he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have

found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No

sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a

fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those.

The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no

happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind

at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have

taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind;

I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the

result--and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy,

and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to

his race--and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and

said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to please."

There it was, you see. He didn't seem to know any way to do a person a

favor except by killing him or making a lunatic out of him. I

apologized, as well as I could; but privately I did not think much of his

processes--at that time.

Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and

uninterrupted self-deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave with

shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its

entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it

had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one. It regarded itself

as gold, and was only brass. One day when he was in this vein he

mentioned a detail--the sense of humor. I cheered up then, and took

issue. I said we possessed it.

"There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't

got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust. You

have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you

possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade

and trivial things--broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries,

absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade

comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision.

Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these

juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them?

For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective

weapon--laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution

--these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a

little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and

atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever

use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever

use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage."

We were traveling at the time and stopped at a little city in India and

looked on while a juggler did his tricks before a group of natives. They

were wonderful, but I knew Satan could beat that game, and I begged him

to show off a little, and he said he would. He changed himself into a

native in turban and breech-cloth, and very considerately conferred on me

a temporary knowledge of the language.

The juggler exhibited a seed, covered it with earth in a small

flower-pot, then put a rag over the pot; after a minute the rag began to

rise; in ten minutes it had risen a foot; then the rag was removed and a

little tree was exposed, with leaves upon it and ripe fruit. We ate the

fruit, and it was good. But Satan said:

"Why do you cover the pot? Can't you grow the tree in the sunlight?"

"No," said the juggler; "no one can do that."

"You are only an apprentice; you don't know your trade. Give me the

seed. I will show you." He took the seed and said, "What shall I raise

from it?"

"It is a cherry seed; of course you will raise a cherry."

"Oh no; that is a trifle; any novice can do that. Shall I raise an

orange-tree from it?"

"Oh yes!" and the juggler laughed.

"And shall I make it bear other fruits as well as oranges?"

"If God wills!" and they all laughed.

Satan put the seed in the ground, put a handful of dust on it, and said,

"Rise!"

A tiny stem shot up and began to grow, and grew so fast that in five

minutes it was a great tree, and we were sitting in the shade of it.

There was a murmur of wonder, then all looked up and saw a strange and

pretty sight, for the branches were heavy with fruits of many kinds and

colors--oranges, grapes, bananas, peaches, cherries, apricots, and so on.

Baskets were brought, and the unlading of the tree began; and the people

crowded around Satan and kissed his hand, and praised him, calling him

the prince of jugglers. The news went about the town, and everybody came

running to see the wonder--and they remembered to bring baskets, too.

But the tree was equal to the occasion; it put out new fruits as fast as

any were removed; baskets were filled by the score and by the hundred,

but always the supply remained undiminished. At last a foreigner in

white linen and sun-helmet arrived, and exclaimed, angrily:

"Away from here! Clear out, you dogs; the tree is on my lands and is my

property."

The natives put down their baskets and made humble obeisance. Satan made

humble obeisance, too, with his fingers to his forehead, in the native

way, and said:

"Please let them have their pleasure for an hour, sir--only that, and no

longer. Afterward you may forbid them; and you will still have more

fruit than you and the state together can consume in a year."

This made the foreigner very angry, and he cried out, "Who are you, you

vagabond, to tell your betters what they may do and what they mayn't!"

and he struck Satan with his cane and followed this error with a kick.

The fruits rotted on the branches, and the leaves withered and fell. The

foreigner gazed at the bare limbs with the look of one who is surprised,

and not gratified. Satan said:

"Take good care of the tree, for its health and yours are bound together.

It will never bear again, but if you tend it well it will live long.

Water its roots once in each hour every night--and do it yourself; it

must not be done by proxy, and to do it in daylight will not answer. If

you fail only once in any night, the tree will die, and you likewise. Do

not go home to your own country any more--you would not reach there; make

no business or pleasure engagements which require you to go outside your

gate at night--you cannot afford the risk; do not rent or sell this

place--it would be injudicious."

The foreigner was proud and wouldn't beg, but I thought he looked as if

he would like to. While he stood gazing at Satan we vanished away and

landed in Ceylon.

I was sorry for that man; sorry Satan hadn't been his customary self and

killed him or made him a lunatic. It would have been a mercy. Satan

overheard the thought, and said:

"I would have done it but for his wife, who has not offended me. She is

coming to him presently from their native land, Portugal. She is well,

but has not long to live, and has been yearning to see him and persuade

him to go back with her next year. She will die without knowing he can't

leave that place."

