The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
By Mark Twain
Samuel L. Clemens
1894
HARTFORD, CONN.
AMERICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY
Copyright, 1894,
by OLIVIA L. CLEMENS
All Rights Reserved
The right of dramatization and translation reserved.
Copyright, 1893-1894, by the Century Company, in the Century Magazine.
Copyright, 1894, by Olivia L. Clemens
(All Rights Reserved)
Contents
Pudd'nhead Wilson
Chapter Chapter Title Page
A Whisper to the Reader 15
I. Pudd'nhead Wins His Name 17
II. Driscoll Spares His Slaves 27
III. Roxy Plays a Shrewd Trick 41
IV. The Ways of the Changelings 52
V. The Twins Thrill Dawson's Landing 67
VI. Swimming in Glory 77
VII. The Unknown Nymph 86
VIII. Marse Tom Tramples His Chance 93
IX. Tom Practises Sycophancy 111
X. The Nymph Revealed 121
XI. Pudd'nhead's Startling Discovery 130
XII. The Shame of Judge Driscoll 155
XIII. Tom Stares at Ruin 166
XIV. Roxana Insists Upon Reform 179
XV. The Robber Robbed 197
XVI. Sold Down the River 214
XVII. The Judge Utters Dire Prophecy 221
XVIII. Roxana Commands 225
XIX. The Prophecy Realized 246
XX. The Murderer Chuckles 263
XXI. Doom 278
Conclusion 300
A Whisper
to the Reader.
There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed
by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance:
his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the
humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of
feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in
doubt.--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar.
A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make
mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen; and so
I was not willing to let the law chapters in this book go to press
without first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting revision and
correction by a trained barrister--if that is what they are called.
These chapters are right, now, in every detail, for they were rewritten
under the immediate eye of William Hicks, who studied law part of a
while in southwest Missouri thirty-five years ago and then came over
here to Florence for his health and is still helping for exercise and
board in Macaroni Vermicelli's horse-feed shed which is up the back
alley as you turn around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just
beyond the house where that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred
years ago is let into the wall when he let on to be watching them build
Giotto's campanile and yet always got tired looking as soon as Beatrice
passed along on her way to get a chunk of chestnut cake to defend
herself with in case of a Ghibelline outbreak before she got to school,
at the same old stand where they sell the same old cake to this day and
it is just as light and good as it was then, too, and this is not
flattery, far from it. He was a little rusty on his law, but he rubbed
up for this book, and those two or three legal chapters are right and
straight, now. He told me so himself.
Given under my hand this second day of January, 1893, at the Villa
Viviani, village of Settignano, three miles back of Florence, on the
hills--the same certainly affording the most charming view to be found
on this planet, and with it the most dreamlike and enchanting sunsets to
be found in any planet or even in any solar system--and given, too, in
the swell room of the house, with the busts of Cerretani senators and
other grandees of this line looking approvingly down upon me as they
used to look down upon Dante, and mutely asking me to adopt them into my
family, which I do with pleasure, for my remotest ancestors are but
spring chickens compared with these robed and stately antiques, and it
will be a great and satisfying lift for me, that six hundred years will.
Mark Twain.
CHAPTER I.
Pudd'nhead Wins His Name.
Tell the truth or trump--but get the trick.--Pudd'nhead Wilson's
Calendar.
The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's Landing, on the
Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey, per steamboat,
below St. Louis.
In 1830 it was a snug little collection of modest one- and two-story
frame dwellings whose whitewashed exteriors were almost concealed from
sight by climbing tangles of rose-vines, honeysuckles, and
morning-glories. Each of these pretty homes had a garden in front fenced
with white palings and opulently stocked with hollyhocks, marigolds,
touch-me-nots, prince's-feathers and other old-fashioned flowers; while
on the window-sills of the houses stood wooden boxes containing
moss-rose plants and terra-cotta pots in which grew a breed of geranium
whose spread of intensely red blossoms accented the prevailing pink tint
of the rose-clad house-front like an explosion of flame. When there was
room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was
there--in sunny weather--stretched at full length, asleep and blissful,
with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose. Then
that house was complete, and its contentment and peace were made
manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible. A
home without a cat--and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered
cat--may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?
All along the streets, on both sides, at the outer edge of the brick
sidewalks, stood locust-trees with trunks protected by wooden boxing,
and these furnished shade for summer and a sweet fragrance in spring
when the clusters of buds came forth. The main street, one block back
from the river, and running parallel with it, was the sole business
street. It was six blocks long, and in each block two or three brick
stores three stories high towered above interjected bunches of little
frame shops. Swinging signs creaked in the wind, the street's whole
length. The candy-striped pole which indicates nobility proud and
ancient along the palace-bordered canals of Venice, indicated merely the
humble barber shop along the main street of Dawson's Landing. On a chief
corner stood a lofty unpainted pole wreathed from top to bottom with tin
pots and pans and cups, the chief tinmonger's noisy notice to the world
(when the wind blew) that his shop was on hand for business at that
corner.
The hamlet's front was washed by the clear waters of the great river;
its body stretched itself rearward up a gentle incline; its most
rearward border fringed itself out and scattered its houses about the
base-line of the hills; the hills rose high, inclosing the town in a
half-moon curve, clothed with forests from foot to summit.
Steamboats passed up and down every hour or so. Those belonging to the
little Cairo line and the little Memphis line always stopped; the big
Orleans liners stopped for hails only, or to land passengers or freight;
and this was the case also with the great flotilla of "transients."
