by Mark Twain
Chapter 28
He could not speak, for emotion; for the same cause my voice forsook me; and so, in silence we grasped hands again; and that grip, strong and warm, said for us what our tongues could not utter. At that moment the cat entered, and stood looking at us. Under her grave gaze a shame-faced discomfort, a sense of embarrassment, began to steal over me, just as would have been the case if she had been a human being who had caught me in that gushy and sentimental situation, and I felt myself blushing. Was it because I was aware that she had lately been that kind of a being? It annoyed me to see that my brother was not similarly affected. And yet, why mind it? didn’t I already know that no human intelligence could guess what occurrence would affect him and what event would leave him cold? With an uncomfortable feeling of being critically watched by the cat, I pressed him with clumsy courtesy into his seat again, and slumped into my own.
The cat sat down. Still looking at us in that disconcerting way, she tilted her head first to one side and then the other, inquiringly and cogitatively, the way a cat does when she has struck the unexpected and can’t quite make out what she had better do about it. Next she washed one side of her face, making such an awkward and unscientific job of it that almost anybody would have seen that she was either out of practice or didn’t know how. She stopped with the one side, and looked bored, and as if she had only been doing it to put in the time, and wished she could think of something else to do to put in some more time. She sat a while, blinking drowsily, then she hit an idea, and looked as if she wondered she hadn’t thought of it earlier. She got up and went visiting around among the furniture and belongings, sniffing at each and every article, and elaborately examining it. If it was a chair, she examined it all around, then jumped up in it and sniffed all over its seat and its back; if it was any other thing she could examine all around, she examined it all around; if it was a chest and there was room for her between it and the wall, she crowded herself in behind there and gave it a thorough overhauling; if it was a tall thing, like a washstand, she would stand on her hind toes and stretch up as high as she could, and reach across and paw at the toilet things and try to rake them to where she could smell them; if it was the cupboard, she stood on her toes and reached up and pawed the knob; if it was the table she would squat, and measure the distance, and make a leap, and land in the wrong place, owing to newness to the business; and, part of her going too far and sliding over the edge, she would scramble, and claw at things desperately, and save herself and make good; then she would smell everything on the table, and archly and daintily paw everything around that was movable, and finally paw something off, and skip cheerfully down and paw it some more, throwing herself into the prettiest attitudes, rising on her hind feet and curving her front paws and flirting her head this way and that and glancing down cunningly at the object, then pouncing on it and spatting it half the length of the room, and chasing it up and spatting it again, and again, and racing after it and fetching it another smack—and so on and so on; and suddenly she would tire of it and try to find some way to get to the top of the cupboard or the wardrobe, and if she couldn’t she would look troubled and disappointed; and toward the last, when you could see she was getting her bearings well lodged in her head and was satisfied with the place and the arrangements, she relaxed her intensities, and got to purring a little to herself, and praisefully waving her tail between inspections—and at last she was done—done, and everything satisfactory and to her taste.
Being fond of cats, and acquainted with their ways, if I had been a stranger and a person had told me that this cat had spent half an hour in that room before, but hadn’t happened to think to examine it until now, I should have been able to say with conviction, “Keep an eye on her, that’s no orthodox cat, she’s an imitation, there’s a flaw in her make-up, you’ll find she’s born out of wedlock or some other arrested-development accident has happened, she’s no true Christian cat, if I know the signs.”
She couldn’t think of anything further to do, now, so she thought she would wash the other side of her face, but she couldn’t remember which one it was, so she gave it up, and sat down and went to nodding and blinking; and between nods she would jerk herself together and make remarks. I heard her say—
“One of them’s the Duplicate, the other’s the Original, but I can’t tell t’other from which, and I don’t suppose they can. I am sure I couldn’t if I were them. The missuses said it was the Duplicate that broke in there last night, and I voted with the majority for policy’s sake, which is a servant’s only protection from trouble, but I would like to know how they knew. I don’t believe they could tell them apart if they were stripped. Now my idea is—”
I interrupted, and intoned musingly, as if to myself,—
“The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but him had fled—”
and stopped there, and seemed to sink into a reverie.
