by Mark Twain
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Ernest Wasserman professed that he wasn't, etc. etc.
To return to Frau Stein. This masterly devil was the master's second wife, & before that she had been the widow Vogel. She had brought into the family a young thing by her first marriage, & this girl was now seventeen and a blister, so to speak; for she was a second edition of her mother-just plain galley-proof, neither revised nor corrected, full of turned letters, wrong fonts, outs & doubles, as we say in the printing-shop-in a word pi, etc. Moses Haas said that whenever she took up an en-quad fact, just watch her and you would see her try and cram it in where there wasn't room for a 4-m space; & she'd do it, too, if she had to take the sheep('s)-foot to it. That daughter kept the name she was born toMarie Vogel; it was her mother's preference & her own. Both were
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Frau Stein-Maria (Stein) Vogel ["Stein" reinstated]-Marget Regen
proud of it, without any reason, etc. Maria [MT's italics] had plenty of energy & vivacity & tongue, & was shapely enough but not pretty, barring her eyes, which had all kinds of fire in them, according to the mood of the moment-opal-fire, fox-fire, hell-f., & the rest. She hadn't any fear, broadly speaking. Perhaps she had none at all, except for Satan, & ghosts, & witches & the priest & the magician, & a sort of fear of God in the dark, & the lightning when she had been blaspheming & hadn't time to get in ayes enough to square-up & cash-in. She (ha) despised Marget Regen & her mother the master['s] niece & dependent & bedridden (moth) sister. She loved Gustav Fischer who did reciprocate & hated all the rest.
Marget Regen was Maria's age-17. She was lithe & graceful & trim-built as a fish, & she was a blue-eyed blonde, & soft & sweet & innocent & shrinking & winning
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& gentle & beautiful; just a vision for the eyes, (worshipful,) [MT's cancellation] adorable, enchanting; but that wasn't the hive for her. She was a kitten in a menagerie.
She was a second edition of what her mother had been at her age. That poor meek mother! Yonder she (Iay) had lain, partially paralysed, ever since her brother my master had brought her eagerly there a dear & lovely young widow 15 YEARS BEFORE, etc. [MT's emphasis]
Next was old Katrina. She was cook & housekeeper; her forebears had served the master's people & none else for 3 or 4 generations; she was 60 & served the master all his life, from the time she was a little girl & he a swaddled baby. She was erect, straight, 6 feet high, with the port & stride of a grenadier; she was independent & masterful, & her fears were limited to the supernatural. She believed that she could whip anybody on the place, & would have considered an invitation a favor. As far as her
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allegiance (went) stretched, she paid it with affection & reverence, but it did not extend beyond "her family"-the master, his sister & Marget. She regarded Frau (Vogel) Stein & Maria as aliens & intruders, & was frank about saying so.
She had under her 2 strapping young wenches-Sara & Duffles (a nickname), and a manservant, Jacob, & a porter, Fritz. & others
Next, we have the printing force!
Adam Binks, 60 years old, learned bachelor, proofreader, poor, disappointed, surly.
Hans Katzenyammer, 36, printer, huge, strong, freckled, redheaded, rough. When drunk, quarrelsome. Drunk when opportunity offered.
Moses Maas, 28, printer; a looker-out for himself; likely to say acid things about people & to people; take him all around, not a pleasant character.
Barty Langbein, 15; cripple; general-utility lad; sunny spirit; affectionate; could play the fiddle.
Ernest Wasserman, 17, apprentice; braggart, malicious, hateful, coward, liar, cruel, underhanded, treacherous.
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He and Moses had a sort of half-fondness for each other, which was natural, they having one or more traits in common, down among the lower grades of traits.
Gustav Fischer, 27, printer; large, well built, shapely & muscular; quiet, brave, kindly, a good disposition, just & fair; a slow temper to ignite, but a reliable burner when well going. Ile was about as much out of place as was Marget. He was the best man of them all, & deserved to be in better company.
Last of all comes August Feldner, 16, 'prentice. This is myself.
The stranger: No. 44, New series 864,962.
