Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

by Mark Twain

  ‘This is Count Luigi’s right hand; this one, three signatures below, is his left. Here is Count Angelo’s right; down here is his left. Now for the other pane: here and here are Count Luigi’s, here and here are his brother’s.’ He faced about. ‘Am I right?’

  A deafening explosion of applause was the answer. The Bench said:

  ‘This certainly approaches the miraculous!’

  Wilson turned to the window again and remarked, pointing with his finger:

  ‘This is the signature of Mr. Justice Robinson.’ (Applause.) ‘This, of Constable Blake.’ (Applause.) ‘This, of John Mason, juryman.’ (Applause.) ‘This, of the sheriff.’ (Applause.) ‘I cannot name the others, but I have them all at home, named and dated, and could identify them all by my finger-print records.’

  He moved to his place through a storm of applause—which the sheriff stopped, and also made the people sit down, for they were all standing and struggling to see, of course. Court, jury, sheriff, and everybody had been too absorbed in observing Wilson’s performance to attend to the audience earlier.

  ‘Now then,’ said Wilson, ‘I have here the natal autographs of two children, thrown up to ten times the natural size by the pantagraph, so that anyone who can see at all can tell the markings apart at a glance. We will call the children A and B. Here are A’s finger-marks taken at the age of five months. Here they are again, taken at seven months.’ (Tom started.) ‘They are alike, you see. Here are B’s at five months, and also at seven months. They, too, exactly copy each other, but the patterns are quite different from A’s, you observe. I shall refer to these again presently, but we will turn them face down now.

  ‘Here, thrown up ten sizes, are the natal autographs of the two persons who are here before you accused of murdering Judge Driscoll. I made these pantagraph copies last night, and will so swear when I go upon the witness stand. I ask the jury to compare them with the finger-marks of the accused upon the window-panes, and tell the court if they are the same.’

  He passed a powerful magnifying-glass to the foreman.

  One juryman after another took the cardboard and the glass and made the comparison. Then the foreman said to the Judge:

  ‘Your honour, we are all agreed that they are identical.’

  Wilson said to the foreman:

  ‘Please turn that cardboard face down, and take this one, and compare it searchingly, by the magnifier, with the fatal signature upon the knife-handle, and report your finding to the court.’

  Again the jury made minute examination, and again reported:

  ‘We find them to be exactly identical, your honour.’

  Wilson turned toward the counsel for the prosecution, and there was a clearly recognisable note of warning in his voice when he said:

  ‘May it please the court, the State has claimed, strenuously and persistently, that the blood-stained finger-prints upon that knife-handle were left there by the assassin of Judge Driscoll. You have heard us grant that claim, and welcome it.’ He turned to the jury. ‘Compare the finger-prints of the accused with the finger-prints left by the assassin—and report.’

  The comparison began. As it proceeded all movement and all sound ceased, and the deep silence of an absorbed and waiting suspense settled upon the house; and when at last the words came, ‘They do not even resemble,’ a thunder-crash of applause followed and the house sprang to its feet, but was quickly repressed by official force and brought to order again. Tom was altering his position every few minutes, now, but none of his changes brought repose nor any small trifle of comfort. When the house’s attention was becoming fixed once more, Wilson said gravely, indicating the twins with a gesture:

  ‘These men are innocent. I have no further concern with them.’ (Another outbreak of applause began, but was promptly checked.) ‘We will now proceed to find the guilty.’ (Tom’s eyes were starting from their sockets. Yes, it was a cruel day for the bereaved youth, everybody thought.) ‘We will return to the infant autographs of A and B. I will ask the jury to take these large pantagraph facsimilies of A’s marked five months and seven months. Do they tally?’

  The foreman responded, ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Now examine this pantagraph, taken at eight months, and also marked A. Does it tally with the other two?’

  The surprised response was,

  ‘No—they differ widely.’

  ‘You are quite right. Now take these two pantagraphs of B’s autograph, marked five months and seven months. Do they tally with each other?’

  ‘Yes—perfectly.’

  ‘Take this third pantagraph marked B, eight months. Does it tally with B’s other two?’

  ‘By no means!’

  ‘Do you know how to account for those strange discrepancies? I will tell you. For a purpose unknown to us, but probably a selfish one, somebody changed those children in the cradle.’

  This produced a vast sensation, naturally. Roxana was astonised at this admirable guess, but not disturbed by it. To guess the exchange was one thing, to guess who did it quite another. Pudd’nhead Wilson could do wonderful things, no doubt, but he couldn’t do impossible ones. Safe? She was perfectly safe. She smiled privately.

