by Mark Twain
‘Oh,’ said Luigi, reposefully, ‘I don’t mind it. I killed the man for good reasons, and I don’t regret it.’
‘What were the reasons?’
‘Well, he needed killing.’
‘I’ll tell you why he did it, since he won’t say himself,’ said Angelo, warmly. ‘He did it to save my life, that’s what he did it for. So it was a noble act, and not a thing to be hid in the dark.’
‘So it was, so it was,’ said Wilson; ‘to do such a thing to save a brother’s life is a great and fine action.’
‘Now come,’ said Luigi, ‘it is very pleasant to hear you say these things, but for unselfishness, or heroism, or magnanimity, the circumstances won’t stand scrutiny. You overlook one detail: suppose I hadn’t saved Angelo’s life, what would have become of mine? If I had let the man kill him, wouldn’t he have killed me too? I saved my own life, you see.’
‘Yes; that is your way of talking,’ said Angelo; ‘but I know you—I don’t believe you thought of yourself at all. I keep that weapon yet that Luigi killed the man with, and I’ll show it to you some time. That incident makes it interesting, and it had a history before it came into Luigi’s hands which adds to its interest. It was given to Luigi by a great Indian prince, the Gaikowar of Baroda, and it had been in his family two or three centuries. It killed a good many disagreeable people who troubled that hearthstone at one time and another. It isn’t much to look at, except that it isn’t shaped like other knives, or dirks, or whatever it may be called. Here, I’ll draw it for you.’ He took a sheet of paper and made a rapid sketch. ‘There it is—a broad and murderous blade, with edges like a razor for sharpness. The devices engraved on it are the ciphers or names of its long line of possessors. I had Luigi’s name added in Roman letters myself with our coat of arms, as you see. You notice what a curious handle the thing has. It is solid ivory, polished like a mirror, and is four or five inches long—round, and as thick as a large man’s wrist, with the end squared off flat, for your thumb to rest on; for you grasp it, with your thumb resting on the blunt end—so—and lift it aloft and strike downward. The Gaikowar showed us how the thing was done when he gave it to Luigi, and before that night was ended Luigi had used the knife, and the Gaikowar was a man short by reason of it. The sheath is magnificently ornamented with gems of great value. You will find the sheath more worth looking at than the knife itself, of course.’
Tom said to himself:
‘It’s lucky I came here. I would have sold that knife for a song; I supposed the jewels were glass.’
‘But go on; don’t stop,’ said Wilson. ‘Our curiosity is up now, to hear about the homicide. Tell us about that.’
‘Well, briefly, the knife was to blame for that, all round. A native servant slipped into our room in the palace in the night, to kill us and steal the knife on account of the fortune incrusted on its sheath, without a doubt. Luigi had it under his pillow; we were in bed together. There was a dim nightlight burning. I was asleep; but Luigi was awake, and he thought he detected a vague form nearing the bed. He slipped the knife out of the sheath and was ready and unembarrassed by hampering bed-clothes, for the weather was hot and we hadn’t any. Suddenly that native rose at the bedside, and bent over me with his right hand lifted and a dirk in it aimed at my throat; but Luigi grabbed his wrist, pulled him downward, and drove his own knife into the man’s neck. That is the whole story.’
Wilson and Tom drew deep breaths, and after some general chat about the tragedy, Pudd’nhead said, taking Tom’s hand:
‘Now, Tom, I’ve never had a look at your palms, as it happens; perhaps you’ve got some little questionable privacies that need—hel-lo!’
Tom had snatched away his hand, and was looking a good deal confused.
‘Why, he’s blushing!’ said Luigi.
Tom darted an ugly look at him, and said sharply:
‘Well, if I am, it ain’t because I’m a murderer!’ Luigi’s dark face flushed, but before he could speak or move, Tom added with anxious haste: ‘Oh, I beg a thousand pardons. I didn’t mean that; it was out before I thought, and I’m very, very sorry—you must forgive me!’
Wilson came to the rescue, and smoothed things down as well as he could; and in fact was entirely successful as far as the twins were concerned, for they felt sorrier for the affront put upon him by his guest’s outburst of ill manners than for the insult offered to Luigi. But the success was not so pronounced with the offender. Tom tried to seem at his ease, and he went through the motions fairly well, but at bottom he felt resentful toward all the three witnesses of his exhibition ; in fact, he felt so annoyed at them for having witnessed it and noticed it, that he almost forgot to feel annoyed at himself for placing it before them. However, something presently happened which made him almost comfortable, and brought him nearly back to a state of charity and friendliness. This was a little spat between the twins; not much of a spat, but still a spat; and before they got far with it they were in a decided condition of irritation with each other. Tom was charmed; so pleased, indeed, that he cautiously did what he could to increase the irritation while pretending to be actuated by more respectable motives. By his help the fire got warmed up to the blazing-point, and he might have had the happiness of seeing the flames show up in another moment, but for the interruption of a knock on the door—an interruption which fretted him as much as it gratified Wilson. Wilson opened the door.
