Weird and Witty Tales of Mystery (10 page)

"What recompense do you desire?"

Filled with that daring inspired by dreams in which nothing seems
impossible, I asked him for the hand of the Princess Hermonthis. The
hand seemed to me a very proper antithetic recompense for the foot.

Pharaoh opened wide his great eyes of glass in astonishment at my witty
request.

"What country do you come from, what is your age?"

"I am a Frenchman, and I am twenty-seven years old, venerable Pharaoh."

"Twenty-seven years old, and he wishes to espouse the Princess
Hermonthis who is thirty centuries old!" cried out at once all the
Thrones and all the Circles of Nations.

Only Hermonthis herself did not seem to think my request unreasonable.

"If you were even only two thousand years old," replied the ancient
king, "I would willingly give you the princess, but the disproportion
is too great; and, besides, we must give our daughters husbands who
will last well. You do not know how to preserve yourselves any longer.
Even those who died only fifteen centuries ago are already no more than
a handful of dust. Behold, my flesh is solid as basalt, my bones are
bones of steel!

"I will be present on the last day of the world with the same body and
the same features which I had during my lifetime. My daughter
Hermonthis will last longer than a statue of bronze.

"Then the last particles of your dust will have been scattered abroad
by the winds, and even Isis herself, who was able to find the atoms of
Osiris, would scarce be able to recompense your being.

"See how vigorous I yet remain, and how mighty is my grasp," he added,
shaking my hand in the English fashion with a strength that buried my
rings in the flesh of my fingers.

He squeezed me so hard that I awoke, and found my friend Alfred shaking
me by the arm to make me get up.

"Oh, you everlasting sleeper! Must I have you carried out into the
middle of the street, and fireworks exploded in your ears? It is
afternoon. Don't you recollect your promise to take me with you to see
M. Aguado's Spanish pictures?"

"God! I forgot all, all about it," I answered, dressing myself
hurriedly. "We will go there at once. I have the permit lying there on
my desk."

I started to find it, but fancy my astonishment when I beheld, instead
of the mummy's foot I had purchased the evening before, the little
green paste idol left in its place by the Princess Hermonthis!

Our esteemed friend, Mr. John William Bloke, of Virginia City, walked
into the office where we are sub-editor at a late hour last night, with
an expression of profound and heartfelt suffering upon his countenance,
and, sighing heavily, laid the following item reverently upon the desk,
and walked slowly out again. He paused a moment at the door, and seemed
struggling to command his feelings sufficiently to enable him to speak,
and then, nodding his head toward his manuscript, ejaculated in a
broken voice, "Friend of mine—oh! how sad!" and burst into tears. We
were so moved at his distress that we did not think to call him back
and endeavour to comfort him until he was gone, and it was too late.
The paper had already gone to press, but knowing that our friend would
consider the publication of this item important, and cherishing the
hope that to print it would afford a melancholy satisfaction to his
sorrowing heart, we stopped the press at once and inserted it in our
columns:

DISTRESSING ACCIDENT.—Last evening, about six o'clock, as Mr.
William Schuyler, an old and respectable citizen of South Park, was
leaving his residence to go downtown, as has been his usual custom
for many years with the exception only of a short interval in the
spring of 1850, during which he was confined to his bed by injuries
received in attempting to stop a runaway horse by thoughtlessly
placing himself directly in its wake and throwing up his hands and
shouting, which if he had done so even a single moment sooner, must
inevitably have frightened the animal still more instead of
checking its speed, although disastrous enough to himself as it
was, and rendered more melancholy and distressing by reason of the
presence of his wife's mother, who was there and saw the sad
occurrence notwithstanding it is at least likely, though not
necessarily so, that she should be reconnoitering in another
direction when incidents occur, not being vivacious and on the
lookout, as a general thing, but even the reverse, as her own
mother is said to have stated, who is no more, but died in the full
hope of a glorious resurrection, upwards of three years ago, aged
eighty-six, being a Christian woman and without guile, as it were,
or property, in consequence of the fire of 1849, which destroyed
every single thing she had in the world. But such is life. Let us
all take warning by this solemn occurrence, and let us endeavour so
to conduct ourselves that when we come to die we can do it. Let us
place our hands upon our heart, and say with earnestness and
sincerity that from this day forth, we will beware of the
intoxicating bowl.—
First Edition of the Californian.