  ‘Between the ages of seven months and eight months those children were changed in the cradle’—he made one of his effect-collecting pauses, and added—‘and the person who did it is in this house!’

  Roxy’s pulses stood still! The house was thrilled as with an electric shock, and the people half rose as if to seek a glimpse of the person who had made that exchange. Tom was growing limp; the life seemed oozing out of him. Wilson resumed:

  ‘A was put into B’s cradle in the nursery; B was transferred to the kitchen and became a negro and a slave’—(Sensation—confusion of angry ejaculations)—‘but within a quarter of an hour he will stand before you white and free!’ (Burst of applause, checked by the officers.) ‘From seven months onward until now, A has still been a usurper, and in my finger-records he bears B’s name. Here is his pantagraph at the age of twelve. Compare it with the assassin’s signature upon the knife-handle. Do they tally?’

  The foreman answered,

  ‘To the minutest detail!’

  Wilson said solemnly, ‘The murderer of your friend and mine—York Driscoll of the generous hand and the kindly spirit—sits in your midst. Valet de Chambre, negro and slave—falsely called Thomas à Becket Driscoll—make upon the window the fingerprints that will hang you!’

  Tom turned his ashen face imploringly towards the speaker, made some impotent movements with his white lips, then slid limp and lifeless to the floor.

  Wilson broke the awed silence with the words:

  ‘There is no need. He has confessed.’

  Roxy flung herself upon her knees, covered her face with her hands, and out through her sobs the words struggled:

  ‘De Lord have mercy on me, po’ misable sinner dat I is!’

  The clock struck twelve.

  The court rose; the new prisoner, handcuffed, was removed.

  CONCLUSION

  It is often the case that the man who can’t tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

  October 12.—The Discovery.—It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

  The town sat up all night to discuss the amazing events of the day, and swop guesses as to when Tom’s trial would begin. Troop after troop of citizens came to serenade Wilson, and require a speech, and shout themselves hoarse over every sentence that fell from his lips—for all his sentences were golden now, all were marvellous. His long fight against hard luck and prejudice was ended; he was a made man for good.

  And as each of these roaring gangs of enthusiasts marched away, some remorseful member of it was quite sure to raise his voice and say:

  ‘And this is the man the likes of us has called a pudd’nhead for more than twenty years. He has resigned from that position, friends.’

&n
bsp; ‘Yes, but it isn’t vacant—we’re elected.’

  The twins were heroes of romance now, and with rehabilitated reputations. But they were weary of Western adventure, and straightway retired to Europe.

  Roxy’s heart was broken. The young fellow upon whom she had inflicted twenty-three years of slavery continued the false heir’s pension of thirty-five dollars a month to her, but her hurts were too deep for money to heal; the spirit in her eye was quenched, her martial bearing departed with it, and the voice of her laughter ceased in the land. In her church and its affairs she found her only solace.

  The real heir suddenly found himself rich and free, but in a most embarrassing situation. He could neither read nor write, and his speech was the basest dialect of the negro quarter. His gait, his attitudes, his gestures, his bearing, his laugh—all were vulgar and uncouth; his manners were the manners of a slave. Money and fine clothes could not mend these defects or cover them up, they only made them the more glaring and the more pathetic. The poor fellow could not endure the terrors of the white man’s parlour, and felt at home and at peace nowhere but in the kitchen. The family pew was a misery to him, yet he could nevermore enter into the solacing refuge of the ‘nigger gallery’—that was closed to him for good and all. But we cannot follow his curious fate further—that would be a long story.

  The false heir made a full confession and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. But now a complication came up. The Percy Driscoll estate was in such a crippled shape when its owner died that it could pay only sixty per cent. of its great indebtedness, and was settled at that rate. But the creditors came forward now, and complained that inasmuch as through an error for which they were in no way to blame the false heir was not inventoried at that time with the rest of the property, great wrong and loss had thereby been inflicted upon them. They rightly claimed that ‘Tom’ was lawfully their property and had been so for eight years; that they had already lost sufficiently in being deprived of his services during that long period, and ought not to be required to add anything to that loss; that if he had been delivered up to them in the first place, they would have sold him and he could not have murdered Judge Driscoll, therefore it was not he that had really committed the murder, the guilt lay with the erroneous inventory. Everybody saw that there was reason in this. Everybody granted that if ‘Tom’ were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him—it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life—that was quite another matter.

  As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river.

  THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS

  A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No—that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale; a very little tale; a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.