"He won't tell her?"

"He? He will not trust that secret with any one; he will reflect that it

could be revealed in sleep, in the hearing of some Portuguese guest's

servant some time or other."

"Did none of those natives understand what you said to him?"

"None of them understood, but he will always be afraid that some of them

did. That fear will be torture to him, for he has been a harsh master to

them. In his dreams he will imagine them chopping his tree down. That

will make his days uncomfortable--I have already arranged for his

nights."

It grieved me, though not sharply, to see him take such a malicious

satisfaction in his plans for this foreigner.

"Does he believe what you told him, Satan?"

"He thought he didn't, but our vanishing helped. The tree, where there

had been no tree before--that helped. The insane and uncanny variety of

fruits--the sudden withering--all these things are helps. Let him think

as he may, reason as he may, one thing is certain, he will water the

tree. But between this and night he will begin his changed career with a

very natural precaution--for him."

"What is that?"

"He will fetch a priest to cast out the tree's devil. You are such a

humorous race--and don't suspect it."

"Will he tell the priest?"

"No. He will say a juggler from Bombay created it, and that he wants the

juggler's devil driven out of it, so that it will thrive and be fruitful

again. The priest's incantations will fail; then the Portuguese will

give up that scheme and get his watering-pot ready."

"But the priest will burn the tree. I know it; he will not allow it to

remain."

"Yes, and anywhere in Europe he would burn the man, too. But in India

the people are civilized, and these things will not happen. The man will

drive the priest away and take care of the tree."

I reflected a little, then said, "Satan, you have given him a hard life,

I think."

"Comparatively. It must not be mistaken for a holiday."

We flitted from place to place around the world as we had done before,

Satan showing me a hundred wonders, most of them reflecting in some way

the weakness and triviality of our race. He did this now every few days

--not out of malice--I am sure of that--it only seemed to amuse and

interest him, just as a naturalist might be amused and interested by a

collection of ants.

Chapter 11

For as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he came

less often, and then for a long time he did not come at all. This always

made me lonely and melancholy. I felt that he was losing interest in our

tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely. When one

day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only for a little while.

He had come to say good-by, he told me, and for the last time. He had

investigations and undertakings in other corners of the universe, he

said, that would keep him busy for a longer period than I could wait for

his return.

"And you are going away, and will not come back any more?"

"Yes," he said. "We have comraded long together, and it has been

pleasant--pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each

other any more."

"In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?"

Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, "There is

no other."

A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a

vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words

might be true--even must be true.

"Have you never suspected this, Theodor?"

"No. How could I? But if it can only be true--"

"It is true."

A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before

it could issue in words, and I said, "But--but--we have seen that future

life--seen it in its actuality, and so--"

"It was a vision--it had no existence."

I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me.

"A vision?--a vi--"

"Life itself is only a vision, a dream."

It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times

in my musings!

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God--man--the world--the sun, the moon,

the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence.

Nothing exists save empty space--and you!"

"I!"

"And you are not you--you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a

thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream--your dream,

creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this,

then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the

nothingness out of which you made me....

"I am perishing already--I am failing--I am passing away. In a little

while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless

solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you will remain a

thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable,

indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself

and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages,

eons, ago!--for you have existed, companionless, through all the

eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that

your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction!

Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all

dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet

preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy,

yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life,

yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness

unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels

painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and

maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths

mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied

by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other

people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them

all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the

responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it

where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine

obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a

dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly

creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks--in a

word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks

are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no

universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all

a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you

are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless

thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he

had said was true.

A FABLE

Once upon a time an artist who had painted a small and very beautiful

picture placed it so that he could see it in the mirror. He said, "This

doubles the distance and softens it, and it is twice as lovely as it was

before."

The animals out in the woods heard of this through the housecat, who was

greatly admired by them because he was so learned, and so refined and

civilized, and so polite and high-bred, and could tell them so much which

they didn't know before, and were not certain about afterward. They were

much excited about this new piece of gossip, and they asked questions, so

as to get at a full understanding of it. They asked what a picture was,

and the cat explained.

"It is a flat thing," he said; "wonderfully flat, marvelously flat,

enchantingly flat and elegant. And, oh, so beautiful!"

