Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
Chapter 96
714 words | Chapter 96
A Thumb-print and What Came of It
WE were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas. So I began to think about my
errand there. Time, noonday; and bright and sunny. This was bad--not
best, anyway; for mine was not (preferably) a noonday kind of errand.
The more I thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me--now in one
form, now in another. Finally, it took the form of a distinct question:
is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a little
sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have night for it, and
no inquisitive eyes around. This settled it. Plain question and plain
answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.
I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create
annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really seemed
best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon. Their
disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous. Their main
argument was one which has always been the first to come to the surface,
in such cases, since the beginning of time: 'But you decided and _agreed
_to stick to this boat, etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise
thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead and make _two _unwise things of
it, by carrying out that determination.
I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good
success: under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show
them that I had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to
blame for it, I presently drifted into its history--substantially as
follows:
Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria.
In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's _pension_, 1a,
Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the
house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her
two young children used to drop in every morning and talk German to
me--by request. One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one
of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses
until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in
a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were
thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on
slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them with wax-white,
rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides
of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these
lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks
of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger
of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring;
and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a
watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert
and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who,
waking out of death, shall make a movement--for any, even the slightest,
movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined
myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging
watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all
my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful
summons! So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually? if
the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to
make his last moments easy. But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle
and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went
my way with a humbled crest.
Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure, when she exclaimed--
'Come with me! I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know.
He has been a night-watchman there.'
He was a living man, but he did not look it. He was abed, and had his
head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless,
his deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast, was
talon-like, it was so bony and long-fingered. The widow began her
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