Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

by Bierce, Ambrose

  Then laid her naked, to keep her cool,

  On a slab of ice from the frozen pool;

  And there we will eat her — you and I.”

  The fox accepts, and away they walk,

  Beguiling the time with courteous talk.

  You’d ne’er have suspected, to see them smile,

  The bear was thinking, the blessed while,

  How, when his guest should be off his guard,

  With feasting hard,

  He’d give him a “wipe” that would spoil his style.

  You’d never have thought, to see them bow,

  The fox was reflecting deeply how

  He would best proceed, to circumvent

  His host, and prig

  The entire pig —

  Or other bird to the same intent.

  When Strength and Cunning in love combine,

  Be sure ‘t is to more than merely dine.

  The while these biters ply the lip,

  A mile ahead the muse shall skip:

  The poet’s purpose she best may serve

  Inside the den — if she have the nerve.

  Behold! laid out in dark recess,

  A ghastly goat in stark undress,

  Pallid and still on her gelid bed,

  And indisputably very dead.

  Her skin depends from a couple of pins —

  And here the most singular statement begins;

  For all at once the butchered beast,

  With easy grace for one deceased,

  Upreared her head,

  Looked round, and said,

  Very distinctly for one so dead:

  “The nights are sharp, and the sheets are thin:

  I find it uncommonly cold herein!”

  I answer not how this was wrought:

  All miracles surpass my thought.

  They’re vexing, say you? and dementing?

  Peace, peace! they’re none of my inventing.

  But lest too much of mystery

  Embarrass this true history,

  I’ll not relate how that this goat

  Stood up and stamped her feet, to inform’em

  With — what’s the word? — I mean, to warm’em;

  Nor how she plucked her rough capote

  From off the pegs where Bruin threw it,

  And o’er her quaking body drew it;

  Nor how each act could so befall:

  I’ll only swear she did them all;

  Then lingered pensive in the grot,

  As if she something had forgot,

  Till a humble voice and a voice of pride

  Were heard, in murmurs of love, outside.

  Then, like a rocket set aflight,

  She sprang, and streaked it for the light!

  Ten million million years and a day

  Have rolled, since these events, away;

  But still the peasant at fall of night,

  Belated therenear, is oft affright

  By sounds of a phantom bear in flight;

  A breaking of branches under the hill;

  The noise of a going when all is still!

  And hens asleep on the perch, they say,

  Cackle sometimes in a startled way,

  As if they were dreaming a dream that mocks

  The lope and whiz of a fleeting fox!

  Half we’re taught, and teach to youth,

  And praise by rote,

  Is not, but merely stands for, truth.

  So of my goat:

  She’s merely designed to represent

  The truth—”immortal” to this extent:

  Dead she may be, and skinned — frappé —

  Hid in a dreadful den away;

  Prey to the Churches — (any will do,

  Except the Church of me and you.)

  The simplest miracle, even then,

  Will get her up and about again.

  CONVERTING A PRODIGAL.

  Little Johnny was a saving youth — one who from early infancy had cultivated a provident habit. When other little boys were wasting their substance in riotous gingerbread and molasses candy, investing in missionary enterprises which paid no dividends, subscribing to the North Labrador Orphan Fund, and sending capital out of the country gene rally, Johnny would be sticking sixpences into the chimney-pot of a big tin house with “BANK” painted on it in red letters above an illusory door. Or he would put out odd pennies at appalling rates of interest, with his parents, and bank the income. He was never weary of dropping coppers into that insatiable chimney-pot, and leaving them there. In this latter respect he differed notably from his elder brother, Charlie; for, although Charles was fond of banking too, he was addicted to such frequent runs upon the institution with a hatchet, that it kept his parents honourably poor to purchase banks for him; so they were reluctantly compelled to discourage the depositing element in his panicky nature.

