No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

by Mark Twain

  We didn’t see a soul, all the murky way from my door to the central grand staircase and half way down it—then we began to see plenty of people, our own and men from the village—and they were armed, and stood in two ranks, waiting, a double fence across the spacious hall—for the magician to pass between, if it might please him to try it; and Katrina was there, between the fences, grim and towering and soldierly, and she was watching and waiting, with her knife. I glanced back, by chance, and there was also a living fence behind! dim forms, men who had been keeping watch in ambush, and had silently closed in upon the magician’s tracks as he passed along. Mary G. had apparently had enough of this grisly journey—she was gone.

  When the people below saw that their plans had succeeded, and that their quarry was in the trap they had set, they set up a loud cheer of exultation, but it didn’t seem to me to ring true; there was a doubtful note in it, and I thought likely those folks were not as glad they had caught their bird as they were letting on to be; and they kept crossing themselves industriously; I took that for a sign, too.

  Forty-Four moved steadily down. When he was on the last step there was turmoil down the hall, and a volley of shoutings, with cries of “make way—Father Adolf is come!” then he burst panting through one of the ranks and threw himself in the way, just as Katrina was plunging for the disguised 44, and stormed out—

  “Stop her, everybody! Donkeys, would you let her butcher him, and cheat the Church’s fires!”

  They jumped for Katrina, and in a moment she was struggling in the jumble of swaying forms, with nothing visible above it but her head and her long arm with the knife in it; and her strong voice was pouring out her feelings with energy, and easily making itself heard above the general din and the priest’s commands:

  “Let me at him—he burnt my child, my darling!” . . . . “Keep her off, men, keep her off!” . . . . “He is not the Church’s, his blood is mine by rights—out of my way! I will have it!” . . . . “Back! woman, hack, I tell you—force her hack, men, have you no strength? are you nothing but hoys?” . . . . “A hundred of you shan’t stay me, woman though I be!”

  And sure enough, with one massy surge she wrenched herself free, and flourished her knife, and bent her head and body forward like a foot-racer and came charging down the living lane through the gathering darkness—

  Then suddenly there was a great light! she lifted her head and caught it full in her swarthy face, which it transfigured with its white glory, as it did also all that place, and its marble pillars, and the frightened people, and Katrina dropped her knife and fell to her knees, with her hands clasped, everybody doing the same; and so there they were, all kneeling, like that, with hands thrust forward or clasped, and they and the stately columns all awash in that unearthly splendor; and there where the magician had stood, stood 44 now, in his supernal beauty and his gracious youth; and it was from him that that flooding light came, for all his form was clothed in that immortal fire. and flashing like the sun; and Katrina crept on her knees to him, and bent down her old head and kissed his feet, and he bent down and patted her softly on the shoulder and touched his lips to the gray hair—and was gone!—and for two or three minutes you were so blinded you couldn’t see your next neighbor in that submerging black darkness. Then after that it was better, and you could make out the murky forms, some still kneeling, some lying prone in a swoon, some staggering about, here and there, with their hands pressed over their eyes, as if that light had hurt them and they were in pain. Katrina was wandering off, on unsteady feet, and her knife was lying there in the midst.

  It was good he thought of the eclipse, it helped out ever so much; the effects would have been fine and great in any case, but the eclipse made them grand and stunning—just letter-perfect, as it seemed to me; and he said himself it beat Barnum and Bailey hands down, and was by as much as several shades too good for the provinces—which was all Sanscrit to me, and hadn’t any meaning even in Sanscrit I reckon, but was invented for the occasion, because it had a learned sound, and he liked sound better than sense as a rule. There’s been others like that, but he was the worst.

  I judged it would take those people several hours to get ever that, and accumulate their wits again and get their bearings, for it had knocked the whole bunch dizzy; meantime there wouldn’t be anything doing. I must put in the time some way until they should be in a condition to resume business at the old stand. I went to my room and put on my flesh and stretched myself out on a lounge before the fire with a book, first setting the door ajar, so that the cat could fetch news if she got hold of any, which I wished she might; but in a little while I was asleep. I did not stir again until ten at night. I woke then, and found the cat finishing her supper, and my own ready on the table and hot; and very welcome, for I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. Mary came and occupied a chair at my board, and washed herself and delivered her news while I ate. She had witnessed the great transformation scene, and had been so astonished by it and so interested in it that she did not wait to see the end, but went up a chimney and stayed there half an hour freezing, until somebody started a fire under her, and then she was thankful and very comfortable. But it got too comfortable, and she climbed out and came down a skylight stairway and went visiting around, and a little while ago she caught a rat, and did it as easy as nothing, and would teach me how, sometime, if I cared for such things; but she didn’t eat it, it wasn’t a fresh rat, or was out of season or something, but it reminded her that she was hungry, so she came home. Then she said—

  “If you like to be astonished, I can astonish you. The magician isn’t dead!”