Martin v. Giesbach
Elisabeth v. Arnim
Emil Schwarz.
Group D
This group of notes consists of eleven note-size pages, 3" by 41%6", in the blue-black ink of MS pp. 432-587, and must have been written in the course of composing that portion of the manuscript.
Group D
D-1
DISAPPEARANCE of the maid discovered.
Hurry the public betrothal before she publishes the scandal.
DISAPPEARANCE of n me (or) and n my Duplicate discovered.
Great excitement in castle.
Betrothal stops.
Distress is killing Marget's mother.
Rumor of 3 murders
The bodies found. Close all exits. Search. They find the murderer (44) with trinkets on him. Arrest him. Torture confession out of him. Behead him-he picks up head, puts
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it in basket & walks off. While they stare, claps it on & becomes magician & disappears in thunder & lightning.
Big reputation.
44 invisible says it was I. The real magician will appear now.
FUNERALS
-the cat is around.
No consecrated ground-they lacked absolution. Buried with 44same ceremonies at night. Katrina & others grieve for cat & others. (How long since K has seen this boy?)
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3
The 3 murdered found again. Funerals.
The 3 found again. Funerals.
Stein declares he will pay no more funerals. They stop.
Upon reflection I find my way is not clear, for certainly Martin is another & not I. It is he that is Lisbet's husband.
I must renounce that marriage & win her in my own person. By & by.
Visit other centuries to ease my heart. Marry there, by compulsion
44 shows me dream-wonders & music of spheres, but I can't describe them, there being nothing to compare them with.
D-4
P.O. DEPT. doesn't use [MT wrote `used'] dreams so much now, they use the late French King's post.
Katrina has dream?
Shall her implorations restore 44? 1 think so
44 must turn to animals.
Have him be a mountebank with trained animals-they talk together.
Adolf arrest the lot
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INDULGENCE-murder produces one signed by Adolf, but he points out it only saves his soul, not his life. Court doubts, but yields. GHOST-NIGHT-castle full of spectres & wandering lights. Distant groans & cries-flight & pursuit, noiseless.
The murderer is I or my Duplicate, they can't tell which; I confess I did it but I won't tell which. The indulgence names the Duplicate & 44 claims to be he & that a duplicate is not human & not amenable to law. Court is uncertain.
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The emperor said:
"They blame an emperor for his appetite for notice & praise: Look at God!"
His Majesty old Henry MMMMMDCXXII (of savage) The Blasphemous/Uncultured said-"Yes, I am fond of (what the books call) praises, processions, notice, attentions, reverence, fuss & feathers. Vanities? Are they? There was never n a living creature nor even n a god that didn't like them." [this paragraph canceled with a single line]
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Kings and all. [circled] All Amen n are so very very little, so microscopically little, not alone to the eye of God but when they searchin[g]ly & honestly examine them-[selves) it seems foolish to go thro the pretence of detecting differences & distinctions.
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Let your condition be what it may, you will provide yourself with the same amount of unhappiness required
by your born disposition -king & tramp alike.
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3B
Pity-don't scoff at & despise & hate the race. It is (sw) victim of a swindle, & the arbitrary character of its nature makes it blameless. It has no responsibility.
(Both talk gently & earnestly.)
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You wouldn't like everybody to (admire) (A applaud n) ["admire" reinstated] you?
A Well .... no. A
You wouldn't like anybody to admire all sides of your character?
Why?
Nemmine. (Tell you)
Wouldn't you he satisfied if the "best people" admired as much of your character & conduct as you do?
NO-(& that is honest.)
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(B) DREAM-LIFE
A funeral;
accident;
loss of wealth;
" " wife & child
Crossed in love—
It bites, it cuts, it tears,-but keep heart, it is not real.
There is but one person in the Universe-you are he, & you are merely a wandering Thought.
Group E
These notes, in the blue-black ink of MS pp. 432-587, on four sheets of Par Value tablet stock, were written during 1905.
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1 Cat passes through-she will bring news.
A 44 says n Those boys are out of date in the matter of conveying messages-go by Fr.[ench] K[ing]'s post, now. I remember the fat & the lean kine.
The dreams are all right enough, but the art of interpreting is lost. 1500 yr ago they were getting to do it A SO A badly it was considered better to depend on (augurs-do you know about those?
Yes,)
chicken-guts & other naturally intelligent sources of prophecy, recognising that when guts can't prophecy it is no use for Ezekiel to go into the business.
Prophecy went out with the chicken guts.
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Everything at standstill because of the missing 3.
A Search for them, must be missing 3 days n
By indulgence from Adolf:
Conspiracy to massacre the Duplicates. A by the strikers. A
Cat overhears
I lave to have signs passwords grips so as to tell who are Duplicates.
Cat reports them to August, & he, invisible, betrays them to Duplicates.
CAT [sidelined in margin]
Now is my chance, if I can only win her in my own name—
Take father Peter's advice-he says Martin is quite another person -"green goods"
Then courts Marget-she is drawn to him, & he may be Emil she doesn't know which he is but (she) her feelings tell her he is no, the one. Yes, she concedes, he would answer all practical purposes; yet, lacking the essential one-love-no good. Sorry, but N. G. One parting kiss to meet no more. Take a hatful. I will not take advantage of your generosity-2 will do.
The murdering is to happen that night-which is Ghost-NightAdolf & other exorcisors there, to be pestered by 44
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(DI) BRONTOSAUR, all bones-"will be more effective that way" -prances around, reaches into 2° story windows-
"Here comes Carnegie!"-it is the (P) Carnegio-Pittsburghio- Brontosoriass"-
They have an old love-grudge of tertiary times-they race all over town & region & fight, scaring everybody to death—
Summons St George from the past, Don Quixotte from the future & try to interest a tournament, but the boys ruther not-("it's Sunday").
44 thrashes the creatures (as the magic[ian]) leads them meekly, they kneel to a cardinal the minute they see him, & the cardinal's littl[e] boy(s) takes a ride
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Remember, Katrina cannot like the magician, he burnt her boyshe crosses herself & attacks him whenever they mee[t]-& she is the only one who dares defy him.
She's been waiting around ever since that tragedy, with a long carving-knife.
Shethinks he has instigated the murders-she is so bitter against him that she attributes to him every evil that happens.
Group F
These miscellaneous notes, on the front and back covers of a Par Value tablet, although clearly not for "The Mysterious Stranger," were apparently written in Florence at the same time as the final chapter of "No. 44." The language of the last chapter parallels the first note on F-2.
F-1
1. Adam? He is part of the dream. [page torn] him by agreeing with his fad.
2. Father o' de Brotherhood? Sho! Cant ever get him to say anything but that.
3. Ad? Enthusiastic. He is the head-criminal-perpetuate his name.
4. Agree with his fad.
5. Full of his trouble; cares nothing for Ad. Peters the inventor.
Adm's fad for life's failures came from wife.
Jemmy a wholesome spirit-practical, like x x poetic like x x x & both, like x x x x & literary by inheri[tance] from that uncle?
Martha is doctor, like Mrs. G. She is in deep sympathy with the Broken Reeds.
Poem "The Derelict."
George Flinders [written in left margin]
The squawkestrelle & penola
Jemmy apparently no fad to work upon. Shall it turn out that he has one himself?-his love for her-& it operates by making him give up the monument scheme.
F-2
1. The intellectual & placid & sane-looking man whose foible is that life n & God & the universe n is a dream & he the only person in it-not a person, but a homeless & silly thought wandering forever in space.
2. The negro whitewasher (of the Brotherhood of Man) whose daughter (nurse) was lynched for poisoning the white childit turns out she was innocent.
3. The N. E. farmer whose young daughter was beguiled away by .... he found her after 7 months' search, dying of starvation -had lived on 2 cans of condensed milk per week-afraid to go to her father who had never taken her mother's interest in the children, he being absorbed in the heathen. He rails at God, who could have saved her & didn't.
4. George Francis Train-looking man who lost wife & his 4 children in a week when was was 30. At 74 is glad they were takenthey escaped life. "God's only valuable gift to man-death." Has almost completed extermination-scheme-oxygen.