  Johnny was not above work, either; to him “the dignity of labour” was not a juiceless platitude, as it is to me, but a living, nourishing truth, as satisfying and wholesome as that two sides of a triangle are equal to one side of bacon. He would hold horses for gentlemen who desired to step into a bar to inquire for letters. He would pursue the fleeting pig at the behest of a drover. He would carry water to the lions of a travelling menagerie, or do anything, for gain. He was sharp-witted too: before conveying a drop of comfort to the parching king of beasts, he would stipulate for six-pence instead of the usual free ticket — or “tasting order,” so to speak. He cared not a button for the show.

  The first hard work Johnny did of a morning was to look over the house for fugitive pins, needles, hair-pins, matches, and other unconsidered trifles; and if he sometimes found these where nobody had lost them, he made such reparation as was in his power by losing them again where nobody but he could find them. In the course of time, when he had garnered a good many, he would “realize,” and bank the proceeds.

  Nor was he weakly superstitious, this Johnny. You could not fool him with the Santa Claus hoax on Christmas Eve: he would lie awake all night, as sceptical as a priest; and along toward morning, getting quietly out of bed, would examine the pendent stockings of the other children, to satisfy himself the predicted presents were not there; and in the morning it always turned out that they were not. Then, when the other children cried because they did not get anything, and the parents affected surprise (as if they really believed in the venerable fiction), Johnny was too manly to utter a whimper: he would simply slip out of the back door, and engage in traffic with affluent orphans; disposing of woolly horses, tin whistles, marbles, tops, dolls, and sugar archangels, at a ruinous discount for cash. He continued these provident courses for nine long years, always banking his accretions with scrupulous care. Everybody predicted he would one day be a merchant prince or a railway king; and some added he would sell his crown to the junk-dealers.

  His unthrifty brother, meanwhile, kept growing worse and worse. He was so careless of wealth — so so wastefully extravagant of lucre — that Johnny felt it his duty at times to clandestinely assume control of the fraternal finances, lest the habit of squandering should wreck the fraternal moral sense. It was plain that Charles had entered upon the broad road which leads from the cradle to the workhouse — and that he rather liked the travelling. So profuse was his prodigality that there were grave suspicions as to his method of acquiring what he so openly disbursed. There was but one opinion as to the melancholy termination of his career — a termination which he seemed to regard as eminently desirable. But one day, when the good pastor put it at him in so many words, Charles gave token of some apprehension.

  “Do you really think so, sir?” said he, thoughtfully; “ain’t you playin’ it on me?”

  “I assure you, Charles,” said the good man, catching a ray of hope from the boy’s dawning seriousness, “you will certainly end your days in a workhouse, unless you speedily abandon your course of extravagance. There is nothing like habit — nothing!”

  Charles may have t
hought that, considering his frequent and lavish contributions to the missionary fund, the parson was rather hard upon him; but he did not say so. He went away in mournful silence, and began pelting a blind beggar with coppers.

  One day, when Johnny had been more than usually provident, and Charles proportionately prodigal, their father, having exhausted moral suasion to no apparent purpose, determined to have recourse to a lower order of argument: he would try to win Charles to economy by an appeal to his grosser nature. So he convened the entire family, and,

  “Johnny,” said he, “do you think you have much money in your bank? You ought to have saved a considerable sum in nine years.”

  Johnny took the alarm in a minute: perhaps there was some barefooted little girl to be endowed with Sunday-school books.

  “No,” he answered, reflectively, “I don’t think there can be much. There’s been a good deal of cold weather this winter, and you know how metal shrinks! No-o-o, I’m sure there can’t be only a little.”

  “Well, Johnny, you go up and bring down your bank. We’ll see. Perhaps Charles may be right, after all; and it’s not worth while to save money. I don’t want a son of mine to get into a bad habit unless it pays.”

  So Johnny travelled reluctantly up to his garret, and went to the corner where his big tin bank-box had sat on a chest undisturbed for years. He had long ago fortified himself against temptation by vowing never to even shake it; for he remembered that formerly when Charles used to shake his, and rattle the coins inside, he always ended by smashing in the roof. Johnny approached his bank, and taking hold of the cornice on either side, braced himself, gave a strong lift upwards, and keeled over upon his back with the edifice atop of him, like one of the figures in a picture of the great Lisbon earthquake! There was but a single coin in it; and that, by an ingenious device, was suspended in the centre, so that every piece popped in at the chimney would clink upon it in passing through Charlie’s little hole into Charlie’s little stocking hanging innocently beneath.