The head editor has been in here raising the mischief, and tearing his
hair and kicking the furniture about, and abusing me like a pickpocket.
He says that every time he leaves me in charge of the paper for half an
hour I get imposed upon by the first infant or the first idiot that
comes along. And he says that that distressing item of Mr. Bloke's is
nothing but a lot of distressing bosh, and has no point to it, and no
sense in it, and no information in it, and that there was no sort of
necessity for stopping the press to publish it.

Now all this comes of being good-hearted. If I had been as
unaccommodating and unsympathetic as some people, I would have told Mr.
Bloke that I wouldn't receive his communication at such a late hour;
but no, his snuffling distress touched my heart, and I jumped at the
chance of doing something to modify his misery. I never read his item
to see whether there was anything wrong about it, but hastily wrote the
few lines which preceded it, and sent it to the printers. And what has
my kindness done for me? It has done nothing but bring down upon me a
storm of abuse and ornamental blasphemy.

Now I will read that item myself, and see if there is any foundation
for all this fuss. And if there is, the author of it shall hear from
me.

I have read it, and I am bound to admit that it seems a little mixed at
a first glance. However, I will peruse it once more.

I have read it again, and it does really seem a good deal more mixed
than ever.

I have read it over five times, but if I can get at the meaning of it I
wish I may get my just deserts. It won't bear analysis. There are
things about it which I cannot understand at all. It don't say whatever
became of William Schuyler. It just says enough about him to get one
interested in his career, and then drops him. Who is William Schuyler,
anyhow, and what part of South Park did he live in, and if he started
down-town at six o'clock, did he ever get there, and if he did, did
anything happen to him? Is
he
the individual that met with the
"distressing accident?" Considering the elaborate circumstantiality of
detail observable in the item, it seems to me that it ought to contain
more information than it does. On the contrary, it is obscure—and not
only obscure, but utterly incomprehensible. Was the breaking of Mr.
Schuyler's leg, fifteen years ago, the "distressing accident" that
plunged Mr. Bloke into unspeakable grief, and caused him to come up
here at dead of night and stop our press to acquaint the world with the
circumstance? Or did the "distressing accident" consist in the
destruction of Schuyler's mother-in-law's property in early times? Or
did it consist in the death of that person herself three years ago
(albeit it does not appear that she died by accident)? In a word, what
did
that "distressing accident" consist in? What did that driveling
ass of a Schuyler stand
in the wake
of a runaway horse for, with his
shouting and gesticulating, if he wanted to stop him? And how the
mischief could he get run over by a horse that had already passed
beyond him? And what are we to take "warning" by? And how is this
extraordinary chapter of incomprehensibilities going to be a "lesson"
to us? And, above all, what has the intoxicating "bowl" got to do with
it, anyhow? It is not stated that Schuyler drank, or that his wife
drank, or that his mother-in-law drank, or that the horse drank—wherefore,
then, the reference to the intoxing bowl? It does seem to me that if
Mr. Bloke had let the intoxicating bowl alone himself, he never would
get into so much trouble about this exasperating imaginary accident. I
have read this absurd item over and over again, with all its
insinuating plausibility, until my head swims; but I can make neither
head nor tail of it. There certainly seems to have been an accident of
some kind or other, but it is impossible to determine what the nature
of it was, or who was the sufferer by it. I do not like to do it, but I
feel compelled to request that the next time anything happens to one of
Mr. Bloke's friends, he will append such explanatory notes to his
account of it as will enable me to find out what sort of an accident it
was and to whom it happened. I had rather all his friends should die
than that I should be driven to the verge of lunacy again in trying to
cipher out the meaning of another such production as the above.