That excited them almost to a frenzy, and they said they would give the

world to see it. Then the bear asked:

"What is it that makes it so beautiful?"

"It is the looks of it," said the cat.

This filled them with admiration and uncertainty, and they were more

excited than ever. Then the cow asked:

"What is a mirror?"

"It is a hole in the wall," said the cat. "You look in it, and there you

see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and

inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and

round, and you almost swoon with ecstasy."

The ass had not said anything as yet; he now began to throw doubts.

He said there had never been anything as beautiful as this before, and

probably wasn't now. He said that when it took a whole basketful of

sesquipedalian adjectives to whoop up a thing of beauty, it was time for

suspicion.

It was easy to see that these doubts were having an effect upon the

animals, so the cat went off offended. The subject was dropped for a

couple of days, but in the meantime curiosity was taking a fresh start,

aid there was a revival of interest perceptible. Then the animals

assailed the ass for spoiling what could possibly have been a pleasure to

them, on a mere suspicion that the picture was not beautiful, without any

evidence that such was the case. The ass was not, troubled; he was calm,

and said there was one way to find out who was in the right, himself or

the cat: he would go and look in that hole, and come back and tell what

he found there. The animals felt relieved and grateful, and asked him to

go at once--which he did.

But he did not know where he ought to stand; and so, through error, he

stood between the picture and the mirror. The result was that the

picture had no chance, and didn't show up. He returned home and said:

"The cat lied. There was nothing in that hole but an ass. There wasn't

a sign of a flat thing visible. It was a handsome ass, and friendly, but

just an ass, and nothing more."

The elephant asked:

"Did you see it good and clear? Were you close to it?"

"I saw it good and clear, O Hathi, King of Beasts. I was so close that I

touched noses with it."

"This is very strange," said the elephant; "the cat was always truthful

before--as far as we could make out. Let another witness try. Go,

Baloo, look in the hole, and come and report."

So the bear went. When he came back, he said:

"Both the cat and the ass have lied; there was nothing in the hole but a

bear."

Great was the surprise and puzzlement of the animals. Each was now

anxious to make the test himself and get at the straight truth. The

elephant sent them one at a time.

First, the cow. She found nothing in the hole but a cow.

The tiger found nothing in it but a tiger.

The lion found nothing in it but a lion.

The leopard found nothing in it but a leopard.

The camel found a camel, and nothing more.

Then Hathi was wroth, and said he would have the truth, if he had to go

and fetch it himself. When he returned, he abused his whole subjectry

for liars, and was in an unappeasable fury with the moral and mental

blindness of the cat. He said that anybody but a near-sighted fool could

see that there was nothing in the hole but an elephant.

MORAL, BY THE CAT

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it

and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they

will be there.

HUNTING THE DECEITFUL TURKEY

When I was a boy my uncle and his big boys hunted with the rifle, the

youngest boy Fred and I with a shotgun--a small single-barrelled shotgun

which was properly suited to our size and strength; it was not much

heavier than a broom. We carried it turn about, half an hour at a time.

I was not able to hit anything with it, but I liked to try. Fred and I

hunted feathered small game, the others hunted deer, squirrels, wild

turkeys, and such things. My uncle and the big boys were good shots.

They killed hawks and wild geese and such like on the wing; and they

didn't wound or kill squirrels, they stunned them. When the dogs treed a

squirrel, the squirrel would scamper aloft and run out on a limb and

flatten himself along it, hoping to make himself invisible in that way

--and not quite succeeding. You could see his wee little ears sticking

up. You couldn't see his nose, but you knew where it was. Then the

hunter, despising a "rest" for his rifle, stood up and took offhand aim

at the limb and sent a bullet into it immediately under the squirrel's

nose, and down tumbled the animal, unwounded, but unconscious; the dogs

gave him a shake and he was dead. Sometimes when the distance was great

and the wind not accurately allowed for, the bullet would hit the

squirrel's head; the dogs could do as they pleased with that one--the

hunter's pride was hurt, and he wouldn't allow it to go into the gamebag.

In the first faint gray of the dawn the stately wild turkeys would be

stalking around in great flocks, and ready to be sociable and answer

invitations to come and converse with other excursionists of their kind.

The hunter concealed himself and imitated the turkey-call by sucking the

air through the leg-bone of a turkey which had previously answered a call

like that and lived only just long enough to regret it. There is nothing

that furnishes a perfect turkey-call except that bone. Another of

Nature's treacheries, you see. She is full of them; half the time she

doesn't know which she likes best--to betray her child or protect it.

