The American Claimant by Mark Twain (book recommendations for teens .txt) 📖

in here—but that’s because there’s something they want to hear about and mix their gabble into. And they’re always around at meals, for the same reason. But the fact is, we have to keep a young negro girl just to take care of them, and a negro woman to do the housework and help take care of them.”

“Well, they ought to be tolerably happy, I should think.”

“It’s no name for it. They quarrel together pretty much all the time— most always about religion, because Dan’l’s a Dunker Baptist and Jinny’s a shouting Methodist, and Jinny believes in special Providences and Dan’l don’t, because he thinks he’s a kind of a free-thinker—and they play and sing plantation hymns together, and talk and chatter just eternally and forever, and are sincerely fond of each other and think the world of Mulberry, and he puts up patiently with all their spoiled ways and foolishness, and so—ah, well, they’re happy enough if it comes to that. And I don’t mind—I’ve got used to it. I can get used to anything, with Mulberry to help; and the fact is, I don’t much care what happens, so long as he’s spared to me.”

“Well, here’s to him, and hoping he’ll make another strike soon.”

“And rake in the lame, the halt and the blind, and turn the house into a hospital again? It’s what he would do. I’ve seen aplenty of that and more. No, Washington, I want his strikes to be mighty moderate ones the rest of the way down the vale.”

“Well, then, big strike or little strike, or no strike at all, here’s hoping he’ll never lack for friends—and I don’t reckon he ever will while there’s people around who know enough to—”

“Him lack for friends!” and she tilted her head up with a frank pride— “why, Washington, you can’t name a man that’s anybody that isn’t fond of him. I’ll tell you privately, that I’ve had Satan’s own time to keep them from appointing him to some office or other. They knew he’d no business with an office, just as well as I did, but he’s the hardest man to refuse anything to, a body ever saw. Mulberry Sellers with an office! laws goodness, you know what that would be like. Why, they’d come from the ends of the earth to see a circus like that. I’d just as lieves be married to Niagara Falls, and done with it.” After a reflective pause she added—having wandered back, in the interval, to the remark that had been her text: “Friends?—oh, indeed, no man ever had more; and such friends: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Johnston, Longstreet, Lee—many’s the time they’ve sat in that chair you’re sitting in—” Hawkins was out of it instantly, and contemplating it with a reverential surprise, and with the awed sense of having trodden shod upon holy ground—

“They!” he said.

“Oh, indeed, yes, a many and a many a time.”

He continued to gaze at the chair fascinated, magnetized; and for once in his life that continental stretch of dry prairie which stood for his imagination was afire, and across it was marching a slanting flamefront that joined its wide horizons together and smothered the skies with smoke. He was experiencing what one or another drowsing, geographically ignorant alien experiences every day in the year when he turns a dull and indifferent eye out of the car window and it falls upon a certain station-sign which reads “Stratford-on-Avon!” Mrs. Sellers went gossiping comfortably along:

“Oh, they like to hear him talk, especially if their load is getting rather heavy on one shoulder and they want to shift it. He’s all air, you know,—breeze, you may say—and he freshens them up; it’s a trip to the country, they say. Many a time he’s made General Grant laugh—and that’s a tidy job, I can tell you, and as for Sheridan, his eye lights up and he listens to Mulberry Sellers the same as if he was artillery. You see, the charm about Mulberry is, he is so catholic and unprejudiced that he fits in anywhere and everywhere. It makes him powerful good company, and as popular as scandal. You go to the White House when the President’s holding a general reception—sometime when Mulberry’s there. Why, dear me, you can’t tell which of them it is that’s holding that reception.”

“Well, he certainly is a remarkable man—and he always was. Is he religious?”

“Clear to his marrow—does more thinking and reading on that subject than any other except Russia and Siberia: thrashes around over the whole field, too; nothing bigoted about him.”

“What is his religion?”

“He—” She stopped, and was lost for a moment or two in thinking, then she said, with simplicity, “I think he was a Mohammedan or something last week.”

Washington started down town, now, to bring his trunk, for the hospitable Sellerses would listen to no excuses; their house must be his home during the session. The Colonel returned presently and resumed work upon his plaything. It was finished when Washington got back.

“There it is,” said the Colonel, “all finished.”

“What is it for, Colonel?”

“Oh, it’s just a trifle. Toy to amuse the children.”

Washington examined it.

“It seems to be a puzzle.”

“Yes, that’s what it is. I call it Pigs in the Clover. Put them in—see if you can put them in the pen.”

After many failures Washington succeeded, and was as pleased as a child.

“It’s wonderfully ingenious, Colonel, it’s ever so clever and interesting—why, I could play with it all day. What are you going to do with it?”

“Oh, nothing. Patent it and throw it aside.”

“Don’t you do anything of the kind. There’s money in that thing.”

A compassionate look traveled over the Colonel’s countenance, and he said:

“Money—yes; pin money: a couple of hundred thousand, perhaps. Not more.”

Washington’s eyes blazed.

“A couple of hundred thousand dollars! do you call that pin money?”