  I threw my hands up and did the astonishment-act like an old expert, crying out—

  “Mary Florence Fortescue, what can you mean!”

  She was delighted, and exclaimed—

  “There, it’s just as I said! I told him you wouldn’t ever believe it; but I can lay my paw on my heart, just so, and I wish I may never stir if I haven’t seen him!—seen him, you hear?—and he’s just as alive as ever he was since the day he was born!”

  “Oh, go ’long, you’re deceiving me!”

  She was almost beside herself with joy over the success of her astonisher, and said—

  “Oh, it’s lovely, it’s too lovely, and just as I said it would be—I told him you wouldn’t, and it’s come out just so!”

  In her triumph and delight she tried to clap her hands, but it was a failure, they wouldn’t clap any more than mushrooms. Then she said—

  “Duplicate, would you believe he is alive if I should prove it?”

  “Sho,” I said, “come off!—what are you giving me?—as he used to say. You’re talking nonsense, Mary. When a person is dead, known to be dead, permanently dead, demonstrably dead, you can’t prove him alive, there isn’t any way. Come, don’t you know that?”

  Well, she was just beaming, by now, and she could hardly hold her system together, she was that near to bursting with the victory she was going to spring on me. She skipped to the floor and flirted something to my foot with her paw; I picked it up, and she jumped into her chair again and said—

  “There, now, he said you would know what that is; what is it?”

  “It’s a thing he calls a paper—Boston paper.”

  “That’s right, that’s what he said. And he said it is future English and you know present English and can read it. Did he say right?”

  “The fact is right, but he didn’t say it, because he’s dead.”

  “You wait—that’s all. He said look at the date.”

  “Very well. He didn’t say it, because he’s dead, and of course wouldn’t think of it; but here it is, all the same—June 28, 1905.”

  “That’s right, it’s what he said. Then he said ask you what was the Founder’s message to her disciples, that was in the other Boston paper. What was it?”

  “Well, he told me there was an immense war going on, and she got tired having her people pray for peace and never take a trick for seventeen
months, so she ordered them to quit, and put their battery out of commission. And he said nobody could understand the rest of the message, and like enough that very ignorance would bring on an immense disaster.”

  “Aha! well, it did! He says the very minute she was stopping the praying, the two fleets were meeting, and the uncivilized one utterly annihilated the civilized one, and it wouldn’t have happened if she had let the praying go on. Now then, you didn’t know that, did you!”

  “No, and I don’t know it yet.”

  “Well, you soon will. The message was June 27, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the disaster was that very day—right after the praying was stopped—and you’ll find the news of it in the very next day’s paper, which you’ve got in your hand—date, June 28.”

  I took a glance at the big headings, and said—

  “M-y word! why it’s absolutely so! Baker G., don’t you know this is the most astounding thing that ever happened? It proves he is alive—nobody else could bring this paper. He certainly is alive, and back with us, after that tremendous abolishment and extinction which we witnessed; yes, he’s alive, Mary, alive, and glad am I, oh, grateful beyond words!”

  “Oh!” she cried, in a rapture, “it’s just splendid, oh, just too lovely! I knew I could prove it; I knew it just as well! I thought he was gone, when he blazed up and went out, that way, and I was so scared and grieved—and isn’t he a wonder! Duplicate, there isn’t another necromancer in the business that can begin with him, now is there?”

  “You can stake your tale and your ears on it, Mary, and don’t you forget it—as he used to say. In my opinion he can give the whole trade ninety-nine in the hundred and go out every time, cross-eyed and left-handed.”

  “But he isn’t, Duplicate.”

  “Isn’t what?”

  “Cross-eyed and left-handed.”

  “Who said he was, you little fool?”

  “Why, you did.”

  “I never said anything of the kind; I said he could if he was. That isn’t saying he was; it was a supposititious case, and literary; it was a figure, a metaphor, and its function was to augment the force of the—”

  “Well, he isn’t, anyway; because I’ve noticed, and—”

  “Oh, shut up! don’t I tell you it was only a figure, and I never meant—”

  “I don’t care, you’ll never make me believe he’s cross-eyed and left-handed, because the time he—”

  “Baker G., if you open your mouth again I’ll jam the boot-jack down it! you’re as random and irrelevant and incoherent and mentally impenetrable as the afflicted Founder herself.”

  But she was under the bed by that time; and reflecting, probably, if she had the machinery for it.

  Chapter 32

  Forty-four, still playing Balthasar Hoffman the magician, entered briskly now, and threw himself in a chair. The cat emerged with confidence, spread herself, purring, in his lap, and said—

  “This Duplicate wouldn’t believe me when I told him, and when I proved it he tried to cram a boot-jack down my throat, thinking to scare me, which he didn’t, didn’t you, Duplicate?”

  “Didn’t I what?”

  “Why, what I just said.”

  “I don’t know what you just said; it was Christian Silence and untranslatable; but I’ll say yes to the whole of it if that will quiet you. Now then, keep still, and let the master tell what is on his mind.”

  “Well, this is on my mind, August. Some of the most distinguished people can’t come. Flora McFlimsey—nothing to wear; Eve, ditto; Adam, previous engagement, and so on and so on; Nero and ever so many others find the notice too short, and are urgent to have more time. Very well, we’ve got to accommodate them.”

  “But how can we do it? The show is due to begin in an hour. Listen!”

  Boom-m-m—boom-m-m—boom-m-m!—

  It was the great bell of the castle tolling the hour. Our American clock on the wall struck in, and simultaneously the clock of the village—faint and far, and half of the notes overtaken in their flight and strangled by the gusty wind. We sat silent and counted, to the end.

  “You see?” said I.

  “Yes, I see. Eleven. Now there are two ways to manage. One is, to have time stand still—which has been done before, a lot of times; and the other one is, to turn time backward for a day or two, which is comparatively new, and offers the best effects, besides.

  “ ‘Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight—

  Make me a child again, just for to-night!’—

  “—‘Beautiful Snow,’ you see; it hasn’t been written yet. I vote to reverse—and that is what we will do, presently. We will make the hands of the clocks travel around in the other direction.”

  “But will they?”

  “Sure. It will attract attention—make yourself easy, as to that. But the stunning effect is going to be the sun.”

  “How?”

  “Well, when they see him come rising up out of the west, about half a dozen hours from now, it will secure the interest of the entire world.”

  “I should think as much.”

  “Oh, yes, depend upon it. There is going to be more early rising than the human race has seen before. In my opinion it’ll be a record.”

  “I believe you are right about it. I mean to get up and see it myself. Or stay up.”

  “I think it will be a good idea to have it rise in the south-west, instead of the west. More striking, you see; and hasn’t been done before.”

  “Master, it will be wonderful! It will be the very greatest marvel the world has ever seen. It will be talked about and written about as long as the human race endures. And there’ll not be any disputing over it, because every human being that’s alive will get up to look at it, and there won’t be one single person to say it’s a lie.”

  “It’s so. It will be the only perfectly authenticated event in all human history. All the other happenings, big and little, have got to depend on minority-testimony, and very little of that—but not so, this time, dontcherknow. And this one’s patented. There aren’t going to be any encores.”

  “How long shall we go backwards, Balthasar?”

  “Two or three days or a week; long enough to accommodate Robert Bruce, and Henry I and such, who have hearts and things scattered around here and there and yonder, and have to get a basket and go around and collect; so we will let the sun and the clocks go backwards a while, then start them ahead in time to fetch up all right at midnight to-night—then the shades will begin to arrive according to schedule.”

  “It grows on me! It’s going to be the most prodigious thing that ever happened, and—”

  “Yes,” he burst out, in a rapture of eloquence, “and will round out and perfect the reputation I’ve been building for Balthasar Hoffman, and make him the most glorious magician that ever lived, and get him burnt, to a dead moral certainty. You know I’ve taken a lot of pains with that reputation; I’ve taken more interest in it than anything I’ve planned out in centuries; I’ve spared neither labor nor thought, and I feel a pride in it and a sense of satisfaction such as I have hardly ever felt in a mere labor of love before; and when I get it completed, now, in this magnificent way, and get him burnt, or pulverized, or something showy and picturesque, like that, I shan’t mind the trouble I’ve had, in the least; not in the least, I give you my word.”

  Boom-m-m—boom-m-m—boom-m-m—

  “There she goes! striking eleven again.”

  “Is it really?”

  “Count—you’ll see.”

  It woke the cat, and she stretched herself out about a yard and a half, and asked if time was starting back—which showed that she had heard the first part of the talk. And understood it of course, because it was in German. She was informed that time was about to start back; so she arranged herself for another nap, and said that when we got back to ten she would turn out and catch that rat again.

  I was counting the clock-strokes—counting aloud—
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