The visitor was a good-natured, ignorant, energetic, middle-aged Irishman named John Buckstone, who was a great politician in a small way, and always took a large share in public matters of every sort. One of the town’s chief excitements, just now, was over the matter of rum. There was a strong rum party and a strong anti-rum party.5 Buckstone was training with the rum party, and he had been sent to hunt up the twins and invite them to attend a mass-meeting of that faction. He delivered his errand, and said the clans were already gathering in the big hall over the market-house. Luigi accepted the invitation cordially, Angelo less cordially, since he disliked crowds, and did not drink the powerful intoxicants of America. In fact, he was even a teetotaler sometimes—when it was judicious to be one.
The twins left with Buckstone, and Tom Driscoll joined company with them uninvited.
In the distance one could see a long wavering line of torches drifting down the main street, and could hear the throbbing of the bass drum, the clash of cymbals, the squeaking of a fife or two, and the faint roar of remote hurrahs. The tail-end of this procession was climbing the market-house stairs when the twins arrived in its neighbourhood; when they reached the hall it was full of people, torches, smoke, noise, and enthusiasm. They were conducted to the platform by Buckstone—Tom Driscoll still following—and were delivered to the chairman in the midst of a prodigious explosion of welcome. When the noise had moderated a little, the chair proposed that ‘our illustrious guests be at once elected, by complimentary acclamation, to membership in our ever-glorious organization, the paradise of the free, and the perdition of the slave.’
This eloquent discharge opened the floodgates of enthusiasm again, and the election was carried with thundering unanimity. Then arose a storm of cries:
‘Wet them down! Wet them down! Give them a drink!’
Glasses of whisky were handed to the twins. Luigi waved his aloft, then brought it to his lips; but Angelo set his down. There was another storm of cries:
‘What’s the matter with the other one?’ ‘What is the blonde one going back on us for?’ ‘Explain! Explain!’
The chairman inquired, and then reported:
‘We have made an unfortunate mistake, gentlemen. I find that the Count Angelo Capello is opposed to our creed—is a teetotaler, in fact, and was not intending to apply for membership with us. He desires that we reconsider the vote by which he was elected. What is the pleasure of the house?’
There was a general burst of laughter, plentifully accented with whistlings and cat-calls, but the energetic use of the gavel presently restored something like orde
r. Then a man spoke from the crowd, and said that while he was very sorry that the mistake had been made, it would not be possible to rectify it at the present meeting. According to the bylaws, it must go over to the next regular meeting for action. He would not offer a motion, as none was required. He desired to apologize to the gentleman in the name of the house, and begged to assure him that, as far as it might lie in the power of the Sons of Liberty, his temporary membership in the order would be made pleasant to him.
This speech was received with great applause, mixed with cries of—
‘That’s the talk!’ ‘He’s a good fellow, anyway, if he is a teetotaler!’ ‘Drink his health!’ ‘Give him a rouser, and no heel-taps!’
Glasses were handed round, and everybody on the platform drank Angelo’s health, while the house bellowed forth in song:
For he’s a jolly good fel-low,
For he’s a jolly good fel-low,
For he’s a jolly good fe-el-low,
Which nobody can deny.
Tom Driscoll drank. It was his second glass, for he had drunk Angelo’s the moment that Angelo had set it down. The two drinks made him very merry—almost idiotically so—and he began to take a most lively and prominent part in the proceedings, particularly in the music and cat-calls and side-remarks.
The chairman was still standing at the front, the twins at his side. The extraordinarily close resemblance of the brothers to each other suggested a witticism to Tom Driscoll, and just as the chairman began a speech he skipped forward and said with an air of tipsy confidence to the audience:
‘Boys, I move that he keeps still and lets this human philopena snip you out a speech.’
The descriptive aptness of the phrase caught the house, and a mighty burst of laughter followed.
Luigi’s southern blood leaped to the boiling-point in a moment under the sharp humiliation of this insult delivered in the presence of four hundred strangers. It was not in the young man’s nature to let the matter pass, or to delay the squaring of the account. He took a couple of strides and halted behind the unsuspecting joker. Then he drew back and delivered a kick of such titanic vigour that it lifted Tom clear over the footlights and landed him on the heads of the front row of the Sons of Liberty.
Even a sober person does not like to have a human being emptied on him when he is not doing any harm; a person who is not sober cannot endure such an attention at all. The nest of Sons of Liberty that Driscoll landed in had not a sober bird in it: in fact, there was probably not an entirely sober one in the auditorium. Driscoll was promptly and indignantly flung on to the heads of Sons in the next row, and these Sons passed him on toward the rear, and then immediately began to pummel the front-row Sons who had passed him to them. This course was strictly followed by bench after bench as Driscoll travelled in his tumultuous and airy flight toward the door; so he left behind him an ever lengthening wake of raging and plunging and fighting and swearing humanity. Down went group after group of torches, and presently above the deafening clatter of the gavel, roar of angry voices, and crash of succumbing benches, rose the paralysing cry of ‘FIRE!’
The fighting ceased instantly; the cursing ceased; for one distinctly defined moment there was a dead hush, a motionless calm, where the tempest had been; then with one impulse the multitude awoke to life and energy again, and went surging and struggling and swaying, this way and that, its outer edges melting away through windows and doors, and gradually lessening the pressure and relieving the mass.
