The Nymph Revealed.
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.--Pudd'nhead
Wilson's Calendar.
When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.--Pudd'nhead Wilson's
Calendar.
Every now and then, after Tom went to bed, he had sudden wakings out of
his sleep, and his first thought was, "Oh, joy, it was all a dream!"
Then he laid himself heavily down again, with a groan and the muttered
words, "A nigger! I am a nigger! Oh, I wish I was dead!"
He woke at dawn with one more repetition of this horror, and then he
resolved to meddle no more with that treacherous sleep. He began to
think. Sufficiently bitter thinkings they were. They wandered along
something after this fashion:
"Why were niggers and whites made? What crime did the uncreated first
nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him? And why is
this awful difference made between white and black? ... How hard the
nigger's fate seems, this morning!--yet until last night such a thought
never entered my head."
He sighed and groaned an hour or more away. Then "Chambers" came humbly
in to say that breakfast was nearly ready. "Tom" blushed scarlet to see
this aristocratic white youth cringe to him, a nigger, and call him
"Young Marster." He said roughly--
"Get out of my sight!" and when the youth was gone, he muttered, "He has
done me no harm, poor wretch, but he is an eyesore to me now, for he is
Driscoll the young gentleman, and I am a--oh, I wish I was dead!"
A gigantic irruption, like that of Krakatoa a few years ago, with the
accompanying earthquakes, tidal waves, and clouds of volcanic dust,
changes the face of the surrounding landscape beyond recognition,
bringing down the high lands, elevating the low, making fair lakes where
deserts had been, and deserts where green prairies had smiled before.
The tremendous catastrophe which had befallen Tom had changed his moral
landscape in much the same way. Some of his low places he found lifted
to ideals, some of his ideals had sunk to the valleys, and lay there
with the sackcloth and ashes of pumice-stone and sulphur on their ruined
heads.
For days he wandered in lonely places, thinking, thinking,
thinking--trying to get his bearings. It was new work. If he met a
friend, he found that the habit of a lifetime had in some mysterious way
vanished--his arm hung limp, instead of involuntarily extending the hand
for a shake. It was the "nigger" in him asserting its humility, and he
blushed and was abashed. And the "nigger" in him was surprised when the
white friend put out his hand for a shake with him. He found the
"nigger" in him involuntarily giving the road, on the sidewalk, to a
white rowdy and loafer. When Rowena, the dearest thing his heart knew,
the idol of his secret worship, invited him in, the "nigger" in him made
an embarrassed excuse and was afraid to enter and sit with the dread
white folks on equal terms. The "nigger" in him went shrinking and
skulking here and there and yonder, and fancying it saw suspicion and
maybe detection in all faces, tones, and gestures. So strange and
uncharacteristic was Tom's conduct that people noticed it, and turned to
look after him when he passed on; and when he glanced back--as he could
not help doing, in spite of his best resistance--and caught that puzzled
expression in a person's face, it gave him a sick feeling, and he took
himself out of view as quickly as he could. He presently came to have a
hunted sense and a hunted look, and then he fled away to the hill-tops
and the solitudes. He said to himself that the curse of Ham was upon
him.
He dreaded his meals; the "nigger" in him was ashamed to sit at the
white folks' table, and feared discovery all the time; and once when
Judge Driscoll said, "What's the matter with you? You look as meek as a
nigger," he felt as secret murderers are said to feel when the accuser
says, "Thou art the man!" Tom said he was not well, and left the table.
His ostensible "aunt's" solicitudes and endearments were become a terror
to him, and he avoided them.
And all the time, hatred of his ostensible "uncle" was steadily growing
in his heart; for he said to himself, "He is white; and I am his
chattel, his property, his goods, and he can sell me, just as he could
his dog."
For as much as a week after this, Tom imagined that his character had
undergone a pretty radical change. But that was because he did not know
himself.
In several ways his opinions were totally changed, and would never go
back to what they were before, but the main structure of his character
was not changed, and could not be changed. One or two very important
features of it were altered, and in time effects would result from this,
if opportunity offered--effects of a quite serious nature, too. Under
the influence of a great mental and moral upheaval his character and
habits had taken on the appearance of complete change, but after a while
with the subsidence of the storm both began to settle toward their
former places. He dropped gradually back into his old frivolous and
easy-going ways and conditions of feeling and manner of speech, and no
familiar of his could have detected anything in him that differentiated
him from the weak and careless Tom of other days.
The theft-raid which he had made upon the village turned out better than
he had ventured to hope. It produced the sum necessary to pay his
gaming-debts, and saved him from exposure to his uncle and another
smashing of the will. He and his mother learned to like each other
fairly well. She couldn't love him, as yet, because there "warn't
nothing to him," as she expressed it, but her nature needed something or
somebody to rule over, and he was better than nothing. Her strong
character and aggressive and commanding ways compelled Tom's admiration
in spite of the fact that he got more illustrations of them than he
needed for his comfort. However, as a rule her conversation was made up
of racy tattle about the privacies of the chief families of the town
(for she went harvesting among their kitchens every time she came to the
village), and Tom enjoyed this. It was just in his line. She always
collected her half of his pension punctually, and he was always at the
haunted house to have a chat with her on these occasions. Every now and
then she paid him a visit there on between-days also.
Occasionally he would run up to St. Louis for a few weeks, and at last
temptation caught him again. He won a lot of money, but lost it, and
with it a deal more besides, which he promised to raise as soon as
possible.
For this purpose he projected a new raid on his town. He never meddled
with any other town, for he was afraid to venture into houses whose ins
and outs he did not know and the habits of whose households he was not
acquainted with. He arrived at the haunted house in disguise on the
Wednesday before the advent of the twins--after writing his aunt Pratt
that he would not arrive until two days after--and lay in hiding there
with his mother until toward daylight Friday morning, when he went to
his uncle's house and entered by the back way with his own key, and
slipped up to his room, where he could have the use of the mirror and
toilet articles. He had a suit of girl's clothes with him in a bundle as
a disguise for his raid, and was wearing a suit of his mother's
clothing, with black gloves and veil. By dawn he was tricked out for his
raid, but he caught a glimpse of Pudd'nhead Wilson through the window
over the way, and knew that Pudd'nhead had caught a glimpse of him. So
he entertained Wilson with some airs and graces and attitudes for a
while, then stepped out of sight and resumed the other disguise, and by
and by went down and out the back way and started down town to
reconnoiter the scene of his intended labors.
But he was ill at ease. He had changed back to Roxy's dress, with the
stoop of age added to the disguise, so that Wilson would not bother
himself about a humble old woman leaving a neighbor's house by the back
way in the early morning, in case he was still spying. But supposing
Wilson had seen him leave, and had thought it suspicious, and had also
followed him? The thought made Tom cold. He gave up the raid for the
day, and hurried back to the haunted house by the obscurest route he
knew. His mother was gone; but she came back, by and by, with the news
of the grand reception at Patsy Cooper's, and soon persuaded him that
the opportunity was like a special providence, it was so inviting and
perfect. So he went raiding, after all, and made a nice success of it
while everybody was gone to Patsy Cooper's. Success gave him nerve and
even actual intrepidity; insomuch, indeed, that after he had conveyed
his harvest to his mother in a back alley, he went to the reception
himself, and added several of the valuables of that house to his
takings.
After this long digression we have now arrived once more at the point
where Pudd'nhead Wilson, while waiting for the arrival of the twins on
that same Friday evening, sat puzzling over the strange apparition of
that morning--a girl in young Tom Driscoll's bedroom; fretting, and
guessing, and puzzling over it, and wondering who the shameless creature
might be.