  Of course restitution was out of the question; and even Johnny felt that any merely temporal punishment would be weakly inadequate to the demands of justice. But that night, in the dead silence of his chamber, Johnny registered a great and solemn swear that so soon as he could worry together a little capital, he would fling his feeble remaining energies into the spendthrift business. And he did so.

  FOUR JACKS AND A KNAVE.

  In the “backwoods” of Pennsylvania stood a little mill. The miller appertaining unto this mill was a Pennsylvania Dutchman — a species of animal in which for some centuries sauerkraut has been usurping the place of sense. In Hans Donnerspiel the usurpation was not complete; he still knew enough to go in when it rained, but he did not know enough to stay there after the storm had blown over. Hans was known to a large circle of friends and admirers as about the worst miller in those parts; but as he was the only one, people who quarrelled with an exclusively meat diet continued to patronize him. He was honest, as all stupid people are; but he was careless. So absent-minded was he, that sometimes when grinding somebody’s wheat he would thoughtlessly turn into the “hopper” a bag of rye, a lot of old beer-bottles, or a basket of fish. This made the flour so peculiar, that the people about there never knew what it was to be well a day in all their lives. There were so many local diseases in that vicinity, that a doctor from twenty miles away could not have killed a patient in a week.

  Hans meant well; but he had a hobby — a hobby that he did not ride: that does not express it: it rode him. It spurred him so hard, that the poor wretch could not pause a minute to see what he was putting into his mill. This hobby was the purchase of jackasses. He expended all his income in this diversion, and his mill was fairly sinking under its weight of mortgages. He had more jackasses than he had hairs on his head, and, as a rule, they were thinner. He was no mere amateur collector either, but a sharp discriminating connoisseur. He would buy a fat globular donkey if he could not do better; but a lank shabby one was the apple of his eye. He rolled such a one, as it were, like a sweet morsel under his tongue.

  Hans’s nearest neighbour was a worthless young scamp named Jo Garvey, who lived mainly by hunting and fishing. Jo was a sharp-witted rascal, without a single scruple between, himself and fortune. With a tithe of Hans’s industry he might have been almost anything; but his dense laziness always rose up like a stone wall about him, shutting him in like a toad in a rock. The exact opposite of Hans in almost every respect, he was notably similar in one: he had a hobby. Jo’s hobby was the selling of jackasses.

  One day, while Hans’s upper and nether mill-stones were making it lively for a mingled grist of corn, potatoes, and young chickens, he heard Joseph calling outside. Stepping to the door, he saw him holding three halters to which were appended three donkeys.

  “I say, Hans,” said he, “here are three fine animals for your stud. I have brought ‘em up from the egg, and I know ‘em to be first-class. But they ‘re not so big as I expected, and you may have ‘em for a sack of oats each.”

  Hans was delighted. He had not the least doubt in the world that Joe had stolen them; but it was a fixed principle with him never to let a donkey go away and say he was a hard man to deal with. He at once brought out and delivered the oats. Jo gravely examined the quality, and placing a sack across each animal, calmly led them away.

  When he had gone, it occurred to Hans that he had less oats and no more asses than he had before.

  “Tuyfel!” he exclaimed, scratching his pow; “I puy dot yackasses, und I don’t vos god ‘im so mooch as I didn’t haf ‘im before — ain’t it?”

  Very much to his comfort it was, therefore, to see Jo come by next day leading the same animals.

  “Hi!” he shrieked; “you prings me to my yackasses. You gif me to my broberdy back!”

  “Oh, very well, Hans. If you want to crawfish out of a fair bargain, all right. I’ll give you back your donkeys, and you give me back my oats.”

  “Yaw, yaw,” assented the mollified miller; “you his von honest shentlemans as I vos efer vent anyvhere. But I don’t god ony more oats, und you moost dake vheat, eh?”

