Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  C. P. — You did not hear me out. Publication of a book entails a considerable expense.

  R. A. — Naturally.

  C. P. — The money does not always come back.

  R. A. — I have been so informed. Publishers sometimes accept work that is very bad literature.

  C. P. — Yes, we try to.

  R. A. — Try to? You cannot mean that you prefer such work.

  C. P. — We must publish what will sell. Do you read the most popular books of the year — the “best-selling” novels? — nearly all “best sellers” are novels.

  R. A. — God forbid! I sometimes look at them.

  C. P. — Do you ever find one that has any literary merit?

  R. A. — Certainly not. I did not expect my book to be popular, but hoped that it might have a steady and perhaps increasing sale and eventually become famous. You sometimes publish new editions of the great works in our language — a the English classics.” Do you lose money by them?

  C. P. — Not usually. They have had the advantage of generations of advertising by scholars and by critics whose words had weight in their time and have in ours. If your excellent book finds a publisher pretty soon and is kept going until the year 2100, we shall be glad to put it on our list. You see it is very simple: you have only to conform to the conditions of success.

  R. A. — I see. But are these the only conditions? Some great work succeeds in its author’s time — that of Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, Carlyle, and so forth, in England; and in America that of — m, er, huh.

  C. P. — Is it surely great work? The ink is hardly dry. The literary fashions determining its form and substance are still with us. Posterity will have to pass judgment upon it, which posterity will indubitably do without reference to our view of the matter. Then, if you and I happen to be in communication with this vale of tears we shall know if these noted authors were mining the great mother-lode of human interest, or, occasionally touching some of its dips, spurs and angles, taking out barren rock. It looks to us like a rich enough ore, but it is a long journey to where there is an assaying-plant capable of dealing with that particular product. When it is “heard from” we shall not be here. Those who mined it are gone already.

  R. A. — Then there can be no valuable contemporary criticism?

  C. P. — None that any one can know to be valuable.

  R. A. — And no man can live long enough to know if he is a good writer?

  C. P. — The trade of writing has that disadvantage.

  R. A. — We are getting a long way from business. Am I to understand that you reject my book because, as you say, “it is exquisitely touching and beautiful”?

  C. P. — You outline the painful situation with accuracy.

  R. A. — Well, Til be damned!

  C. P. — Sure! — if you find a sentimentalist who will publish your book. He will do the damning.

  II

  EDITOR. — Glad to see you, sir. Take a chair.

  VISITOR. — I am the proprietor of The Prosperous Monthly.

  ED. — Take two chairs.

  Vis. — I called to congratulate you on the extraordinary success of The Waste Basket. I should not have thought it possible for you to break into our field and play this game as well as we. And with so fantastic a title!

  Ed. — For my success I am greatly indebted to yourself.

  Vis. — Not if I know it: we have fought you, tooth and nail.

  Ed. — Oh, that is all right; if it had been expedient we should have fought back. Our prosperity depended on yours.

  Vis. — Heaven has withheld from me the intelligence to understand.

  Ed. — Have any of the contents of this magazine ever seemed familiar to you?

  Vis. — I am not much of a reader; my editor has fancied that some of your articles lacked originality, but has confessed that he could not quite identify their authors.

  Ed. — Just so; I accept nothing for my magazine that has not been first submitted to yours. If it has not been when offered, I — require that to be done.

  Vis. — That is monstrous nice of you. Such knightly courtesy to a senior competitor is most unusual. I thank you — come and dine with me to-morrow at seven (handing card), ED. — With pleasure. Good day.

  Vis. — Good day. (Exit Visitor.)

  Ed. (solus). — If he thinks it out, I shall miss a dinner.

  A STORY AT THE CLUB

  “DO you believe that?” said Dr. Dutton, passing a newspaper across the table to Will Brady and taking needless pains to point out “that” with his thumb. Brady read the discredited paragraph. It was as follows:

  Mr. John Doane, of Peequecgan, Maine, has received seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the estate of an old man whom he protected from the abuse of a rowdy fifteen years ago, and whom he never afterward saw nor heard from. In the will the old man apologized for the smallness of the bequest, explaining that it was all that he had.

  “Believe it?” said Brady; “I know it to be true. I was myself the—”

  He paused to think.

  “Now, how the devil,” said Dutton, “can you ring yourself into that story? You are not John Doane, and you certainly are not the late old man.”

  “I was about to say,” resumed Brady, composedly, “that I was myself the legatee in a somewhat similar case. In the year—”

  “Waiter,” said Dutton, “bring me twelve cigars, three bottles of champagne and, at daylight, a cup of powerful coffee. When the fellows come in from the theater ask them not to come into this room — say there’s a man in here who is engaged in being murdered.”

  “In the year 1892,” Mr. Brady went on to say, “I was living in Peoria, Illinois. One night while walking along the railroad track just outside of town I saw a man making the most violent exertions to release himself from the ‘frog’ of a switch, into which he had incautiously wedged the heel of his shoe. He was steaming with perspiration and the look of agony on his face was worth a long walk to see. You have probably seen such a look on the countenance of many a patient undergoing the operation of receiving your bill. The express train was due in two minutes, and we had not so much as a match to signal it with — the night was tar-dark.”

