by Mark Twain
“Do you think you would like to learn the printing business?”
“Well, I don’t re’ly k’yer a durn what I do learn, so’s I git a chance fur to make my way. I’d jist as soon learn print’n ’s anything.”
“Can you read?”
“Yes,—middlin’.”
“Write?”
“Well, I’ve seed people could lay over me thar.”
“Cipher?”
“Not good enough to keep store, I don’t reckon, but up as fur as twelve-times-twelve I ain’t no slouch. ’Tother side of that is what gits me.”
“Where is your home?”
“I’m f’m old Shelby.”
“What’s your father’s religious denomination?”
“Him? O, he’s a blacksmith.”
“No, no,—I don’t mean his trade. What’s his religious denomination?”
“O,—I didn’t understand you befo’. He’s a Freemason.”
“No-no, you don’t get my meaning yet. What I mean is, does he belong to any church?”
“Now you’re talkin’! Couldn’t make out what you was a tryin’ to git through yo’ head no way. B’long to a church! Why boss he’s ben the pizenest kind of a Free-will Babtis’ for forty year. They ain’t no pizener ones ’n’ what he is. Mighty good man, pap is. Everybody says that. If they said any diffrunt they wouldn’t say it whar I wuz,—not much they wouldn’t.”
“What is your own religion?”
“Well, boss, you’ve kind o’ got me, thar,—and yit you hain’t got me so mighty much, nuther. I think ’t if a feller he’ps another feller when he’s in trouble, and don’t cuss, and don’t do no mean things, nur noth’n’ he ain’ no business to do, and don’t spell the Savior’s name with a little g, he ain’t runnin’ no resks,—he’s about as saift as if he b’longed to a church.”
“But suppose he did spell it with a little g,—what then?”
“Well, if he done it a-purpose, I reckon he wouldn’t stand no chance,—he oughtn’t to have no chance, anyway, I’m most rotten certain ’bout that.”
“What is your name?”
“Nicodemus Dodge.”
“I think maybe you’ll do, Nicodemus. We’ll give you a trial, anyway.”
“All right.”
“When would you like to begin?”
“Now.”
So, within ten minutes after we had first glimpsed this nondescript he was one of us, and with his coat off and hard at it.
Beyond that end of our establishment which was furthest from the street, was a deserted garden, pathless, and thickly grown with the bloomy and villainous “jimpson” weed and its common friend the stately sunflower. In the midst of this mournful spot was a decayed and aged little “frame” house with but one room, one window, and no ceiling,—it had been a smoke-house a generation before. Nicodemus was given this lonely and ghostly den as a bed chamber.
The village smarties recognized a treasure in Nicodemus, right away,—a butt to play jokes on. It was easy to see that he was inconceivably green and confiding. George Jones had the glory of perpetrating the first joke on him; he gave him a cigar with a fire-cracker in it and winked to the crowd to come; the thing exploded presently and swept away the bulk of Nicodemus’s eyebrows and eyelashes. He simply said,—
“I consider them kind of seeg’yars dangersome,”—and seemed to suspect nothing. The next evening Nicodemus waylaid George and poured a bucket of ice-water over him.
One day, while Nicodemus was in swimming, Tom McElroy “tied” his clothes. Nicodemus made a bonfire of Tom’s, by way of retaliation.
A third joke was played upon Nicodemus, a day or two later,—he walked up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night, with a staring hand-bill pinned between his shoulders. The joker spent the remainder of the night, after church, in the cellar of a deserted house, and Nicodemus sat on the cellar door till toward breakfast time to make sure that the prisoner remembered that if any noise was made, some rough treatment would be the consequence. The cellar had two feet of stagnant water in it, and was bottomed with six inches of soft mud.
But I wander from the point. It was the subject of skeletons that brought this boy back to my recollection. Before a very long time had elapsed, the village smarties began to feel an uncomfortable consciousness of not having made a very shining success out of their attempts on the simpleton from “old Shelby.” Experimenters grew scarce and chary. Now the young doctor came to the rescue. There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare Nicodemus to death, and explained how he was going to do it. He had a noble new skeleton,—the skeleton of the late and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village drunkard,—a grisly piece of property which he had bought of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars, under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in the tan-yard a fortnight before his death. The fifty dollars had gone promptly for whisky and had considerably hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton. The doctor would put Jimmy Finn’s skeleton in Nicodemus’s bed!
This was done,—about half past ten in the evening. About Nicodemus’s usual bedtime,—midnight,—the village jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den. They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt, and nothing more; he was dangling his legs contentedly back and forth, and wheezing the music of “Camptown Races” out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top, a solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles, five pounds of “store” candy, and a well-gnawed slab of gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of sheet music. He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three dollars and was enjoying the result!
Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were drifting into the subject of fossils, Harris and I heard a shout, and glanced up the steep hillside. We saw men and women standing away up there looking frightened, and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering down the steep slope toward us. We got out of the way, and when the object landed in the road it proved to be a boy. He had tripped and fallen, and there was nothing for him to do but trust to luck and take what might come.