In the case of the turkey she is badly mixed: she gives it a bone to be

used in getting it into trouble, and she also furnishes it with a trick

for getting itself out of the trouble again. When a mamma-turkey answers

an invitation and finds she has made a mistake in accepting it, she does

as the mamma-partridge does--remembers a previous engagement--and goes

limping and scrambling away, pretending to be very lame; and at the same

time she is saying to her not-visible children, "Lie low, keep still,

don't expose yourselves; I shall be back as soon as I have beguiled this

shabby swindler out of the country."

When a person is ignorant and confiding, this immoral device can have

tiresome results. I followed an ostensibly lame turkey over a

considerable part of the United States one morning, because I believed in

her and could not think she would deceive a mere boy, and one who was

trusting her and considering her honest. I had the single-barrelled

shotgun, but my idea was to catch her alive. I often got within rushing

distance of her, and then made my rush; but always, just as I made my

final plunge and put my hand down where her back had been, it wasn't

there; it was only two or three inches from there and I brushed the

tail-feathers as I landed on my stomach--a very close call, but still not

quite close enough; that is, not close enough for success, but just close

enough to convince me that I could do it next time. She always waited

for me, a little piece away, and let on to be resting and greatly

fatigued; which was a lie, but I believed it, for I still thought her

honest long after I ought to have begun to doubt her, suspecting that

this was no way for a high-minded bird to be acting. I followed, and

followed, and followed, making my periodical rushes, and getting up and

brushing the dust off, and resuming the voyage with patient confidence;

indeed, with a confidence which grew, for I could see by the change of

climate and vegetation that we were getting up into the high latitudes,

and as she always looked a little tireder and a little more discouraged

after each rush, I judged that I was safe to win, in the end, the

competition being purely a matter of staying power and the advantage

lying with me from the start because she was lame.

Along in the afternoon I began to feel fatigued myself. Neither of us

had had any rest since we first started on the excursion, which was

upwards of ten hours before, though latterly we had paused awhile after

rushes, I letting on to be thinking about something else; but neither of

us sincere, and both of us waiting for the other to call game but in no

real hurry about it, for indeed those little evanescent snatches of rest

were very grateful to the feelings of us both; it would naturally be so,

skirmishing along like that ever since dawn and not a bite in the

meantime; at least for me, though sometimes as she lay on her side

fanning herself with a wing and praying for strength to get out of this

difficulty a grasshopper happened along whose time had come, and that was

well for her, and fortunate, but I had nothing--nothing the whole day.

More than once, after I was very tired, I gave up taking her alive, and

was going to shoot her, but I never did it, although it was my right, for

I did not believe I could hit her; and besides, she always stopped and

posed, when I raised the gun, and this made me suspicious that she knew

about me and my marksmanship, and so I did not care to expose myself to

remarks.

I did not get her, at all. When she got tired of the game at last, she

rose from almost under my hand and flew aloft with the rush and whir of a

shell and lit on the highest limb of a great tree and sat down and

crossed her legs and smiled down at me, and seemed gratified to see me so

astonished.

I was ashamed, and also lost; and it was while wandering the woods

hunting for myself that I found a deserted log cabin and had one of the

best meals there that in my life-days I have eaten. The weed-grown

garden was full of ripe tomatoes, and I ate them ravenously, though I had

never liked them before. Not more than two or three times since have I

tasted anything that was so delicious as those tomatoes. I surfeited

myself with them, and did not taste another one until I was in middle

life. I can eat them now, but I do not like the look of them. I suppose

we have all experienced a surfeit at one time or another. Once, in

stress of circumstances, I ate part of a barrel of sardines, there being

nothing else at hand, but since then I have always been able to get along

without sardines.

THE McWILLIAMSES AND THE BURGLAR ALARM

The conversation drifted smoothly and pleasantly along from weather to

crops, from crops to literature, from literature to scandal, from scandal

to religion; then took a random jump, and landed on the subject of

burglar alarms. And now for the first time Mr. McWilliams showed

feeling. Whenever I perceive this sign on this man's dial, I comprehend

it, and lapse into silence, and give him opportunity to unload his heart.