The fire-boys were never on hand so suddenly before; for there was no distance to go, this time, their quarters being in the rear end of the market-house. There was an engine company and a hook-and-ladder company. Half of each was composed of rummies and the other half of anti-rummies, after the moral and political share-and-share-alike fashion of the frontier town of the period. Enough anti-rummies were loafing in quarters to man the engine and the ladders. In two minutes they had their red shirts and helmets on—they never stirred officially in unofficial costume—and as the mass meeting overhead smashed through the long row of windows and poured out upon the roof of the arcade, the deliverers were ready for them with a powerful stream of water, which washed some of them off the roof and nearly drowned the rest. But water was preferable to fire, and still the stampede from the windows continued, and still the pitiless drenchings assailed it until the building was empty; then the fireboys mounted to the hall and flooded it with water enough to annihilate forty times as much fire as there was there; for a village fire-company does not often get a chance to show off, and so when it does get a chance it makes the most of it. Such citizens of that village as were of a thoughtful and judicious temperament did not insure against fire; they insured against the fire company.
CHAPTER 12
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!—incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who ‘didn’t know what fear was’, we ought always to add the flea—and put him at the head of the procession. —Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
Judge Driscoll was in bed and asleep by ten o‘clock on Friday night, and he was up and gone a-fishing before daylight in the morning with his friend Pembroke Howard. These two had been boys together in Virginia when that State still ranked as the chief and most imposing member of the Union, and they still coupled the proud and affectionate adjective ‘Old’ with her name when they spoke of her. In Missouri a recognised superiority attached to any person who hailed from Old Virginia; and this superiority was exalted to supremacy when a person of such nativity could also prove descent from the First Families of that great commonwealth. The Howards and Driscolls were of this aristocracy. In their eyes it was a nobility. It had its unwritten laws, and they were as clearly defined and as strict as any that could be found among the printed statutes of the land. The F.F.V. was born a gentleman; his highest duty in life was to watch over that great inheritance and keep it unsmirched. He must keep his honour spotless. Those laws were his chart; his course was marked out on it; if he swerved from it by so much as half a point of the compass it meant shipwreck to his honour; that is to say, degradation from his rank as a gentleman. These laws required certain things of him which his religion might forbid: then his religion must yield—the laws could not be relaxed to accommodate religions or anything else. Honour stood first; and the laws defined what it was and wherein it differed in certain details from honour as defined by church creeds and by the social laws and customs of some of the minor divisions of the globe that had got crowded out when the sacred boundaries of Virginia were staked out.
If Judge Driscoll was the recognised first citizen of Dawson’s Landing, Pembroke Howard was easily its recognised second citizen. He was called ‘the great lawyer’—an earned title. He and Driscoll were of the same age—a year or two past sixty.
Although Driscoll was a Freethinker and Howard a strong and determined Presbyterian, their warm intimacy suffered no impairment in consequence. They were men whose opinions were their own property and not subject to revision and amendment, suggestion or criticism, by anybody, even their friends.
The day’s fishing finished, they came floating downstream in their skiff, talking national politics and other high matters, and presently met a skiff coming up from town, with a man in it, who said:
‘I reckon you know one of the new twins gave your nephew a kicking last night, Judge?’
‘Did
what?’
‘Gave him a kicking.’
The old Judge’s lips paled, and his eyes began to flame. He choked with anger for a moment, then he got out what he was trying to say.
‘Well—well—go on! Give me the details.’
The man did it. At the finish the Judge was silent a minute, turning over in his mind the shameful picture of Tom’s flight over the footlights; then he said, as if musing aloud: ‘H’m—I don’t understand it. I was asleep at home. He didn’t wake me. Thought he was competent to manage his affair without my help, I reckon.’ His face lit up with pride and pleasure at that thought, and he said with a cheery complacency, ‘I like that—it’s the true old blood—hey, Pembroke?’
Howard smiled an iron smile, and nodded his head approvingly. Then the news-bringer spoke again.
‘But Tom beat the twin on the trial.’
The Judge looked at the man wonderingly, and said:
‘The trial? What trial?’
‘Why, Tom had him up before Judge Robinson for assault and battery’
The old man shrank suddenly together like one who has received a death-stroke. Howard sprang for him as he sank forward in a swoon, and took him in his arms, and bedded him on his back in the boat. He sprinkled water in his face, and said to the startled visitor:
‘Go, now—don’t let him come to and find you here. You see what an effect your heedless speech has had; you ought to have been more considerate than to blurt out such a cruel piece of slander as that.’
‘I’m right down sorry I did it now, Mr. Howard, and I wouldn’t have done it if I had thought: but it ain’t a slander; it’s perfectly true, just as I told him.’
He rowed away. Presently the old Judge came out of his faint and looked up piteously into the sympathetic face that was bent over him.
‘Say it ain’t true, Pembroke; tell me it ain’t true!’ he said in a weak voice.
There was nothing weak in the deep organ-tones that responded: