Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  The protagonists of water tell us that it is the natural drink of man. We drink it for economy, from ignorance or inattention, from hereditary habit bequeathed to us by barbarian ancestors who had nothing else and knew not the sacred grape. They ate beetles, too, stale fish and one another. Were these the natural food of man? Man has no natural food and drink; he takes what he can get. An infant race is like an infant individual: whatever it can lay its hands on goes into its dauby mouth.

  Water, pure water, has one merit — it is cheap; and one disadvantage — it is not good.

  Mr. Prohibitionist would like to deprive me of wine by law; not because that would make me happier: it would make him happier. As long as I cannot prevent him from trying, I fancy that I don’t wish to, and execute a multitude of fine sentiments about the virtue of tolerance and the advantages of free speech. But give me the power, and the first time I catch him rolling his rebuking eye at my wineglass I will fill up his well.

  GODS IN CHICAGO

  IN the death of Mr. W. J. Gunning theology incurred a serious loss. The deceased was an intelligent and painstaking collector of gods, and at the time of his death was in the service of the Committee on Gods, of the “World’s Fair” in Chicago. He had already got together about five hundred deities, some of them exceedingly powerful, and was on his way around the world on the lookout for more. It is believed that he would have enriched the pantheon of the fair with some singularly fine exhibits if he had been spared, for he was a most accomplished theologian, knew exactly where to lay his hand on any deity that he needed in his business, and whenever he went godding was blessed (under Providence) with a large take. He was an honest collector, a kind and considerate provider, and left behind him a wide circle of Celestial Powers bewailing their loss.

  The advantage of having a first-rate collection of gods at a world’s fair is obvious. Hitherto the study of comparative theology has been beset with dispiriting difficulties, many of which will vanish in the light that such a collection will pour upon the science. In actual presence of the wood and stone which the heathen in his blindness bows down to we shall be able to trace resemblances and relationships hitherto undiscerned and even unsuspected. We shall know, perhaps, why the religion of the Inquots is somewhat similar to that of the Abemjees when we see (if such is the fact) that the gods of both these widely separated tribes have availed themselves of the advantages of the tail. We shall perhaps find the missing link between the Hindu’s mild disposition and his adoration of the “idol of hope and slaughter.” Better than all, we shall by actual scrutiny of the mongrel and measly gods of other and inferior nations be confirmed in the True Faith, as in this favored land we have the happiness to know it.

  That the goddery will be a point of chief attraction goes without saying. A temple in which, satisfying the two mightiest needs of his spiritual nature, one may both scoff and pray will have a powerful fascination for the truly religious. There the visiting stranger from the overseas can perform appropriate rites before the deity of his fathers and execute feats of contumelious disdain — short of actual demolition — before the hideous and senseless images adored of those not delivered from error’s chain. Even to the wicked person who has justly incurred the ancient reproach that he “tears down but does not build up,” the god-show will have a certain value as displaying everywhere the kind of things he tears down and nowhere the kind he is expected to build up — whereby he shall be put into better esteem and kicked and cuffed with abated assiduity. There is one disquieting possibility — one haunting thought that grows amain to apprehension: What will be the effect of setting up a multitude of gods in a city which has not hitherto tolerated one? It was well, though, to make the experiment, even as a missionary measure; and if the lakeside pantheon had served to lure the world’s pious to their financial doom the Chicagonese might have become a profoundly religious people, attentive to pilgrims and blandly assuring them that it was no trouble to show gods.

  1892.

  FOR LAST WORDS

  THE special kind of telephone designed to be affixed to the bedside of one who may have the bad luck to suffer from some infectious or contagious disease is a thoughtful provision for a crying need. By means of the instrument so placed, the patient’s friends are able to converse to him, read and sing at him, and, in general, give him the benefit of their society without danger of getting back more than they bestow. The plan is of admirable simplicity and nothing could be better — for the friends. There must be a certain satisfaction in possessing one end of a telephone at the other end of which there is one who cannot get away — one who has to listen to as many helloes as may be thought good for him, and to submit to the question, “Is that you?” when you know that it is he, as frequently as you choose to afflict him with it. That he is heartily wishing but impotently unable to transmit his disorder through the wire adds something to the joy of the situation.

  One of the advantages of the sick-bed telephone lies in the fact that it can be used for preservation of “last words.” Hitherto those only of men who died surrounded by attentive friends have had a chance of getting before the public; those of the unfortunate infectionary, isolated from his race and dying in a pesthouse, assisted by hireling physicians and unsympathetic nurses, have been lost to the world. No matter how many years of his life the patient may have been engaged in their composition and rehearsal; no matter how “neat and opprobrious” they were, they fell upon unappreciative ears, and were, not recorded. Under the new régime the patient as his fire fails may summon his friends to the telephone, launch at them his Parthian platitude and die in the pleasant consciousness that posterity will have profit of his death. Whether, like Falstaff, he choose to give his remarks a reminiscent character and “babble o’green fields;” confine himself to the historical method, like Daniel Webster with his memorable “I still live;” assume the benevolent pose, and, like Charles II, urge the survivors not to let some “poor Nelly” starve; the exclamatory, like the late President Garfield, who, according to one Swaim, said “O

  Swaim!” and let it go at that; or the merely idiotic, like the great Napoleon with his “Tête d’armée” the faithful telephone will be there, ready and willing to transmit (and transmute) the sentiment, admonition, statement or whatever it may be.

  To persons intending to make this use of the telephone a word of counsel may not be impertinent. As no human being, however well-eared, ever understood the telephone until it had repeated itself a number of times in response to his demands for more light, and as the moribund are not commonly in very good voice, it will be wise to begin the “last words” while there is yet a little reserve fund of life and strength remaining, for repetition and explanation.

  THE CHAIR OF LITTLE EASE

  NOT many years ago, as I remember, a deal of deprecatory talk was in evolution about a certain Governor of a Persian province, who was said to have been boiled alive by order of the Shah. Our shouting and shrilling in this matter were not altogether becoming, considering whose progeny we are. It is not so very long since all the nations of Europe practised boiling alive — commonly in oil, which was thought to impart a fine discomfort to the person so unlucky as to be in the cauldron. In England boiling was the legal punishment for poisoners for a long time, beginning in 1531, in the reign of Henry VII. Among those who suffered this discomfort was a man mentioned in the chronicle of the Grey Friars, who was let down into the kettle by a chain until he was done. He, however, was not boiled in oil — just plain. Some of the items of an expense account relating to the execution of Friar Stone at Canterbury are interesting in their homely way:

  Paid 2 men that sat by the kettle and parboiled him — 1s To 3 men that carried his quarters to the gates and set them up — 1s For a woman that scoured the kettle — 2d

  With regard to that last item one cannot repress the flame of a consuming curiosity to know if the scouring was done before or afterward. If afterward, the poor woman seems to have been miserably underpaid.

/>   But call it a long time ago, protesting that the tendency to boil one another has exhausted its impetus, or, if you please, worked itself out of our clarifying blood. But the year 1790 is not so far back, and burning at the stake probably generates an uneasiness to which that of the oil-boiled gentry of the earlier period was nowise superior. It was in the year mentioned — in the reign of his most gracious Majesty George, the third of that name — that burning at the stake ceased to be the legal penalty for “coining,” which was accounted “treason,” and murder of a husband, which was “petty treason.” But wife-killers and coiners, male, were hanged. The last woman burned alive departed this life, I think, in 1789. Men are living to-day whose fathers were living then and may, as children, have played in the ashes.

  Still (it may be urged) it was not actually we who did it: in our milder day we have neither the cauldron nor the stake. Ah, but we have the dynamo. We have the custom of putting a small percentage of our assassins into an “electrical chair” and doing them to death by pressing a button — a process to which in defiance of two languages we have given the name a electrocution.” For encouragement of the rising young assassin, physicians assure us that this gives a painless death.

  The physicians know nothing about it; for anything they know to the contrary, death by electricity may be the most frightful torment that it is possible for any of nature’s forces or processes to produce. The agony may be not only inconceivably great, but to the sufferer it may seem to endure for a period inconceivably long. That many of the familiar physical indications of suffering are absent (though “long, shuddering sighs” and “straining at the straps” are not certainly symptoms of joy) is very little to the purpose when we know that electricity paralyzes the muscles by whose action pain is familiarly manifested. We know that it paralyzes all the seats of sensation, for that matter, and puts an end to possibilities of pain. That is only to say that it kills. But by what secret and infernal pang may not all this be accompanied or accomplished? Through what unnatural exaltation of the senses may not the moment of its accomplishing be commuted into unthinkable cycles of time? Of all this the physicians can have no more knowledge than so many toads under stones.

  It is probable, at least it is possible, that a “victim’s” sum of suffering from his instantaneous pervasion with enough of the fluid to kill him is no less than if it were leisurely rilled through him a little faster than he could bear until he should die of it that way. Theories of the painlessness of sudden death appear to be based mostly upon the fact that those who undergo it make no entries of their sensations in their diaries. It is to be wished that they would be more thoughtful and less selfish. The man smitten by lightning, or widely distributed by a hitch in the proceedings at a powder mill, owes a duty to his fellow men of which he commonly appears to have but an imperfect sense. A careful and analytic record of his sensations at every stage of his mischance would be a precious contribution to medical literature. Published under some such title as A Diary of Sudden Death; by a Public-Spirited Observer on the Inside it would serve many useful purposes, and also profit the publisher. What we most need — next to more doctors at executions — is some person having experience of the matter, to tell us fairly in inoffensive English, interlarded with “Soche-sorte Latin as physickers doe use,” just how it feels to be dead all over at once.

  A GHOST IN THE UNMAKING

  BELIEF in ghosts is natural, general and comforting. In many minds it is cherished as a good working substitute for religion; in others it appears to take the place of morality. It is rather more convenient than either, for it may be disavowed and even reviled without exposing oneself to suspicion and reproach. As an intellectual conviction it is, in fact, not a very common phenomenon among people of thought and education; nevertheless the number of civilized and enlightened human beings who can pass through a graveyard at midnight without whistling is not notably greater than the number who are unable to whistle.