5 Young policeman refused $10,000 bribe & reported it. Is admired (with words) but is privately believed to be "a little off." Is little by little neglected, then dismissed. He laments his foolish act; the other policeman took the $10,000 & is now Chief of Police.
Page of Discarded Manuscript
This single discarded page of manuscript on cross-barred paper may be an early effort to explore the material used in these manuscripts. It may equally have come from some closely related manuscript: only once in the Mysterious Stranger stories is Traum or Satan or 44 characterized as "The Prince of Darkness."
I
The rain continued to beat softly upon the panes, & the wind to sigh & wail about the eaves. In the room there was no sound; both of us remained buried in thought. After a long time I roused myself & took up the thread where it had been broken off:
("It was depressing-that which you said.)
"My perhaps over-warm eulogy n of the character A of my race, & my praise of its noble struggle against heavy odds toward higher & ever higher moral & spiritual summits, have not won from you even the slender kindness of a comment."
(He) A The Prince of Darkness n answered gravely-
"Is not silence a comment?"
I had invited that thrust, & was (sorry) ashamed.
A further possibility is suggested in a newspaper letter entitled "A Mystery," probably written in 1868 to "EDS. HERALD" (clipping in MTP). Complaining of a deadbeat "Double" who had been writing squibs and borrowing money in his name, Mark Twain concludes: "I am fading, still fading. Shortly, if my distress of mind continues, there may be only four of us left. (That is a joke, and it naturally takes the melancholy tint of my own feelings. I will explain it: I am Twain, which is two; my Double is Double-Twain, which is four more; fo
ur and two are six; two from six leaves four. It is very sad.)" Thus, in a punning non-mathematical sense, 44 might be Twain twice doubled.
None of these explanations, however, seems wholly adequate. On the basis of present evidence I conclude that the number and name "44" indicate simply that "Satan's original host have large families," as the author says in his working notes for "Schoolhouse Hill."
RATHER THAN define each printing term as it occurs in the text, I have assembled them here in a glossary. The definitions, often condensed, derive mostly from Herbert Simon and Harry Carter, Printing Explained (Leicester, 1931). As early as 1886, Clemens used many of these same terms in his speech, "The Compositor," delivered to a group of printers on Franklin's birthday; Hartford Courant, 20 January 1886. As late as 1909, in the essay "Is Shakespeare Dead?" Clemens would write: "If a man should write a book and in it make one of his characters say, 'Here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing galley and the imposingstone into the hell-box; assemble the comps around the frisket and let them jeff for takes and be quick about it,' I should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing, and would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically"; What Is Man?, pp. 336-337.
Mark Twain had written in his notebook on 6 January 1897 an idea for a farce or sketch involving a backward shift in time, a dream backward in time, in which Chaucer was to appear (Notebook 31, TS pp. 41-43).
1 MTSatan.
2 "Introduction," DE, XXVII, ix-x.
p. 130.
r --- ' After suggesting that the generalized source for The Mysterious Stranger was chapter 20, "L'Hermite," of Voltaire's Zadig, and that Goethe's Faust might have contributed picturesque events, Cowper wrote in a footnote: "When he was over seventy, Mark Twain was going over with Paine a number of incomplete manuscripts. They found three forms of The Mysterious Stranger and agreed that one could early be made ready for publication. Seemingly nothing was done to complete it. Twain died in 1910 and the story was not published until 1916. It is evidently not a finished work." His analysis appears in "The Hermit Story, as Used by Voltaire and Mark Twain," In Honor of the Ninetieth Birthday of Charles Frederick Johnson, ed. Odell Shepard and Arthur Adams (Hartford, 1928), p. 333. Fussell perceived a constant conflict in the published story between the author's "emotional reactions" and "his theoretical formulations,"-a conflict partially inherent in the manuscript on which the posthumous edition is based, it may be noted, and partially caused by Paine's editorial tampering ("The Structural Problem of The Mysterious Stranger," Studies in Philology, XLIX [January 1952], 103).