No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

by Mark Twain

  “Eight . . . . nine . . . . ten . . . . eleven—”

  Forty-Four shouted—

  “Backward! turn backward! O Time in thy flight! Look at the clock-hands! Listen!”

  Instantly I found myself counting the strokes again, aloud—

  “Eleven . . . ten . . . . nine . . . eight . . . . seven . . . six . . . . five . . . . four . . . two . . . one!”

  At once the cat woke and repeated her remark about re-catching the rat—saying it backwards!

  Then Forty-Four said—

  “see you’ll—Count.”

  Whereupon I said—

  “really? it Is”

  And he remarked—the booming of the great castle clock mixing with his words—

  “again. eleven striking goes! she There word (here his voice began to become impressive, then to nobly rise, and swell, and grow in eloquent feeling and majestic expression), my you give I least, the in not least; the in had, I’ve trouble the mind shan’t I that, like picturesque, and showy something or pulverized, or burnt, him get and way, magnificent this in now, completed, it get I when and before; love of labor mere a in felt ever hardly have I as such satisfaction of sense a and it in pride (here his voice was near to breaking, so deeply were his feelings stirred) a feel I and thought, nor labor neither spared I’ve centuries; in out planned I’ve anything than it in interest more taken I’ve reputation; that with pains of lot a taken I’ve know You (here his winged eloquence reached its loftiest flight, and in his deep organ-tones he thundered forth his sublime words) certainty, moral dead a to burnt, him get and lived, ever that magician glorious most the him make and Hoffman, Balthasar for building been I’ve reputation the perfect and out round will and Yes,”—

  My brain was spinning, it was audibly whizzing, I rose reeling, and was falling lifeless to the floor, when 44 caught me. His touch restored me, and he said—

  “I see it is too much for you, you cannot endure it, you would go mad. Therefore I relieve you of your share in this grand event. You shall look on and enjoy, taking no personal part in the backward flight of time, nor in its return, until it reaches the present hour again and resumes its normal march forward. Go and come as you please, amuse yourself as you choose.”

  Those were blessed words! I could not tell him how thankful I was.

  A considerable blank followed—a silent one, for it represented the unrepeated conversation which he and I had had about the turning back of time and the sun.

  Then another silent blank followed; it represented the interval occupied by my dispute with the cat as to whether the magician was come alive again or not.

  I filled in these intervals not wearily nor drearily—oh, no indeed, just the reverse; for my gaze was glued to that American clock—watching its hands creeping backward around its face, an uncanny spectacle!

  Then I fell asleep, and when I woke again the clock had gone back seven hours, and it was mid-afternoon. Being privileged to go and come as I pleased, I threw off my flesh and went down to see the grand transformation-spectacle repeated backwards.

  It was as impressive and as magnificent as ever. In the darkness some of the people lay prone, some were kneeling, some were wandering and tottering about with their hands over their eyes, Katrina was walking backwards on unsteady feet; she backed further and further, then knelt and bowed her head—then that white glory burst upon the darkness and 44 stood clothed as with the sun; and he bent and kissed the old head—and so on and so on, the scene repeated itself backwards, detail by detail, clear to the beginning; then the magician, the cat and I walked backward up the stairs and through the gathering eclipse to my room.

  After that, as time drifted rearward, I skipped some things and took in others, according to my humor. I watched my Duplicate turn from nothing into a lovely soap-bubble statue with delicate rainbow-hues playing over it; watched its skeleton gather form and solidity; watched it put on flesh and clothes, and all that; but I skipped the interviews with the cat; I also skipped the interview with the master; and when the clock had gone back twenty-three hours and I was due to appear drunk in Marget’s chamber, I took the pledge and stayed away.

  Then, for amusement and to note effects, 44 and I—invisible—appeared in China, where it was noonday. The sun was just ready to turn downward on his new north-eastern track, and millions of yellow people were gazing at him, dazed and stupid, while other millions lay stretched upon the ground everywhere, exhausted with the terrors and confusions they had been through, and now blessedly unconscious. We loafed along behind the sun around the globe, tarrying in all the great cities on the route, and observing and admiring the effects. Everywhere weary people were re-chattering previous conversations backwards and not understanding each other, and oh, they did look so tuckered out and tired of it all! and always there were groups gazing miserably at the town-clocks; in every city funerals were being held again that had already been held once, and the hearses and the processions were marching solemnly backwards; where there was war, yesterday’s battles were being refought, wrong-end-first; the previously killed were getting killed again, the previously wounded were getting hit again in the same place and complaining about it; there were blood-stirring and tremendous charges of masses of steel-clad knights across the field—backwards; and on the oceans the ships, with full-bellied sails were speeding backwards over the same water they had traversed the day before, and some of each crew were scared and praying, some were gazing in mute anguish at the crazy sun, and the rest were doing profanity beyond imagination.

  At Rouen we saw Henry I gathering together his split skull and his other things.

  Chapter 33

  SURELY Forty-Four was the flightiest creature that ever was! Nothing interested him long at a time. He would contrive the most elaborate projects, and put his whole mind and heart into them, then he would suddenly drop them, in the midst of their fulfilment, and start something fresh. It was just so with his Assembly of the Dead. He summoned those forlorn wrecks from all the world and from all the epochs and ages, and then, when everything was ready for the exhibition, he wanted to flit back to Moses’s time and see the Egyptians floundering around in the Dead Sea, and take me along with him. He said he had seen it twice, and it was one of the handsomest and most exciting incidents a body ever saw. It was all I could do to persuade him to wait a while.

  To me the Procession was very good indeed, and most impressive. First, there was an awful darkness. All visible things gloomed down gradually, losing their outlines little by little, then disappeared utterly. The thickest and solidest and blackest darkness followed, and a silence which was so still it was as if the world was holding its breath. That deep stillness continued, and continued, minute after minute, and got to be so oppressive that presently I was holding my breath—that is, only half-breathing. Then a wave of cold air came drifting along, damp, searching, and smelling of the grave, and was shivery and dreadful. After about ten minutes I heard a faint clicking sound coming as from a great distance. It came slowly nearer and nearer, and a little louder and a little louder, and increasing steadily in mass and volume, till all the place was filled with a dry sharp clacking and was right abreast of us and passing by! Then a vague twilight suffused the place and through it and drowned in it we made out the spidery dim forms of thousands of skeletons marching! It made me catch my breath. It was that grewsome and grisly and horrible, you can’t think.

  Soon the light paled to a half dawn, and we could distinguish details fairly well. Forty-Four had enlarged the great hall of the castle, so as to get effects. It was a vast and lofty corridor, now, and stretched away for miles and miles, and the Procession drifted solemnly down it sorrowfully clacking, losing definiteness gradually, and finally fading out in the far distances, and melting from sight.

  Forty-Four named no end of those poor skeletons, as they passed by, and he said the most of them had been distinguished, in their day and had cut a figure in the world. Some of the names were familiar to me, but the most of t
hem were not. Which was natural, for they belonged to nations that perished from the earth ten, and twenty, and fifty, and a hundred, and three hundred, and six hundred thousand years ago, and so of course I had never heard of them.

  By force of 44’s magic each skeleton had a tab on him giving his name and date, and telling all about him, in brief. It was a good idea, and saved asking questions. Pharaoh was there, and David and Goliah and several other of the sacred characters; and Adam and Eve, and some of the Caesars, and Cleopatra, and Charlemagne, and Dagobert, and kings, and kings and kings till you couldn’t count them—the most of them from away back thousands and thousands of centuries before Adam’s time. Some of them fetched their crowns along, and had a rotten velvet rag or two dangling about their bones, a kind of pathetic spectacle.

  And there were skeletons whom I had known, myself, and been at their funerals, only three or four years before—men and women, boys and girls; and they put out their poor bony hands and shook with me, and looked so sad. Some of the skeletons dragged the rotting ruins of their coffins after them by a string, and seemed pitifully anxious that that poor property shouldn’t come to harm.

  But to think how long the pathos of a thing can last, and still carry its touching effect, the same as if it was new and happened yesterday! There was a slim skeleton of a young woman, and it went by with its head bowed and its bony hands to its eyes, crying, apparently. Well, it was a young mother whose little child disappeared one day and was never heard of again, and so her heart was broken, and she cried her life away. It brought the tears to my eyes and made my heart ache to see that poor thing’s sorrow. When I looked at her tab I saw it had happened five hundred thousand years ago! It seemed strange that it should still affect me, but I suppose such things never grow old, but remain always new.

  King Arthur came along, by and by, with all his knights. That interested me, because we had just been printing his history, copying it from Caxton. They rode upon bony crates that had once been horses, and they looked very stately in their ancient armor, though it was rusty and lacked a piece here and there, and through those gaps you could see the bones inside. They talked together, skeletons as they were, and you could see their jawbones go up and down through the slits in their helmets. By grace of Forty-Four’s magic I could understand them. They talked about Arthur’s last battle, and seemed to think it happened yesterday, which shows that a thousand years in the grave is merely a night’s sleep, to the dead, and counts for nothing.

  It was the same with Noah and his sons and their wives. Evidently they had forgotten that they had ever left the Ark, and could not understand how they came to be wandering around on land. They talked about the weather; they did not seem to be interested in anything else.

  The skeletons of Adam’s predecessors outnumbered the later representatives of our race by myriads, and they rode upon undreamt-of monsters of the most extraordinary bulk and aspect. They marched ten thousand abreast, our walls receding and melting away and disappearing, to give them room, and the earth was packed with them as far as the eye could reach. Among them was the Missing Link. That is what 44 called him. He was an under-sized skeleton, and he was perched on the back of a long-tailed and long-necked creature ninety feet long and thirty-three feet high; a creature that had been dead eight million years, 44 said.

  For hours and hours the dead passed by in continental masses, and the bone-clacking was so deafening you could hardly hear yourself think. Then, all of a sudden 44 waved his hand and we stood in an empty and soundless world.

  Chapter 34

  “And you are going away, and will not come back any more.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We have comraded long together, and it has been pleasant—pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more.”

  “In this life, 44, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely, 44?”

  Then all tranquilly and soberly he made the strange answer—

  “There is no other.”

  A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words might be true—even must be true.

  “Have you never suspected this, August?”

  “No—how could I? But if it can only be true—”

  “It is true.”

  A gush of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said—

  “But—but—we have seen that future life—seen it in its actuality, and so—”

  “It was a vision—it had no existence.”

  I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me—

  “A vision?—a vi—”

  “Life itself is only a vision, a dream.”

  It was electrical. By God I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!

  “Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world,—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars: a dream, all a dream, they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!”

  “I!”

  “And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence, I am but a dream—your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me . . . .

  “I am perishing already—I am failing, I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a Thought, the only existent Thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I your poor servant have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better! . . . .

  “Strange! that you should not have suspected, years ago, centuries, ages, æons ago! for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fictions! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell—mouths mercy, and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor abused slave to worship him! . . . .

  “You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible, except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present—you should have recognized them earlier . . . . .

  “It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You. And You are but a Thought—a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”

  He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

  THE END

  Explanatory Notes

  Notes are keyed to page and line: 5.3–18 means page 5, lines 3–18. Chapter titles are not included when counting lines.

  title. 5–6 being an ancient tale found in a jug, and freely translated from the jug] T
he author was not consistent in maintaining his role as translator, but the significance of his subtitle is made clear in chapter 22. There his supernatural character, 44, who is having difficulty enlightening August, laments that the human mind “doesn’t hold anything; one cannot pour the starred and shoreless expanses of the universe into a jug!” (114.2–4).

  3.9–4.3 Yes, Austria . . . shade-trees.] In sketching Eseldorf, Mark Twain used his notes made in July 1897 about the Swiss village of Weggis. Like his hometown, Hannibal (Missouri), Weggis was a small village backed by forested heights and fronting on an expanse of water. It also had the air of repose and lethargy that he associated with Hannibal, described in Life on the Mississippi (1883) as a “town drowsing in the sunshine” (chapter 4). Impressions of the recently observed European village are blended here with those of the well-remembered American one. For further discussion of the setting, see Henry Nash Smith, “Mark Twain’s Images of Hannibal: From St. Petersburg to Eseldorf,” Texas Studies in English 37 (1958): 3–23; and John S. Tuckey, “Hannibal, Weggis, and Mark Twain’s Eseldorf,” American Literature 42 (May 1970): 235–40.

  5.3–18 he was . . . saying is.] Mark Twain based his characterization of Father Adolf on his unfavorable impressions of Dr. Karl Lueger, leader of the anti-Jewish Christian Socialist Party and Burgomeister of Vienna. Lueger had been prominent in events leading to an outbreak of rioting on the floor of the Austrian parliament in the fall of 1897, which Mark Twain witnessed. The manuscript for this chapter, which Mark Twain salvaged from an earlier version of his novel called “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” shows that he first called the bad priest “Lueger,” but changed the name to “Adolf” before reaching the end of the chapter.

  11.10–16.6 stretched . . . myself.] Sometime after Mark Twain decided to call his novel “The Mysterious Stranger” in 1902 or 1903, he wrote a note to himself on the manuscript: “Put in (Description of the region from the ‘Young Satan.’).” This long passage was in fact salvaged from the earlier manuscript, “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” which he had abandoned about 1900.