  It may be noted here as a distinction with a difference that belief in ghosts is not the same thing as faith in them. Many men believe in the adversary of souls, but comparatively few, and they not among our best citizens, have any faith in him. Similarly, the belief in ghosts has reference only to their existence, not to their virtues. They are, indeed, commonly thought to harbor the most evil designs against the continuity of peaceful thoughts and the integrity of sleep. Their malevolence has in it a random and wanton quality which invests it with a peculiarly lively interest: there is no calculating upon whom it will fall: the just and the unjust alike are embraced in its baleful jurisdiction and subjected to the humiliating indignity of displaying the white feather. And this leads us directly back to the incident by which these remarks have the honor to be suggested.

  A woman living near Sedalia, Missouri, who had recently been married alive to a widower, was once passing along a “lonely road” which had been thoughtfully laid out near her residence. It was late in the evening, and the lady was, naturally, somewhat apprehensive in a land known to be infested by Missourians of the deepest dye. She was, therefore, not in a suitable frame of mind for an interview with an inhabitant of the other world, and it was with no slight trepidation that she suddenly discovered in the gloom a tall figure, clad all in white, standing silent and menacing in the road before her. She endeavored to run away, but terror fastened her feet to the earth; to shriek, but her lungs refused their office — the first time that an office was ever refused in that sovereign commonwealth. In short, to use a neat and graphic locution of the vicinity, she was utterly “guv out.” The ghost was tremendously successful. Unluckily it could not hold its ghost of a tongue, and that spectral organ could accomplish feats of speech intelligible to ears still in the flesh. The apparition advanced upon its helpless victim and said in hollow accents: “I am the spirit of your husband’s first wife: beware, beware!” Nothing could have been more imprudent. The cowering lady effected a vertical attitude, grew tall, and expanded. Her terror gave place to an intrepidity of the most military character, and she moved at once to the attack. A moment later all that was mortal of that immortal part, divested of its funeral habiliments, hair, teeth and whatever was removable — battered, lacerated, gory and unconscious — lay by the roadside awaiting identification. When the husband arrived upon the scene with a horrible misgiving and a lantern, his worst fears were not realized; the grave had bravely held its own; the object by the roadside was what was left of his deceased wife’s sister. On learning that her victim was not what she had incautiously represented herself to be, the victorious lady expressed the deepest regret Such incidents as this go far to account for that strong current of human testimony to the existence of ghosts, which Dr. Johnson found running through all the ages, and at the same time throw a new and significant light upon Heine’s suggestion that ghosts are as much afraid of us as we of them. It would appear that some of the less judicious of them have pretty good reason.

  THE TURN OF THE TIDE

  IN the year 1890 I wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, àpropos of Chinese immigration:

  “There is but one remedy — I do not recommend it: to kill the Chinese. That we shall not do: the minority will not undertake, nor the majority permit. It would be massacre now; in its own good time (too late) it will be war. We could kill the Chinese now, as we have killed the Indians; but fifty years hence — perhaps thirty — the nation that kills Chinamen will have to answer to China.” Twenty-one years later a Chinese warship steamed into the port of Vera Cruz, Mexico, to back up a demand of the Chinese government for an indemnity for a massacre of Chinese subjects. She was a little warship, but she bore a momentous mandate, performed it and steamed away, the world as inattentive to the event as it had been to the prophecy.

  Perhaps our national indifference to the portentous phenomenon came of “use and wont;” already an American president had been made to grovel at the feet of a Japanese emperor, and had truculently threatened a state of the union with war if it did not adjust its m
unicipal laws to the will of that Asian sovereign. Clearly, as the hope was then expressed, “we have reached the end of Asiatic dictation” — the hither end, unfortunately.

  All Asia is astir, looking East and West. Its incalculable multitudes are learning war and navigation; and Caucasian powers—” infatuate, blind, selfsure!” — are their tutors. Their armies are taught by European officers, their warships are built in European and American ports. All the military powers unite in maintaining “the integrity of China” and in awakening her to aggression and dominance.

  Even if it were to our immediate interest to preserve the integrity of the Chinese Empire a long look ahead might disclose a greater one that would be best subserved by partition. In a single generation Japan has performed the astonishing feat of changing civilizations. It has been, for her, retrogression, for the civilization that she has discarded was superior to that which she has adopted; but in one important particular she has been the gainer by the exchange; in the matter, namely, of military power, and therefore political consequence. As by a leap, she has advanced from nowhere to the position of a first-rate power. What she has done China is doing, with this difference: China’s advance will be to a position that will dominate the world and reduce the foremost nations of to-day to second place. Trained by European officers to European methods of warfare, such an army as she can raise and equip from her four hundred millions of population will be invincible. It may overrun Europe and extinguish Christian civilization on that continent, which would not be a very good thing for it on this. It was only yesterday — a little more than two hundred years ago — that Europe came within a single battle-hazard of being an Islam dependency. If John Sobieski had been defeated under the walls of Vienna, that city, Berlin, Paris and London would to-day be Mohammedan capitals. History has not exhausted its reserve of astounding events, nor have civilizations learned the secret of stability.