Perhaps the man who never wanders away from the place of his birth may
pass all his life without knowing ghosts; but the nomad is more than
likely to make their acquaintance. I refer to the civilized nomad,
whose wanderings are not prompted by hope of gain, nor determined by
pleasure, but simply compelled by certain necessities of his
being,—the man whose inner secret nature is totally at variance with
the stable conditions of a society to which he belongs only by
accident. However intellectually trained, he must always remain the
slave of singular impulses which have no rational source, and which
will often amaze him no less by their mastering power than by their
continuous savage opposition to his every material interest.... These
may, perhaps, be traced back to some ancestral habit,—be explained by
self-evident hereditary tendencies. Or perhaps they may not,—in which
event the victim can only surmise himself the
Imago
of some
pre-existent larval aspiration—the full development of desires long
dormant in a chain of more limited lives....

Assuredly the nomadic impulses differ in every member of the
class,—take infinite variety from individual sensitiveness to
environment: the line of least resistance for one being that of
greatest resistance for another;—no two courses of true nomadism can
ever be wholly the same. Diversified of necessity both impulse and
direction, even as human nature is diversified. Never since
consciousness of time began were two beings born who possessed exactly
the same quality of voice, the same precise degree of nervous
impressibility, or,—in brief, the same combination of those viewless
force-storing molecules which shape and poise themselves in sentient
substance. Vain, therefore, all striving to particularize the curious
psychology of such existences: at the very utmost it is possible only
to describe such impulses and perceptions of nomadism as lie within the
very small range of one's own observation. And whatever in these be
strictly personal can have little interest or value except in so far as
it holds something in common with the great general experience of
restless lives. To such experience may belong, I think, one ultimate
result of all those irrational partings,—self-wreckings,—sudden
isolations,—abrupt severances from all attachment, which form the
history of the nomad ... the knowledge that a strange silence is ever
deepening and expanding about one's life, and that in that silence
there are ghosts.

... Oh! the first vague charm, the first sunny illusion of some fair
city,—when vistas of unknown streets all seem leading to the
realization of a hope you dare not even whisper; when even the shadows
look beautiful, and strange façades appear to smile good omen through
light of gold! And those first winning relations with men, while you
are still a stranger, and only the better and the brighter side of
their nature is turned to you!... All is yet a delightful, luminous
indefiniteness—sensation of streets and of men,—like some beautifully
tinted photograph slightly out of focus....

Then the slow solid sharpening of details all about you,—thrusting
through illusion and dispelling it—growing keener and harder day by
day, through long dull seasons, while your feet learn to remember all
asperities of pavements, and your eyes all physiognomy of buildings and
of persons,—failures of masonry,—furrowed lines of pain. Thereafter
only the aching of monotony intolerable,—and the hatred of sameness
grown dismal,—and dread of the merciless, inevitable, daily and hourly
repetition of things;—while those impulses of unrest, which are Nature's
urgings through that ancestral experience which lives in each one
of us,—outcries of sea and peak and sky to man,—ever make wilder
appeal.... Strong friendships may have been formed; but there finally
comes a day when even these can give no consolation for the pain of
monotony,—and you feel that in order to live you must decide,—regardless
of result,—to shake forever from your feet the familiar dust of that
place....

And, nevertheless, in the hour of departure you feel a pang. As train
or steamer bears you away from the city and its myriad associations,
the old illusive impression will quiver back about you for a
moment,—not as if to mock the expectation of the past, but softly,
touchingly, as if pleading to you to stay; and such a sadness, such a
tenderness may come to you, as one knows after reconciliation with a
friend misapprehended and unjustly judged.... But you will never more
see those streets,—except in dreams.