When one starts to roll down a place like that, there is no stopping till the bottom is reached. Think of people farming on a slant which is so steep that the best you can say of it,—if you want to be fastidiously accurate,—is, that it is a little steeper than a ladder and not quite so steep as a mansard roof. But that is what they do. Some of the little farms on the hillside opposite Heidelberg were stood up “edgeways.” The boy was wonderfully jolted up, and his head was bleeding, from cuts which it had got from small stones on the way.
Harris and I gathered him up and set him on a stone, and by that time the men and women had scampered down and brought his cap.
Men, women and children flocked out from neighboring cottages and joined the crowd; the pale boy was petted, and stared at, and commiserated, and water was brought for him to drink, and bathe his bruizes in. And such another clatter of tongues! All who had seen the catastrophe were describing it at once, and each trying to talk louder than his neighbor; and one youth of a superior genius ran a little way up the hill, called attention, tripped, fell, rolled down among us, and thus triumphantly showed exactly how the thing had been done.
Harris and I were included in all the descriptions: how we were coming along; how Hans Gross shouted; how we looked up startled; how we saw Peter coming like a cannon-shot; how judiciously we got out of the way, and let him come; and with what presence of mind we picked him up and brushed him off and set him on a rock when the performance was over. We were as much heroes as anybody else, except Peter, and were so recognized; we were taken with Peter and the populace to Peter’s mother’s cottage, and there we ate bread and cheese, and drank milk and beer with everybody, and had a most sociable good time; and when we left we had a hand-shake all around, and were receiving and shouting b
ack Leb’ wohl’s until a turn in the road separated us from our cordial and kindly new friends forever.
We accomplished our undertaking. At half past 8 in the evening we stepped into Oppenau, just eleven hours and a half out from Allerheiligen,—146 miles. This is the distance by pedometer; the guide-book and the Imperial Ordnance maps make it only ten and a quarter,—a surprising blunder, for these two authorities are usually singularly accurate in the matter of distances.
CHAPTER XXIV
THAT WAS A thoroughly satisfactory walk,—and the only one we were ever to have which was all the way down hill. We took the train next morning and returned to Baden-Baden through fearful fogs of dust. Every seat was crowded, too; for it was Sunday, and consequently everybody was taking a “pleasure” excursion. Hot! the sky was an oven,—and a sound one, too, with no cracks in it to let in any air. An odd time for a pleasure excursion, certainly.
Sunday is the great day, on the continent,—the free day, the happy day. One can break the Sabbath in a hundred ways without committing any sin.
We do not work on Sunday, because the commandment forbids it; the Germans do not work on Sunday, because the commandment forbids it. We rest on Sunday, because the commandment requires it; the Germans rest on Sunday, because the commandment requires it. But in the definition of the word “rest” lies all the difference. With us, its Sunday meaning is, stay in the house and keep still; with the Germans its Sunday and week-day meanings seem to be the same,—rest the tired part, and never mind the other parts of the frame; rest the tired part, and use the means best calculated to rest that particular part. Thus: If one’s duties have kept him in the house all the week, it will rest him to be out on Sunday; if his duties have required him to read weighty and serious matter all the week, it will rest him to read light matter on Sunday; if his occupation has busied him with death and funerals all the week, it will rest him to go to the theatre Sunday night and put in two or three hours laughing at a comedy; if he is tired with digging ditches or felling trees all the week, it will rest him to lie quiet in the house on Sunday; if the hand, the arm, the brain, the tongue, or any other member, is fatigued with inanition, it is not to be rested by adding a day’s inanition; but if a member is fatigued with exertion, inanition is the right rest for it. Such is the way in which the Germans seem to define the word “rest;” that is to say, they rest a member by recreating, recuperating, restoring its forces. But our definition is less broad. We all rest alike on Sunday,—by secluding ourselves and keeping still, whether that is the surest way to rest the most of us or not. The Germans make the actors, the preachers, etc., work on Sunday. We encourage the preachers, the editors, the printers, etc., to work on Sunday, and imagine that none of the sin of it falls upon us; but I do not know how we are going to get around the fact that if it is wrong for the printer to work at his trade on Sunday it must be equally wrong for the preacher to work at his, since the commandment has made no exception in his favor. We buy Monday morning’s paper and read it, and thus encourage Sunday-printing. But I shall never do it again.
The Germans remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, by abstaining from work, as commanded; we keep it holy by abstaining from work, as commanded, and by also abstaining from play, which is not commanded. Perhaps we constructively break the command to rest, because the resting we do is in most cases only a name, and not a fact.
These reasonings have sufficed, in a measure, to mend the rent in my conscience which I made by traveling to Baden-Baden that Sunday. We arrived in time to furbish up and get to the English church before services began. We arrived in considerable style, too, for the landlord had ordered the first carriage that could be found, since there was no time to lose, and our coachman was so splendidly liveried that we were probably mistaken for a brace of stray dukes; else why were we honored with a pew all to ourselves, away up among the very elect at the left of the chancel? That was my first thought. In the pew directly in front of us sat an elderly lady, plainly and cheaply dressed; at her side sat a young lady with a very sweet face, and she also was quite simply dressed; but around us and about us were clothes and jewels which it would do anybody’s heart good to worship in.
I thought it was pretty manifest that the elderly lady was embarrassed at finding herself in such a conspicuous place arrayed in such cheap apparel; I began to feel sorry for her and troubled about her. She tried to seem very busy with her prayer book and her responses, and unconscious that she was out of place, but I said to myself, “She is not succeeding,—there is a distressed tremulousness in her voice which betrays increasing embarrassment.” Presently the Savior’s name was mentioned, and in her flurry she lost her head completely, and rose and curtsied, instead of making a slight nod as everybody else did. The sympathetic blood surged to my temples and I turned and gave those fine birds what I intended to be a beseeching look, but my feelings got the better of me and changed it into a look which said, “If any of you pets of fortune laugh at this poor soul, you will deserve to be flayed for it.” Things went from bad to worse, and I shortly found myself mentally taking the unfriended lady under my protection. My mind was wholly upon her, I forgot all about the sermon. Her embarrassment took stronger and stronger hold upon her; she got to snapping the lid of her smelling bottle,—it made a loud sharp sound, but in her trouble she snapped and snapped away, unconscious of what she was doing. The last extremity was reached when the collection-plate began its rounds; the moderate people threw in pennies, the nobles and the rich contributed silver, but she laid a twenty-mark gold piece upon the book-rest before her with a sounding slap! I said to myself, “She has parted with all her little hoard to buy the consideration of these unpitying people,—it is a sorrowful spectacle.” I did not venture to look around this time; but as the service closed, I said to myself, “Let them laugh, it is their opportunity; but at the door of this church they shall see her step into our fine carriage with us, and our gaudy coachman shall drive her home.”
Then she rose,—and all the congregation stood while she walked down the aisle. She was the Empress of Germany!
No,—she had not been so much embarrassed as I had supposed. My imagination had got started on the wrong scent, and that is always hopeless; one is sure, then, to go straight on misinterpreting everything, clear through to the end. The young lady with her imperial Majesty was a maid of honor,—and I had been taking her for one of her boarders, all the time.
This is the only time I have ever had an Empress under my personal protection; and considering my inexperience, I wonder I got through with it so well. I should have been a little embarrassed myself if I had known earlier what sort of a contract I had on my hands.
We found that the Empress had been in Baden-Baden several days. It is said that she never attends any but the English form of church service.
I lay abed and read and rested from my journey’s fatigues the remainder of that Sunday, but I sent my agent to represent me at the afternoon service, for I never allow anything to interfere with my habit of attending church twice every Sunday.
There was a vast crowd in the public grounds that night to hear the band play the “Fremersberg.” This piece tells one of the old legends of the region: how a great noble of the Middle Ages got lost in the mountains, and wandered about with his dogs in a violent storm, until at last the faint tones of a monastery bell, calling the monks to a midnight service, caught his ear, and he followed the direction the sounds came from and was saved. A beautiful air ran through the music, without ceasing; sometimes loud and strong, sometimes so soft that it could hardly be distinguished,—but it was always there; it swung grandly along through the shrill whistling of the storm-wind, the rattling patter of the rain, and the boom and crash of the thunder; it wound soft and low through the lesser sounds, the distant ones, such as the throbbing of the convent bell, the melodious winding of the hunter’s horn, the distressed bayings of his dogs, and the solemn chanting of the monks; it rose again, with a jubilant ring, and mingled itself with the
country songs and dances of the peasants assembled in the convent hall to cheer up the rescued huntsman while he ate his supper. The instruments imitated all these sounds with a marvelous exactness. More than one man started to raise his umbrella when the storm burst forth and the sheets of mimic rain came driving by; it was hardly possible to keep from putting your hand to your hat when the fierce wind began to rage and shriek; and it was not possible to refrain from starting when those sudden and charmingly real thundercrashes were let loose.
I suppose the Fremersberg is very low-grade music; I know, indeed, that it must be low-grade music, because it so delighted me, warmed me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that I was full of cry all the time, and mad with enthusiasm. My soul had never had such a scouring out since I was born. The solemn and majestic chanting of the monks was not done by instruments, but by men’s voices; and it rose and fell, and rose again in that rich confusion of warring sounds, and pulsing bells, and the stately swing of that ever-present enchanting air, and it seemed to me that nothing but the very lowest of low-grade music could be so divinely beautiful. The great crowd which the Fremersberg had called out was another evidence that it was low-grade music; for only the few are educated up to a point where high-grade music gives pleasure. I have never heard enough classic music to be able to enjoy it. I dislike the opera because I want to love it and can’t.
I suppose there are two kinds of music,—one kind which one feels, just as an oyster might, and another sort which requires a higher faculty, a faculty which must be assisted and developed by teaching. Yet if base music gives certain of us wings, why should we want any other? But we do. We want it because the higher and better like it. But we want it without giving it the necessary time and trouble; so we climb into that upper tier, that dress circle, by a lie: we pretend we like it. I know several of that sort of people,—and I propose to be one of them myself when I get home with my fine European education.