These latter came out of a dozen rivers--the Illinois, the Missouri, the
Upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the Monongahela, the Tennessee, the Red
River, the White River, and so on; and were bound every whither and
stocked with every imaginable comfort or necessity which the
Mississippi's communities could want, from the frosty Falls of St.
Anthony down through nine climates to torrid New Orleans.
Dawson's Landing was a slaveholding town, with a rich slave-worked grain
and pork country back of it. The town was sleepy and comfortable and
contented. It was fifty years old, and was growing slowly--very slowly,
in fact, but still it was growing.
The chief citizen was York Leicester Driscoll, about forty years old,
judge of the county court. He was very proud of his old Virginian
ancestry, and in his hospitalities and his rather formal and stately
manners he kept up its traditions. He was fine and just and generous. To
be a gentleman--a gentleman without stain or blemish--was his only
religion, and to it he was always faithful. He was respected, esteemed
and beloved by all the community. He was well off, and was gradually
adding to his store. He and his wife were very nearly happy, but not
quite, for they had no children. The longing for the treasure of a child
had grown stronger and stronger as the years slipped away, but the
blessing never came--and was never to come.
With this pair lived the Judge's widowed sister, Mrs. Rachel Pratt, and
she also was childless--childless, and sorrowful for that reason, and
not to be comforted. The women were good and commonplace people, and did
their duty and had their reward in clear consciences and the community's
approbation. They were Presbyterians, the Judge was a free-thinker.
Pembroke Howard, lawyer and bachelor, aged about forty, was another old
Virginian grandee with proved descent from the First Families. He was a
fine, brave, majestic creature, a gentleman according to the nicest
requirements of the Virginia rule, a devoted Presbyterian, an authority
on the "code," and a man always courteously ready to stand up before you
in the field if any act or word of his had seemed doubtful or suspicious
to you, and explain it with any weapon you might prefer from brad-awls
to artillery. He was very popular with the people, and was the Judge's
dearest friend.
Then there was Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, another F. F. V. of
formidable caliber--however, with him we have no concern.
Percy Northumberland Driscoll, brother to the Judge, and younger than he
by five years, was a married man, and had had children around his
hearthstone; but they were attacked in detail by measles, croup and
scarlet fever, and this had given the doctor a chance with his effective
antediluvian methods; so the cradles were empty. He was a prosperous
man, with a good head for speculations, and his fortune was growing. On
the 1st of February, 1830, two boy babes were born in his house: one to
him, the other to one of his slave girls, Roxana by name. Roxana was
twenty years old. She was up and around the same day, with her hands
full, for she was tending both babies.
Mrs. Percy Driscoll died within the week. Roxy remained in charge of the
children. She had her own way, for Mr. Driscoll soon absorbed himself in
his speculations and left her to her own devices.
In that same month of February, Dawson's Landing gained a new citizen.
This was Mr. David Wilson, a young fellow of Scotch parentage. He had
wandered to this remote region from his birthplace in the interior of
the State of New York, to seek his fortune. He was twenty-five years
old, college-bred, and had finished a post-college course in an Eastern
law school a couple of years before.
He was a homely, freckled, sandy-haired young fellow, with an
intelligent blue eye that had frankness and comradeship in it and a
covert twinkle of a pleasant sort. But for an unfortunate remark of his,
he would no doubt have entered at once upon a successful career at
Dawson's Landing. But he made his fatal remark the first day he spent in
the village, and it "gaged" him. He had just made the acquaintance of a
group of citizens when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl
and make himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young
Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud--
"I wish I owned half of that dog."
"Why?" somebody asked.
"Because I would kill my half."
The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found
no light there, no expression that they could read. They fell away from
him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him. One
said:
"'Pears to be a fool."
"'Pears?" said another. "Is, I reckon you better say."
"Said he wished he owned half of the dog, the idiot," said a third.
"What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his
half? Do you reckon he thought it would live?"
"Why, he must have thought it, unless he is the downrightest fool in the
world; because if he hadn't thought it, he would have wanted to own the
whole dog, knowing that if he killed his half and the other half died,
he would be responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed
that half instead of his own. Don't it look that way to you, gents?"
"Yes, it does. If he owned one half of the general dog, it would be so;
if he owned one end of the dog and another person owned the other end,
it would be so, just the same; particularly in the first case, because
if you kill one half of a general dog, there ain't any man that can tell
whose half it was, but if he owned one end of the dog, maybe he could
kill his end of it and--"
"No, he couldn't either; he couldn't and not be responsible if the other
end died, which it would. In my opinion that man ain't in his right
mind."
"In my opinion he hain't got any mind."
No. 3 said: "Well, he's a lummox, anyway."
"That's what he is," said No. 4, "he's a labrick--just a Simon-pure
labrick, if ever there was one."
"Yes, sir, he's a dam fool, that's the way I put him up," said No. 5.
"Anybody can think different that wants to, but those are my
sentiments."
"I'm with you, gentlemen," said No. 6. "Perfect jackass--yes, and it
ain't going too far to say he is a pudd'nhead. If he ain't a pudd'nhead,
I ain't no judge, that's all."
Mr. Wilson stood elected. The incident was told all over the town, and
gravely discussed by everybody. Within a week he had lost his first
name; Pudd'nhead took its place. In time he came to be liked, and well
liked too; but by that time the nickname had got well stuck on, and it
stayed. That first day's verdict made him a fool, and he was not able to
get it set aside, or even modified. The nickname soon ceased to carry
any harsh or unfriendly feeling with it, but it held its place, and was
to continue to hold its place for twenty long years.