  And fetching out three sacks of wheat, he handed them over. Jo was proceeding to lay these upon the backs of the animals; but this was too thin for even Hans.

  “Ach! you tief-veller! you leabs dis yackasses in me, und go right avay off; odther I bust your het mid a gloob, don’t it?”

  So Joseph was reluctantly constrained to hang the donkeys to a fence. While he did this, Hans was making a desperate attempt to think. Presently he brightened up:

  “Yo, how you coom by dot vheat all de dime?”

  “Why, old mudhead, you gave it to me for the jacks.”

  “Und how you coom by dot oats pooty soon avhile ago?”

  “Why, I gave that to you for them,” said Joseph, pressed very hard for a reply.

  “Vell, den, you goes vetch me back to dot oats so gwicker as a lamb gedwinkle his dail — hay?”

  “All right, Hans. Lend me the donkeys to carry off my wheat, and I ‘ll bring back your oats on ‘em.”

  Joseph was beginning to despair; but no objection being made, he loaded up the grain, and made off with his docile caravan. In a half-hour he returned with the donkeys, but of course without anything else.

  “I zay, Yo, where is dis oats I hear zo mooch dalk aboud still?”

  “Oh, curse you and your oats!” growled Jo, with simulated anger. “You make such a fuss about a bargain, I have decided not to trade. Take your old donkeys, and call it square!”

  “Den vhere mine vheat is?”

  “Now look here, Hans; that wheat is yours, is it?”

  “Yaw, yaw.”

  “And the donkeys are yours, eh?”

  “Yaw, yaw.”

  “And the wheat’s been yours all the time, has it?”

  “Yaw, yaw.”

  “Well, so have the donkeys. I took ‘em out of your pasture in the first place. Now what have you got to complain of?” />
  The Dutchman reflected all over his head with’ his forefinger-nail.

  “Gomblain? I no gomblain ven it is all right. I zee now I vos made a mistaken. Coom, dake a drinks.”

  Jo left the animals standing, and went inside, where they pledged one another in brimming mugs of beer. Then taking Hans by the hand,

  “I am sorry,” said he, “we can’t trade. Perhaps some other day you will be more reasonable. Good bye!”

  And Joseph departed leading away the donkeys!

  Hans stood for some moments gazing after him with a complacent smile making his fat face ridiculous. Then turning to his mill-stones, he shook his head with an air of intense self-satisfaction:

  “Py donner! Dot Yo Garfey bees a geen, shmard yockey, but he gonnot spiel me svoppin’ yackasses!”

  DR. DEADWOOD, I PRESUME.

  My name is Shandy, and this is the record of my Sentimental Journey. Mr. Ames Jordan Gannett, proprietor’s son of the “York —— ,” with which paper I am connected by marriage, sent me a post-card in a sealed envelope, asking me to call at a well-known restaurant in Regent Street. I was then at a well-known restaurant in Houndsditch. I put on my worst and only hat, and went. I found Mr. Gannett, at dinner, eating pease with his knife, in the manner of his countrymen. He opened the conversation, characteristically, thus:

  “Where’s Dr. Deadwood?”

  After several ineffectual guesses I had a happy thought. I asked him:

  “Am I my brother’s bar-keeper?”

  Mr. Gannett pondered deeply, with his forefinger alongside his nose. Finally he replied:

  “I give it up.”

  He continued to eat for some moments in profound silence, as that of a man very much in earnest. Suddenly he resumed:

  “Here is a blank cheque, signed. I will send you all my father’s personal property to-morrow. Take this and find Dr. Deadwood. Find him actually if you can, but find him. Away!”

  I did as requested; that is, I took the cheque. Having supplied myself with such luxuries as were absolutely necessary, I retired to my lodgings. Upon my table in the centre of the room were spread some clean white sheets of foolscap, and sat a bottle of black ink. It was a good omen: the virgin paper was typical of the unexplored interior of Africa; the sable ink represented the night of barbarism, or the hue of barbarians, indifferently.