It gave her a start! She muttered—
“That’s the Duplicate. Duplicates know languages—everything, sometimes, and then again they don’t know anything at all. That is what Fischer says, though of course it could have been his Duplicate that said it, there’s never any telling, in this bewitched place, whether you are talking to a person himself, or only to his heathen image. And Fischer says they haven’t any morals nor any principles—though of course it could have been his Duplicate that said it—one never knows. Half the time when you say to a person he said so-and-so, he says he didn’t—so then you recognize it was the other one. As between living in such a place as this and being crazy, you don’t know which it is, the most of the time. I would rather be a cat and not have any Duplicate, then I always know which one I am. Otherwise, not. If they haven’t any principles, it was this Duplicate that broke in there, though of course, being drunk he wouldn’t know which one he was, and so it could be the other without him suspecting it, which leaves the matter where it was before—not certain enough to be certain, and just uncertain enough to be uncertain. So I don’t see that anything’s decided. In fact I know it isn’t. Still, I think this one that wailed is the Duplicate, because sometimes they know all languages a minute, and next minute they don’t know their own, if they’ve got one, whereas a man doesn’t. Doesn’t, and can’t even learn it—can’t learn cat-language, anyway. It’s what Fischer says—Fischer or his Duplicate. So this is the one—that’s decided. He couldn’t talk cataract, nor ever learn it, either, if it was the Christian one . . . . . I’m awful tired!”
I didn’t let on, but pretended to be dozing; my brother was a little further along than that—he was softly snoring. I wanted to wait and see, if I could, what was troubling the cat, for it seemed plain to me that she had something on her mind, she certainly was not at her ease. By and by she cleared her throat, and I stirred up and looked at her, as much as to say, “well, I’m listening—proceed.” Then she said, with studied politeness—
“It is very late. I am sorry to disturb you gentlemen, but I am very tired, and would like to go to bed.”
“Oh, dear me,” I said, “don’t wait up on our account I beg of you. Turn right in!”
She looked astonished.
“With you present?” she said.
So then I was astonished myself, but did not reveal it.
“Do you mind it?” I asked.
“Do I mind it! You will grant, I make no doubt, that so extraordinary a question is hardly entitled to the courtesy of an answer from one of my sex. You are offensive, sir; I beg that you will relieve me of your company at once, and take your friend with you.”
“Remove him? I could not do that. He is my guest, and it is his place to make the first move. This is my room.”
I said it with a submerged chuckle, as knowing quite well, that soft-spoken as it was, it would knock some of the starch out of her. As indeed it did.
“Your room! Oh, I beg a thousand pardons, I am ashamed of my rude conduct, and will go at once. I assure you sir, I was the innocent victim of a m
istake: I thought it was my room.”
“And so it is. There has been no mistake. Don’t you see?—there is your bed.”
She looked whither I was pointing, and said with surprise—
“How strange that is! it wasn’t there five seconds ago. Oh, isn’t it a love!”
She made a spring for it—cat-like, forgetting the old interest in the new one; and feminine-like, eager to feast her native appetite for pretty things upon its elegancies and daintinesses. And really it was a daisy! It was a canopied four-poster, of rare wood, richly carved, with bed twenty inches wide and thirty long, sumptuously bepillowed and belaced and beruffled and besatined and all that; and when she had petted it and patted it and searched it and sniffed it all over, she cried out in an agony of delight and longing—
“Oh, I would just love to stretch out on that!”
The enthusiasm of it melted me, and I said heartily—
“Turn right in, Mary Florence Fortescue Baker G. Nightingale, and make yourself at home—that is the magician’s own present to you, and it shows you he’s no imitation-friend, but the true thing!”
“Oh, what a pretty name!” she cried; “is it mine for sure enough, and may I keep it? Where did you get it?”