The colonel rose and tip-toed his way across the room, closed a door that was slightly ajar, tip-toed his way to his seat again, and said, under his breath:

“You can keep a secret?”

Washington nodded his affirmative, he was too awed to speak.

“You have heard of materialization—materialization of departed spirits?”

Washington had heard of it.

“And probably didn’t believe in it; and quite right, too. The thing as practised by ignorant charlatans is unworthy of attention or respect— where there’s a dim light and a dark cabinet, and a parcel of sentimental gulls gathered together, with their faith and their shudders and their tears all ready, and one and the same fatty degeneration of protoplasm and humbug comes out and materializes himself into anybody you want, grandmother, grandchild, brother-in-law, Witch of Endor, John Milton, Siamese twins, Peter the Great, and all such frantic nonsense—no, that is all foolish and pitiful. But when a man that is competent brings the vast powers of science to bear, it’s a different matter, a totally different matter, you see. The spectre that answers that call has come to stay. Do you note the commercial value of that detail?”

“Well, I—the—the truth is, that I don’t quite know that I do. Do you mean that such, being permanent, not transitory, would give more general satisfaction, and so enhance the price—of tickets to the show—”

“Show? Folly—listen to me; and get a good grip on your breath, for you are going to need it. Within three days I shall have completed my method, and then—let the world stand aghast, for it shall see marvels. Washington, within three days—ten at the outside—you shall see me call the dead of any century, and they will arise and walk. Walk?—they shall walk forever, and never die again. Walk with all the muscle and spring of their pristine vigor.”

“Colonel! Indeed it does take one’s breath away.”

“Now do you see the money that’s in it?”

“I’m—well, I’m—not really sure that I do.”

Great Scott, look here. I shall have a monopoly; they’ll all belong to me, won’t they? Two thousand policemen in the city of New York. Wages, four dollars a day. I’ll replace them with dead ones at half the money.

“Oh, prodigious! I never thought of that. F-o-u-r thousand dollars a day. Now I do begin to see! But will dead policemen answer?”

“Haven’t they—up to this time?”

“Well, if you put it that way—”

“Put it any way you want to. Modify it to suit yourself, and my lads shall still be superior. They won’t eat, they won’t drink—don’t need those things; they won’t wink for cash at gambling dens and unlicensed rum-holes, they won’t spark the scullery maids; and moreover the bands of toughs that ambuscade them on lonely beats, and cowardly shoot and knife them will only damage the uniforms and not live long enough to get more than a momentary satisfaction out of that.”

“Why, Colonel, if you can furnish policemen, then of course—”

“Certainly—I can furnish any line of goods that’s wanted. Take the army, for instance—now twenty-five thousand men; expense, twenty-two millions a year. I will dig up the Romans, I will resurrect the Greeks, I will furnish the government, for ten millions a year, ten thousand veterans drawn from the victorious legions of all the ages—soldiers that will chase Indians year in and year out on materialized horses, and cost never a cent for rations or repairs. The armies of Europe cost two billions a year now—I will replace them all for a billion. I will dig up the trained statesmen of all ages and all climes, and furnish this country with a Congress that knows enough to come in out of the rain— a thing that’s never happened yet, since the Declaration of Independence, and never will happen till these practically dead people are replaced with the genuine article. I will restock the thrones of Europe with the best brains and the best morals that all the royal sepulchres of all the centuries can furnish—which isn’t promising very much—and I’ll divide the wages and the civil list, fair and square, merely taking my half and—”

“Colonel, if the half of this is true, there’s millions in it—millions.”

“Billions in it—billions; that’s what you mean. Why, look here; the thing is so close at hand, so imminent, so absolutely immediate, that if a man were to come to me now and say, Colonel, I am a little short, and if you could lend me a couple of billion dollars for—come in!”

This in answer to a knock. An energetic looking man bustled in with a big pocket-book in his hand, took a paper from it and presented it, with the curt remark:

“Seventeenth and last call—you want to out with that three dollars and forty cents this time without fail, Colonel Mulberry Sellers.”

The Colonel began to slap this pocket and that one, and feel here and there and everywhere, muttering:

“What have I done with that wallet?—let me see—um—not here, not there —Oh, I must have left it in the kitchen; I’ll just run and—”

“No you won’t—you’ll stay right where you are. And you’re going to disgorge, too—this time.”

Washington innocently offered to go and look. When he was gone the Colonel said:

“The fact is, I’ve got to throw myself on your indulgence just this once more, Suggs; you see the remittances I was expecting—”

“Hang the remittances—it’s too stale—it won’t answer. Come!”

The Colonel glanced about him in despair. Then his face lighted; he ran to the wall and began to dust off a peculiarly atrocious chromo with his handkerchief. Then he brought it reverently, offered it to the collector, averted his face and said:

“Take it, but don’t let me see it go. It’s the sole remaining Rembrandt that—”

“Rembrandt be damned, it’s a chromo.”

“Oh, don’t speak of it so, I beg you. It’s the only really great original, the only supreme example of that