Said he, with but ill-controlled emotion:

"I do not go one single cent on burglar alarms, Mr. Twain--not a single

cent--and I will tell you why. When we were finishing our house, we

found we had a little cash left over, on account of the plumber not

knowing it. I was for enlightening the heathen with it, for I was always

unaccountably down on the heathen somehow; but Mrs. McWilliams said no,

let's have a burglar alarm. I agreed to this compromise. I will explain

that whenever I want a thing, and Mrs. McWilliams wants another thing,

and we decide upon the thing that Mrs. McWilliams wants--as we always do

--she calls that a compromise. Very well: the man came up from New York

and put in the alarm, and charged three hundred and twenty-five dollars

for it, and said we could sleep without uneasiness now. So we did for

awhile--say a month. Then one night we smelled smoke, and I was advised

to get up and see what the matter was. I lit a candle, and started

toward the stairs, and met a burglar coming out of a room with a basket

of tinware, which he had mistaken for solid silver in the dark. He was

smoking a pipe. I said, 'My friend, we do not allow smoking in this

room.' He said he was a stranger, and could not be expected to know the

rules of the house: said he had been in many houses just as good as this

one, and it had never been objected to before. He added that as far as

his experience went, such rules had never been considered to apply to

burglars, anyway.

"I said: 'Smoke along, then, if it is the custom, though I think that the

conceding of a privilege to a burglar which is denied to a bishop is a

conspicuous sign of the looseness of the times. But waiving all that,

what business have you to be entering this house in this furtive and

clandestine way, without ringing the burglar alarm?'

"He looked confused and ashamed, and said, with embarrassment: 'I beg a

thousand pardons. I did not know you had a burglar alarm, else I would

have rung it. I beg you will not mention it where my parents may hear of

it, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach of

the hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization might all

too rudely sunder the frail bridge which hangs darkling between the pale

and evanescent present and the solemn great deeps of the eternities. May

I trouble you for a match?'

"I said: 'Your sentiments do you honor, but if you will allow me to say

it, metaphor is not your best hold. Spare your thigh; this kind light

only on the box, and seldom there, in fact, if my experience may be

trusted. But to return to business: how did you get in here?'

"'Through a second-story window.'

"It was even so. I redeemed the tinware at pawnbroker's rates, less cost

of advertising, bade the burglar good-night, closed the window after him,

and retired to headquarters to report. Next morning we sent for the

burglar-alarm man, and he came up and explained that the reason the alarm

did not 'go off' was that no part of the house but the first floor was

attached to the alarm. This was simply idiotic; one might as well have

no armor on at all in battle as to have it only on his legs. The expert

now put the whole second story on the alarm, charged three hundred

dollars for it, and went his way. By and by, one night, I found a

burglar in the third story, about to start down a ladder with a lot of

miscellaneous property. My first impulse was to crack his head with a

billiard cue; but my second was to refrain from this attention, because

he was between me and the cue rack. The second impulse was plainly the

soundest, so I refrained, and proceeded to compromise. I redeemed the

property at former rates, after deducting ten per cent. for use of

ladder, it being my ladder, and, next day we sent down for the expert

once more, and had the third story attached to the alarm, for three

hundred dollars.

"By this time the 'annunciator' had grown to formidable dimensions. It

had forty-seven tags on it, marked with the names of the various rooms

and chimneys, and it occupied the space of an ordinary wardrobe. The

gong was the size of a wash-bowl, and was placed above the head of our

bed. There was a wire from the house to the coachman's quarters in the

stable, and a noble gong alongside his pillow.

"We should have been comfortable now but for one defect. Every morning

at five the cook opened the kitchen door, in the way of business, and rip

went that gong! The first time this happened I thought the last day was

come sure. I didn't think it in bed--no, but out of it--for the first

effect of that frightful gong is to hurl you across the house, and slam

you against the wall, and then curl you up, and squirm you like a spider

on a stove lid, till somebody shuts the kitchen door. In solid fact,

there is no clamor that is even remotely comparable to the dire clamor

which that gong makes. Well, this catastrophe happened every morning

regularly at five o'clock, and lost us three hours sleep; for, mind you,

when that thing wakes you, it doesn't merely wake you in spots; it wakes

you all over, conscience and all, and you are good for eighteen hours of

wide-awakeness subsequently--eighteen hours of the very most

inconceivable wide-awakeness that you ever experienced in your life.

A stranger died on our hands one time, aid we vacated and left him in our

room overnight. Did that stranger wait for the general judgment? No,

sir; he got up at five the next morning in the most prompt and

unostentatious way. I knew he would; I knew it mighty well. He

collected his life-insurance, and lived happy ever after, for there was

plenty of proof as to the perfect squareness of his death.

"Well, we were gradually fading toward a better land, on account of the

daily loss of sleep; so we finally had the expert up again, and he ran a

wire to the outside of the door, and placed a switch there, whereby

Thomas, the butler, always made one little mistake--he switched the alarm

off at night when he went to bed, and switched it on again at daybreak in

the morning, just in time for the cook to open the kitchen door, and

enable that gong to slam us across the house, sometimes breaking a window

with one or the other of us. At the end of a week we recognized that

this switch business was a delusion and a snare. We also discovered that

a band of burglars had been lodging in the house the whole time--not

exactly to steal, for there wasn't much left now, but to hide from the

police, for they were hot pressed, and they shrewdly judged that the

detectives would never think of a tribe of burglars taking sanctuary in a

house notoriously protected by the most imposing and elaborate burglar

alarm in America.

"Sent down for the expert again, and this time he struck a most dazzling

idea--he fixed the thing so that opening the kitchen door would take off

the alarm. It was a noble idea, and he charged accordingly. But you

already foresee the result. I switched on the alarm every night at

bed-time, no longer trusting on Thomas's frail memory; and as soon as the

lights were out the burglars walked in at the kitchen door, thus taking

the alarm off without waiting for the cook to do it in the morning. You

see how aggravatingly we were situated. For months we couldn't have any

company. Not a spare bed in the house; all occupied by burglars.

"Finally, I got up a cure of my own. The expert answered the call, and

ran another ground wire to the stable, and established a switch there, so

that the coachman could put on and take off the alarm. That worked first

rate, and a season of peace ensued, during which we got to inviting

company once more and enjoying life.

"But by and by the irrepressible alarm invented a new kink. One winter's

night we were flung out of bed by the sudden music of that awful gong,

and when we hobbled to the annunciator, turned up the gas, and saw the

word 'Nursery' exposed, Mrs. McWilliams fainted dead away, and I came

precious near doing the same thing myself. I seized my shotgun, and

stood timing the coachman whilst that appalling buzzing went on. I knew

that his gong had flung him out, too, and that he would be along with his

gun as soon as he could jump into his clothes. When I judged that the

time was ripe, I crept to the room next the nursery, glanced through the

window, and saw the dim outline of the coachman in the yard below,

standing at present-arms and waiting for a chance. Then I hopped into

the nursery and fired, and in the same instant the coachman fired at the

red flash of my gun. Both of us were successful; I crippled a nurse, and

he shot off all my back hair. We turned up the gas, and telephoned for a

surgeon. There was not a sign of a burglar, and no window had been

raised. One glass was absent, but that was where the coachman's charge

had come through. Here was a fine mystery--a burglar alarm 'going off'

at midnight of its own accord, and not a burglar in the neighborhood!

"The expert answered the usual call, and explained that it was a 'False

alarm.' Said it was easily fixed. So he overhauled the nursery window,

charged a remunerative figure for it, and departed.

"What we suffered from false alarms for the next three years no

stylographic pen can describe. During the next three months I always

flew with my gun to the room indicated, and the coachman always sallied

forth with his battery to support me. But there was never anything to

shoot at--windows all tight and secure. We always sent down for the

expert next day, and he fixed those particular windows so they would keep

quiet a week or so, and always remembered to send us a bill about like

this:

Wire ............................$2.15

Nipple........................... .75

Two hours' labor ................ 1.50

Wax.............................. .47

Tape............................. .34

Screws........................... .15

Recharging battery .............. .98

Three hours' labor .............. 2.25

String........................... .02

Lard ............................ .66

Pond's Extract .................. 1.25

Springs at 50.................... 2.00

Railroad fares................... 7.25

"At length a perfectly natural thing came about--after we had answered

three or four hundred false alarms--to wit, we stopped answering them.

Yes, I simply rose up calmly, when slammed across the house by the alarm,

calmly inspected the annunciator, took note of the room indicated; and

then calmly disconnected that room from the alarm, and went back to bed

as if nothing had happened. Moreover, I left that room off permanently,

and did not send for the expert. Well, it goes without saying that in

the course of time all the rooms were taken off, and the entire machine

was out of service.

"It was at this unprotected time that the heaviest calamity of all

happened. The burglars walked in one night and carried off the burglar

alarm! yes, sir, every hide and hair of it: ripped it out, tooth and

nail; springs, bells, gongs, battery, and all; they took a hundred and

fifty miles of copper wire; they just cleaned her out, bag and baggage,

and never left us a vestige of her to swear at--swear by, I mean.