“I don’t know—the magician hooked it from somewhere, he is always at that, and it just happened to come into my mind at the psychological moment, and I’m glad it did, for your sake, for it’s a dandy! Turn in, now, Baker G., and make yourself entirely at home.”
“You are so good, dear Duplicate, and I am just as grateful as I can be, but—but—well, you see how it is. I have never roomed with any person not of my own sex, and—”
“You will be perfectly safe here, Mary, I assure you, and—”
“I should be an ingrate to doubt it, and I do not doubt it, be sure of that; but at this particular time—at this time of all others—er—well, you know, for a smaller matter than this, Miss Marget is already compromised beyond repair, I fear, and if I—”
“Say no more, Mary Florence, you are perfectly right, perfectly. My dressing-room is large and comfortable, I can get along quite well without it, and I will carry your bed in there. Come along . . . Now then, there you are! Snug and nice and all right, isn’t it? Contemplate that! Satisfactory?—yes?”
She cordially confessed that it was. So I sat down and chatted along while she went around and examined that place all over, and pawed everything and sampled the smell of each separate detail, like an old hand, for she was getting the hang of her trade by now; then she made a final and special examination of the button on our communicating-door, and stretched herself up on her hind-toes and fingered it till she got the trick of buttoning-out inquisitives and undesirables down fine and ship-shape, then she thanked me handsomely for fetching the bed and taking so much trouble; and gave me good-night, and when I asked if it would disturb her if I talked a while with my guest, she said no, talk as much as we pleased, she was tired enough to sleep through thunderstorms and earthquakes. So I said, right cordially—
“Good-night, Mary G., und schlafen Sie wohl!” and passed out and left her to her slumbers. As delicate-minded a cat as ever I’ve struck, and I’ve known a many of them.
Chapter 29
I stirred my brother up, and we talked the time away while waiting for the magician to come. I said his coming was a most uncertain thing, for he was irregular, and not at all likely to come when wanted, but Schwarz was anxious to stay and take the chances; so we did as I have said—talked and waited. He told me a great deal about his life and ways as a dream-sprite, and did it in a skipping and disconnected fashion proper to his species. He would side-track a subject right in the middle of a sentence if another subject attracted him, and he did this without apology or explanation—well, just as a dream would, you know. His talk was scatteringly seasoned with strange words and phrases, picked up in a thousand worlds, for he had been everywhere. Sometimes he could tell me their meaning and where he got them, but not always; in fact not very often, the dream-memory being pretty capricious, he said—sometimes good, oftener bad, and always flighty. “Side-track,” for instance. He was not able to remember where he had picked that up, but thought it was in a star in the belt of Orion where he had spent a summer one night with some excursionists from Sirius whom he had met in space. That was as far as he could remember with anything like certainty; as to when it was, that was a blank with him; perhaps it was in the past, maybe it was in the future, he couldn’t tell which it was, and probably didn’t know, at the time it happened. Couldn’t know, in fact, for Past and Future were human terms and not comprehendable by him, past and future being all one thing to a dream-sprite, and not distinguishable the one from the other. “And not important, anyway.” How natural that sounded, coming from him! His notions of the important were just simply elementary, as you may say.
He often dropped phrases which had clear meanings to him, but which he labored in vain to make comprehensible by me. It was because they came from countries where none of the conditions resembled the conditions I had been used to; some from comets where nothing was solid, and nobody had legs; some from our sun, where nobody was comfortable except when white-hot, and where you needn’t talk to people about cold and darkness, for you would not be able to explain the words so that they could understand what you were talking about; some from invisible black planets swimming in eternal midnight and thick-armored in perpetual ice, where the people have no eyes, nor any use for them, and where you might wear yourself out trying to make them understand what you meant by such words as warmth and light, you wouldn’t ever succeed; and some from general space—that sea of ether which has no shores, and stretches on, and on, and arrives nowhere; which is a waste of black gloom and thick darkness through which you may rush forever at thought-speed, encountering at weary long intervals spirit-cheering archipelagoes of suns which rise sparkling far in front of you, and swiftly grow and swell, and burst into blinding glories of light, apparently measureless in extent, but you plunge through and in a moment they are far behind, a twinkling archipelago again, and in another moment they are blotted out in darkness; constellations, these? yes; and the earliest of them the property of your own solar system; the rest of that unending flight is through solar systems not known to men.