  And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale grows into the long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite different one. It was so in the case of a magazine sketch which I once started to write—a funny and fantastic sketch about a prince and a pauper; it presently assumed a grave cast of its own accord, and in that new shape spread itself out into a book. Much the same thing happened with ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’. I had a sufficiently hard time with that tale, because it changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it—a most embarrassing circumstance. But what was a great deal worse was, that it was not one story, but two stories tangled together; and they obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and annoyance. I could not offer the book for publication, for I was afraid it would unseat the reader’s reason. I did not know what was the matter with it, for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one. It took me months to make that discovery. I carried the manuscript back and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read it and studied over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the difficulty lay. I had no further trouble. I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other one—a kind of literary Cæasarean operation.

  Would the reader care to know something about the story which I pulled out? He has been told many a time how the born-and-trained novelist works. Won’t he let me round and complete his knowledge by telling him how the jack-leg does it?

  Originally the story was called ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’. I meant to make it very short. I had seen a picture of a youthful Italian ‘freak’—or ‘freaks’—which was—or which were—on exhibition in our cities—a combination consisting of two heads and four arms joined to a single body and a single pair of legs—and I thought I would write an extravagantly fantastic little story with this freak of nature for hero—or heroes—a silly young miss for heroine, and two old ladies and two boys for the minor parts. I lavishly elaborated these people and their doings, of course. But the tale kept spreading along, and spreading along, and other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more and more room with their talk and their affairs. Among them came a stranger named Pudd’nhead Wilson, and a woman named Roxana; and presently the doings of these two pushed up into prominence a young fellow named Tom Driscoll, whose proper place was away in the obscure background. Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private venture of their own—a tale which they had nothing at all to do with, by rights.

  When the book was finished and I came to look around to see what had become of the team I had originally started out with—Aunt Patsy Cooper, Aunt Betsy Hale, the two boys, and Rowena the light-weight heroine—they were nowhere to be seen; they had disappeared from the story some time or other. I hunted about and found them—found them stranded, idle, forgotten, and permanently useless. It was very awkward. It was awkward all around; but more particularly in the case of Rowena, because there was a love-match on, between her and one of the twins that constituted the freak, and I had worked it up to a blistering heat and thrown in a quite dramatic love-quarrel, wherein Rowena scathingly denounced her betrothed for getting drunk, and scoffed at his explanation of how it had happened, and wouldn’t listen to it, and had driven him from her in the usual ‘forever’ way; and now here she sat crying and broken-hearted; for she had found that he had spoken only the truth; that it was not he, but the other half of the freak, that had drunk the liquor that made him drunk; that her half was a prohibitionist and had never drunk a drop in his life, and, although tight as a brick three days in the week, was wholly innocent of blame; and indeed, when sober, was constantly doing all he could to reform his brother, the other half, who never got any satisfaction out of drinking, anyway, because liquor never affected him. Yes, here she was, stranded with that deep injustice of hers torturing her poor torn heart.

  I didn’t know what to do with her. I was as sorry for her as anybody could be, but the campaign was over, the book was finished, she was side-tracked, and there was no possible way of crowding her in, anywhere. I could not leave her there, of course; it would not do. After spreading her out so, and making such a to-do over her affairs, it would be absolutely necessary to account to the reader for her. I thought and thought and studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing. I finally saw plainly that there was really no way but one—I must simply give her the grand bounce. It grieved me to do it, for
after associating with her so much I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding she was such an ass and said such stupid, irritating things and was so nauseatingly sentimental. Still it had to be done. So, at the top of Chapter XVII, I put a ‘Calendar’ remark concerning July the Fourth, and began the chapter with this statistic:

  ‘Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fire-works and fell down the well and got drowned.’

  It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn’t notice it, because I changed the subject right away to something else. Anyway it loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way, and that was the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those others; so I hunted up the two boys and said ‘they went out back one night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned’. Next I searched around and found old Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy Hale where they were aground, and said ‘they went out back one night to visit the sick and fell down the well and got drowned.’ I was going to drown some of the others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more anyway.

  Still the story was unsatisfactory. Here was a set of new characters who were become inordinately prominent and who persisted in remaining so to the end; and back yonder was an older set who made a large noise and a great to-do for a little while and then suddenly played out utterly and fell down the well. There was a radical defect somewhere, and I must search it out and cure it.

  The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of—two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy. So I pulled out the farce and left the tragedy. This left the original team in, but only as mere names, not as characters. Their prominence was wholly gone; they were not even worth drowning; so I removed that detail. Also I took those twins apart and made two separate men of them. They had no occasion to have foreign names now, but it was too much trouble to remove them all through, so I left them christened as they were and made no explanation.