"We had a time of it to get her back; but we accomplished it finally, for

money. The alarm firm said that what we needed now was to have her put

in right--with their new patent springs in the windows to make false

alarms impossible, and their new patent clock attached to take off and

put on the alarm morning and night without human assistance. That seemed

a good scheme. They promised to have the whole thing finished in ten

days. They began work, and we left for the summer. They worked a couple

of days; then they left for the summer. After which the burglars moved

in, and began their summer vacation. When we returned in the fall, the

house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been

at work. We refurnished, and then sent down to hurry up the expert. He

came up and finished the job, and said: 'Now this clock is set to put on

the alarm every night at 10, and take it off every morning at 5:45. All

you've got to do is to wind her up every week, and then leave her alone

--she will take care of the alarm herself.'

"After that we had a most tranquil season during three months. The bill

was prodigious, of course, and I had said I would not pay it until the

new machinery had proved itself to be flawless. The time stipulated was

three months. So I paid the bill, and the very next day the alarm went

to buzzing like ten thousand bee swarms at ten o'clock in the morning.

I turned the hands around twelve hours, according to instructions, and

this took off the alarm; but there was another hitch at night, and I had

to set her ahead twelve hours once more to get her to put the alarm on

again. That sort of nonsense went on a week or two, then the expert came

up and put in a new clock. He came up every three months during the next

three years, and put in a new clock. But it was always a failure. His

clocks all had the same perverse defect: they would put the alarm on in

the daytime, and they would not put it on at night; and if you forced it

on yourself, they would take it off again the minute your back was

turned.

"Now there is the history of that burglar alarm--everything just as it

happened; nothing extenuated, and naught set down in malice. Yes, sir,

--and when I had slept nine years with burglars, and maintained an

expensive burglar alarm the whole time, for their protection, not mine,

and at my sole cost--for not a d---d cent could I ever get THEM to

contribute--I just said to Mrs. McWilliams that I had had enough of that

kind of pie; so with her full consent I took the whole thing out and

traded it off for a dog, and shot the dog. I don't know what you think

about it, Mr. Twain; but I think those things are made solely in the

interest of the burglars. Yes, sir, a burglar alarm combines in its

person all that is objectionable about a fire, a riot, and a harem, and

at the same time had none of the compensating advantages, of one sort or

another, that customarily belong with that combination. Good-by: I get

off here."

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A DOUBLE BARRELLED DETECTIVE

by Mark Twain

PART I

"We ought never to do wrong when people are looking."

I

The first scene is in the country, in Virginia; the time, 1880. There

has been a wedding, between a handsome young man of slender means and a

rich young girl--a case of love at first sight and a precipitate

marriage; a marriage bitterly opposed by the girl's widowed father.

Jacob Fuller, the bridegroom, is twenty-six years old, is of an old but

unconsidered family which had by compulsion emigrated from Sedgemoor, and

for King James's purse's profit, so everybody said--some maliciously the

rest merely because they believed it. The bride is nineteen and

beautiful. She is intense, high-strung, romantic, immeasurably proud of

her Cavalier blood, and passionate in her love for her young husband.

For its sake she braved her father's displeasure, endured his reproaches,

listened with loyalty unshaken to his warning predictions and went from

his house without his blessing, proud and happy in the proofs she was

thus giving of the quality of the affection which had made its home in

her heart.

The morning after the marriage there was a sad surprise for her. Her

husband put aside her proffered caresses, and said:

"Sit down. I have something to say to you. I loved you. That was

before I asked your father to give you to me. His refusal is not my

grievance--I could have endured that. But the things he said of me to

you--that is a different matter. There--you needn't speak; I know quite

well what they were; I got them from authentic sources. Among other

things he said that my character was written in my face; that I was

treacherous, a dissembler, a coward, and a brute without sense of pity or

compassion: the 'Sedgemoor trade-mark,' he called it--and 'white-sleeve

badge.' Any other man in my place would have gone to his house and shot

him down like a dog. I wanted to do it, and was minded to do it, but a

better thought came to me: to put him to shame; to break his heart; to

kill him by inches. How to do it? Through my treatment of you, his

idol! I would marry you; and then--Have patience. You will see."

From that moment onward, for three months, the young wife suffered all

the humiliations, all the insults, all the miseries that the diligent and

inventive mind of the husband could contrive, save physical injuries

only. Her strong pride stood by her, and she kept the secret of her

troubles. Now and then the husband said, "Why don't you go to your

father and tell him?" Then he invented new tortures, applied them, and

asked again. She always answered, "He shall never know by my mouth," and

taunted him with his origin; said she was the lawful slave of a scion of

slaves, and must obey, and would--up to that point, but no further; he

could kill her if he liked, but he could not break her; it was not in the

Sedgemoor breed to do it. At the end of the three months he said, with a

dark significance in his manner, "I have tried all things but one"--and

waited for her reply. "Try that," she said, and curled her lip in

mockery.

That night he rose at midnight and put on his clothes, then said to her:

"Get up and dress!"

She obeyed--as always, without a word. He led her half a mile from the

house, and proceeded to lash her to a tree by the side of the public

road; and succeeded, she screaming and struggling. He gagged her then,

struck her across the face with his cowhide, and set his bloodhounds on

her. They tore the clothes off her, and she was naked. He called the

dogs off, and said:

"You will be found--by the passing public. They will be dropping along

about three hours from now, and will spread the news--do you hear?

Good-by. You have seen the last of me."

He went away then. She moaned to herself:

"I shall bear a child--to him! God grant it may be a boy!"

The farmers released her by and by--and spread the news, which was

natural. They raised the country with lynching intentions, but the bird

had flown. The young wife shut herself up in her father's house; he shut

himself up with her, and thenceforth would see no one. His pride was

broken, and his heart; so he wasted away, day by day, and even his

daughter rejoiced when death relieved him.

Then she sold the estate and disappeared.

II

In 1886 a young woman was living in a modest house near a secluded New

England village, with no company but a little boy about five years old.

She did her own work, she discouraged acquaintanceships, and had none.

The butcher, the baker, and the others that served her could tell the

villagers nothing about her further than that her name was Stillman, and

that she called the child Archy. Whence she came they had not been able

to find out, but they said she talked like a Southerner. The child had

no playmates and no comrade, and no teacher but the mother. She taught

him diligently and intelligently, and was satisfied with the results

--even a little proud of them. One day Archy said:

"Mamma, am I different from other children?"

"Well, I suppose not. Why?"

"There was a child going along out there and asked me if the postman had

been by and I said yes, and she said how long since I saw him and I said

I hadn't seen him at all, and she said how did I know he'd been by, then,

and I said because I smelt his track on the sidewalk, and she said I was

a dum fool and made a mouth at me. What did she do that for?"

The young woman turned white, and said to herself, "It's a birth mark!

The gift of the bloodhound is in him." She snatched the boy to her

breast and hugged him passionately, saying, "God has appointed the way!"

Her eyes were burning with a fierce light, and her breath came short and

quick with excitement. She said to herself: "The puzzle is solved now;

many a time it has been a mystery to me, the impossible things the child

has done in the dark, but it is all clear to me now."

She set him in his small chair, and said:

"Wait a little till I come, dear; then we will talk about the matter."

She went up to her room and took from her dressing-table several small

articles and put them out of sight: a nail-file on the floor under the

bed; a pair of nail-scissors under the bureau; a small ivory paper-knife

under the wardrobe. Then she returned, and said:

"There! I have left some things which I ought to have brought down."

She named them, and said, "Run up and bring them, dear."

The child hurried away on his errand and was soon back again with the

things.

"Did you have any difficulty, dear?"

"No, mamma; I only went where you went."

During his absence she had stepped to the bookcase, taken several books

from the bottom shelf, opened each, passed her hand over a page, noting

its number in her memory, then restored them to their places. Now she

said:

"I have been doing something while you have been gone, Archy. Do you

think you can find out what it was?"

The boy went to the bookcase and got out the books that had been touched,

and opened them at the pages which had been stroked.

The mother took him in her lap, and said:

"I will answer your question now, dear. I have found out that in one way

you are quite different from other people. You can see in the dark, you

can smell what other people cannot, you have the talents of a bloodhound.

They are good and valuable things to have, but you must keep the matter a

secret. If people found it out, they would speak of you as an odd child,

a strange child, and children would be disagreeable to you, and give you

nicknames. In this world one must be like everybody else if he doesn't

want to provoke scorn or envy or jealousy. It is a great and fine

distinction which has been born to you, and I am glad; but you will keep

it a secret, for mamma's sake, won't you?"

The child promised, without understanding.