And he said that in that flight one came across such interesting dream-sprites! coming from a billion worlds, bound for a billion others; always friendly, always glad to meet up with you, always full of where they’d been and what they’d seen, and dying to tell you about it; doing it in a million foreign languages, which sometimes you understood and sometimes you didn’t, and the tongue you understood to-day you forgot tomorrow, there being nothing permanent about a dream-sprite’s character, constitution, beliefs, opinions, intentions, likes, dislikes, or anything else; all he cares for is to travel, and talk, and see wonderful things and have a good time. Schwarz said dream-sprites are well-disposed toward their fleshly brothers, and did what they could to make them partakers of the wonders of their travels, but it couldn’t be managed except on a poor and not-worth-while scale, because they had to communicate through the flesh-brothers’ Waking-Self imagination, and that medium—oh, well, it was like “emptying rainbows down a rat-hole.”
His tone was not offensive. I think his tone was never that, and was never meant to be that; it was all right enough, but his phrasing was often hurtful, on account of the ideal frankness of it. He said he was once out on an excursion to Jupiter with some fellows about a million years ago, when—
I stopped him there, and said—
“I am only seventeen, and you said you were born with me.”
“Yes,” he said, “I’ve been with you only about two million years, I believe—counting as you count; we don’t measure time at all. Many a time I’ve been abroad five or ten or twenty thousand years in a single night; I’m always abroad when you are asleep; I always leave, the moment you fall asleep, and I never return until you wake up. You are dreaming all the
time I am gone, but you get little or nothing of what I see—never more than some cheap odds and ends, such as your groping Mortal Mind is competent to perceive—and sometimes there’s nothing for you at all, in a whole night’s adventures, covering many centuries; it’s all above your dull Mortal Mind’s reach.”
Then he dropped into his “chances.” That is to say, he went to discussing my health—as coldly as if I had been a piece of mere property that he was commercially interested in, and which ought to be thoughtfully and prudently taken care of for his sake. And he even went into particulars, by gracious! advising me to be very careful about my diet, and to take a good deal of exercise, and keep regular hours, and avoid dissipation and religion, and not get married, because a family brought love, and distributed it among many objects, and intensified it, and this engendered wearing cares and anxieties, and when the objects suffered or died the miseries and anxieties multiplied and broke the heart and shortened life; whereas if I took good care of myself and avoided these indiscretions, there was no reason why he should not live ten million years and be hap—
I broke in and changed the subject, so as to keep from getting inhospitable and saying language; for really I was a good deal tried. I started him on the heavens, for he had been to a good many of them and liked ours the best, on account of there not being any Sunday there. They kept Saturday, and it was very pleasant: plenty of rest for the tired, and plenty of innocent good times for the others. But no Sunday, he said; the Sunday-Sabbath was a commercial invention and quite local, having been devised by Constantine to equalize prosperities in this world between the Jews and the Christians. The government statistics of that period showed that a Jew could make as much money in five days as a Christian could in six; and so Constantine saw that at this rate the Jews would by and by have all the wealth and the Christians all the poverty. There was nothing fair nor right about this, a righteous government should have equal laws for all, and take just as much care of the incompetent as of the competent—more, if anything. So he added the Sunday-Sabbath, and it worked just right, because it equalized the prosperities. After that, the Jew had to lie idle 104 days in the year, the Christian only 52, and this enabled the Christian to catch up. But my brother said there was now talk among Constantine and other early Christians up there, of some more equalizing; because, in looking forward a few centuries they could notice that along in the twentieth century somewhere it was going to be necessary to furnish the Jews another Sabbath to keep, so as to save what might be left of Christian property at that time. Schwarz said he had been down into the first quarter of the twentieth century lately, and it looked so to him.