  “The look of agony, I suppose, shone by its own inherent light.”

  “The man was facing away from the approaching train — the thunder of which was now audible between his groans and cries.

  Just in the nick of time I stepped up to him and introducing myself begged pardon for the intrusion and suggested that he unlace his shoe and remove his foot from it, which he did. When the train had passed he thanked me and handed me his card. I have carried it with me ever since — here it is.”

  Taking out a bit of pasteboard he handed it across the table without looking at it. It read:

  DEARIE, — I could not come: I was watched. To-morrow — same time, at the other place.

  OOPSIE.

  The Doctor read the card and quietly handed it back. The story proceeded:

  “A moment later the man had disappeared, but in a week or two I received a letter from him, dated at Chicago. He said he owed his life to me and should devote it to my service. Being childless, friendless and heretofore without an aim or ambition, he should pass the rest of his days in acquiring wealth, in order to testify his gratitude. It would be a labor of love to trace me wherever I might wander — I need not apprise him of my address, nor in any way bother myself about him. If I survived him I would be a very rich man.

  “Well, sir, you may believe it or not, but if there is any name which deserves to be held by me in high honor for truth and simple good faith it is the name of—”

  “Oopsie.”

  Mr. Brady was visibly affected. For a moment he was fitly comparable to nothing warmer and livelier than a snow bank under the bleak stars of a polar midnight. The Doctor toyed absently with the ash-holder. It was a supreme crisis. It passed.

  “That man died in 1901 and left me, by will, an estate valued at more than n
ine hundred thousand dollars. The will was properly probated and never contested.”

  “But, my dear fellow,” said Dutton, taking at last a genuine interest in the narrative, “you never told us — nobody has ever heard of this, and you certainly do not pass for a very rich man. Did you really get the property?”

  “Alas, no,” said Brady, with a solemn shake of the head, as he rose from the table and glanced at his watch. “It is true, just as I have told you — on my honor: the man left me that property and all was square, regular and legal, but I did not get a cent. The fact is, I died first.”

  THE WIZARD OF BUMBASSA

  MR. GEORGE WESTING-HOUSE, the air-brake man, did a cruel and needless thing in going out of his way to try to destroy humanity’s hope of being shot along the ground at a speed of one hundred miles an hour. There is no trouble, it appears, in building locomotives able to snatch a small village of us through space at the required speed; the difficulty lies in making, with sufficient promptness, those unschedulary stops necessitated by open switches, missing bridges, and various obstacles that industrial discontent is wont to grace the track withal. Even on a straight line — what the civil engineers find a pleasure in calling a tangent — the prosperous industrian at the throttle-valve cannot reasonably be expected to discern these hindrances at a greater distance than one thousand feet; and Mr. Westinghouse sadly confessed that in that distance his most effective appliance could not do more than reduce the rate from one hundred miles an hour to fifty — an obviously inadequate reduction. He held out no hope of being able to evolve from his inner consciousness either a brake of superior effectiveness or a pair of spectacles that would enable the engine driver to discover a more distant danger on a tangent, or to see round a curve.

  All this begets an intelligent dejection. If we must renounce our golden dream of cannonading ourselves from place to place with a celerity suitable to our rank in the world’s fauna — comprising the shark, the hummingbird, the hornet and the jackass rabbit — civilization is indeed a failure. But it is forbidden to the wicked pessimist to rejoice, for there is a greater than Mr. Westinghouse and he has demonstrated his ability to bring to a dead stop within its own length any railway train, however short and whatever its rate of speed. It were unwise though, to indulge too high a hope in this matter, even if the gloomy vaticinations of the Westinghouse person are fallacious. Approaching an evidence of social unrest at a speed of one and two-thirds mile a minute on a down grade, even in a train equipped by a greater than Mr. Westinghouse, may not be an altogether pleasing performance.

  This possibility can be best illustrated by recalling to the reader’s memory the history of the Ghargaroo and Gallywest Railway in Bumbassa. As is well known, the trains on that road attained a speed that had not theretofore been dreamed of except by the illustrious projector of the road. But the King of Bumbassa was not content: with an indifference to the laws of dynamics which in the retrospect seems almost imperial, he insisted upon instantaneous stoppage. To the royal demand the clever and prudent gentleman who had devised and carried out the enterprise responded with an invention which he assured his Majesty would accomplish the desired end. A trial was made in the sovereign’s presence, the coaches being loaded with his chief officers of state and other courtiers, and it was eminently successful. The train, going at a speed of ninety miles an hour, was brought to a dead stop within the length of the rhinoceros-catcher and directly in front of the blue cotton umbrella beneath which his Majesty sat to observe the result of the test. The passengers, unfortunately, did not stop so promptly, and were afterward scraped off the woodwork at the forward ends of the cars and decently interred. The train-hands had all escaped by the ingenious plan of absenting themselves from the proceedings, with the exception of the engineer, who had thoughtfully been selected for the occasion from among the relatives of the projector’s wife, and instructed how to shut off the steam and apply the brake. When hosed off the several parts of the engine he was found to have incurred a serious dispersal of the viscera.

  The King’s delight at the success of the experiment was somewhat mitigated by the reflection that if the train had been freighted with bona fide travelers instead of dignitaries whom he could replace by appointment the military resources of the state would have suffered a considerable loss; so he commanded the projector to invent a method of stopping the passengers and the trains simultaneously. This, after much experiment, was done by fixing the passengers to the seats by clamps extending across the abdomen and chest; but no provision being made for the head, a general decapitation ensued at each stop; and people who valued their heads preferred thereafter to travel afoot or ostrichback, as before. It was found, moreover, that, as arrested motion is converted into heat, the royal requirement frequently resulted in igniting and consuming the trains — which was expensive.

  These various hard conditions of railroading in Bumbassa eventually subdued the spirits of the stockholders, drove the projector to drink and led at last to withdrawal of the concession — whereby one of the most promising projects for civilizing the Dark Continent was, in the words of the Ghargaroo Palladium “knocked perfectly cold.”

  I have thought it well to recall this melancholy incident here for its general usefulness in pointing a moral, and for its particular application to the fascinating enterprise of a one-hundred-miles-an-hour electric road from New York to Chicago — a road whose trains, intending passengers are assured, will be under absolute control of the engineers and “can be stopped at a moment’s notice.” If I have said anything to discourage the enterprise I am sorry, but really it is not easy to understand why anybody should wish to go from New York to Chicago.

  THE FUTURE HISTORIAN

  I — THE DISPERSAL

  So sombre a phenomenon as the effacement of an ancient and brilliant civilization within the lifetime of a single generation is, fortunately, known to have occurred only once in the history of the world. The catastrophe is not only unique in history, but all the more notable for having befallen, not a single state overrun by powerful barbarians, but a half of the world; and for having been effected by a seemingly trivial agency that sprang from the civilization itself. Indeed, it was the work of one man.

  Hiram Perry (or Percy) Maximus was born in the latter part of the nineteenth century of “the Christian Era,” in Podunk, the capital of America. Little is known of his ancestry, although Dumbleshaw affirms on evidence not cited by him that he came of a family of pirates that infested the waters of Lake Erie (now the desert of Gobol) as early as “1813” — whenever that may have been.

  The precise nature of Hiram Perry’s invention, with its successive improvements, is not known — probably could not now be understood. It was called “the silent firearm” — so much we learn from fragmentary chronicles of the period; also that it was of so small size that it could be put into the “pocket.” (In his Dictionary of Antiquities the learned Pantin-Gwocx defines “pocket” as, first, “the main temple of the American deity;” second, “a small receptacle worn on the person.” The latter definition is the one, doubtless, that concerns us if the two things are not the same.) Regarding the work of “the silent firearm” we have light in abundance. Indeed, the entire history of the brief but bloody period between its invention and the extinction of the Christian civilization is an unbroken record of its fateful employment.

  Of course the immense armies of the time were at once supplied with the new weapon, with results that none had foreseen. Soldiers were thenceforth as formidable to their officers as to their enemies. It was no longer possible to maintain discipline, for no officer dared offend, by punishment or reprimand, one who could fatally retaliate as secretly and securely, in the repose of camp as in the tumult of battle. In civic affairs the deadly device was malignly active. Statesmen in disfavor (and all were hateful to men of contrary politics) fell dead in the forum by means invisible and inaudible. Anarchy, discarding her noisy and imperfectly effective methods, gladly embraced the new and sa
fe one.

  In other walks of life matters were no better. Armed with the sinister power of life and death, any evil-minded person (and most of the ancient Caucasians appear to have been evil-minded) could gratify a private revenge or wanton malevolence by slaying whom he would, and nothing cried aloud the lamentable deed.

  So horrible was the mortality, so futile all preventive legislation, that society was stricken with a universal panic. Cities were plundered and abandoned; villages without villagers fell to decay; homes were given up to bats and owls, and farms became jungles infested with wild beasts. The people fled to the mountains, the forests, the marshes, concealing themselves from one another in caves and thickets, and dying from privation and exposure and diseases more dreadful than the perils from which they had fled. When every human being distrusted and feared every other human being solitude was esteemed the only good; and solitude spells death. In one generation Americans and Europeans had slunk back into the night of barbarism.

  II — RISE AND FALL OF THE AEROPLANE

  The craze for flying appears to have culminated in the year 369 Before Smith. In that year the aeroplane (a word of unknown derivation) was almost the sole means of travel. These flying-machines were so simple and cheap that one who had not a spare half-hour in which to make one could afford to purchase. The price for a one-man machine was about two dollars — one-tenth of a gooble. Double-seated ones were of course a little more costly. No other kinds were allowed by law, for, as was quaintly explained by a chronicle of the period, “a man has a right to break his own neck, and that of his wife, but not those of his children and friends.” It had been learned by experiment that for transportation of goods and for use in war the aeroplane was without utility. (Of balloons, dirigible and indirigible, we hear nothing after 348 B. S; the price of gas, controlled by a single corporation, made them impossible.)