This was in 1849. I was fourteen years old, then. We were still living in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, in the new "frame" house built by my father five years before. That is, some of us lived in the new part, the rest in the old part back of it and attached to it. In the autumn my sister gave a party and invited all the marriageable young people of the village. I was too young for this society, and was too bashful to mingle1 with young ladies, anyway, therefore I was not invited--at least not for the whole evening. Ten minutes of it was to be my whole share. I was to do the part of a bear in a small fairy play. I was to be disguised all over in a close-fitting brown hairy stuff proper for a bear. About half past ten I was told to go to my room and put on this disguise, and be ready in half an hour. I started, but changed my mind, for I wanted to practice a little, and that room was very small. I crossed over to the large unoccupied house on the corner of Main Street, unaware2 that a dozen of the young people were also going there to dress for their parts. I took the little black boy, Sandy, with me, and we selected a roomy and empty chamber3 on the second floor. We entered it talking, and this gave a couple of half-dressed young ladies an opportunity to take refuge behind a screen undiscovered. Their gowns and things were hanging on hooks behind the door, but I did not see them; it was Sandy that shut the door, but all his heart was in the theatricals4, and he was as unlikely to notice them as I was myself.
That was a rickety screen, with many holes in it, but, as I did not know there were girls behind it, I was not disturbed by that detail. If I had known, I could not have undressed in the flood of cruel moonlight that was pouring in at the curtainless windows; I should have died of shame. Untroubled by apprehensions5, I stripped to the skin and began my practice. I was full of ambition, I was determined6 to make a hit, I was burning to establish a reputation as a bear and get further engagements; so I threw myself into my work with an abandon that promised great things. I capered7 back and forth8 from one end of the room to the other on all fours, Sandy applauding with enthusiasm; I walked upright and growled9 and snapped and snarled10, I stood on my head, I flung handsprings, I danced a lubberly dance with my paws bent11 and my imaginary snout sniffing12 from side to side, I did everything a bear could do, and many things which no bear could ever do and no bear with any dignity would want to do, anyway; and of course I never suspected that I was making a spectacle of myself to anyone but Sandy. At last, standing13 on my head, I paused in that attitude to take a minute's rest. There was a moment's silence, then Sandy spoke14 up with excited interest and said:
"Mars Sam, has you ever seed a dried herring?"
"No. What is that?"
"It's a fish."
"Well, what of it? Anything peculiar15 about it?"
"Yes, suh, you bet you dey is. Dey eats 'em innards and all!"
There was a smothered16 burst of feminine snickers from behind the screen! All the strength went out of me and I toppled forward like an undermined tower and brought the screen down with my weight, burying the young ladies under it. In their fright they discharged a couple of piercing screams--and possibly others--but I did not wait to count. I snatched my clothes and fled to the dark hall below, Sandy following. I was dressed in half a minute, and out the back way. I swore Sandy to eternal silence, then we went away and hid until the party was over. The ambition was all out of me. I could not have faced that giddy company after my adventure, for there would be two performers there who knew my secret and would be privately17 laughing at me all the time. I was searched for, but not found, and the bear had to be played by a young gentleman in his civilized18 clothes. The house was still and everybody asleep when I finally ventured home. I was very heavy hearted and full of a bitter sense of disgrace. Pinned to my pillow I found a slip of paper which bore a line which did not lighten my heart, but only made my face burn. It was written in a laboriously19 disguised hand, and these were its mocking terms:
You probably couldn't have played bear, but you played bare very well--oh, very very well!
We think boys are rude, unsensitive animals, but it is not so in all cases. Each boy has one or two sensitive spots, and if you can find out where they are located you have only to touch them and you can scorch20 him as with fire. I suffered miserably21 over that episode. I expected that the facts would be all over the village in the morning, but it was not so. The secret remained confined to the two girls and Sandy and me. That was some appeasement22 of my pain, but it was far from sufficient--the main trouble remained: I was under four mocking eyes, and it might as well have been a thousand, for I suspected all girls' eyes of being the ones I so dreaded23. During several weeks I could not look any young lady in the face; I dropped my eyes in confusion when any one of them smiled upon me and gave me greeting; I said to myself, "That is one of them," and got quickly away. Of course I was meeting the right girls everywhere, but if they ever let slip any betraying sign I was not bright enough to catch it. When I left Hannibal, four years later, the secret was still a secret; I had never guessed those girls out, and was no longer hoping or expecting to do it.
One of the dearest and prettiest girls in the village at the time of my mishap24 was one whom I will call Mary Wilson, because that was not her name. She was twenty years old; she was dainty and sweet, peach-blooming and exquisite25, gracious and lovely in character. I stood in awe26 of her, for she seemed to me to be made out of angel clay and rightfully unapproachable by just any unholy ordinary kind of boy like me. I probably never suspected her. But--
The scene changes to Calcutta--forty-seven years later. It was in 1896. I arrived there on a lecturing trip. As I entered the hotel a vision passed out of it, clothed in the glory of the Indian sunshine--the Mary Wilson of my long-vanished boyhood! It was a startling thing. Before I could recover from the pleasant shock and speak to her she was gone. I thought maybe I had seen an apparition27, but it was not so, she was flesh. She was the granddaughter of the other Mary. The other Mary, now a widow, was upstairs, and presently sent for me. She was old and gray-haired, but she looked young and was very handsome. We sat down and talked. We steeped our thirsty souls in the reviving wine of the past, the pathetic past, the beautiful past, the dear and lamented28 past; we uttered the names that had been silent upon our lips for fifty years, and it was as if they were made of music; with reverent29 hands we unburied our dead, the mates of our youth, and caressed30 them with our speech; we searched the dusty chambers31 of our memories and dragged forth incident after incident, episode after episode, folly32 after folly, and laughed such good laughs over them, with the tears running down; and finally Mary said, suddenly, and without any leading up:
"Tell me! What is the special peculiarity33 of dried herrings?"
It seemed a strange question at such a hallowed time as this. And so inconsequential, too. I was a little shocked. And yet I was aware of a stir of some kind away back in the deeps of my memory somewhere. It set me to musing--thinking--searching. Dried herrings? Dried herrings? The peculiarity of dri . . . I glanced up. Her face was grave, but there was a dim and shadowy twinkle in her eye which--All of a sudden I knew and far away down in the hoary34 past I heard a remembered voice murmur35. "Dey eats 'em innards and all!"
"At--last! I've found one of you, anyway! Who was the other girl?"
But she drew the line there. She wouldn't tell me.
But a boy's life is not all comedy; much of the tragic36 enters into it. The drunken tramp--mentioned elsewhere--who was burned up in the village jail lay upon my conscience a hundred nights afterward37 and filled them with hideous38 dreams--dreams in which I saw his appealing face as I had seen it in the pathetic reality, pressed against the window bars, with the red hell glowing behind him--a face which seemed to say to me, "If you had not given me the matches, this would not have happened; you are responsible for my death." I was not responsible for it, for I had meant him no harm, but only good, when I let him have the matches; but no matter, mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty--to hunt and harry39 its slave upon all pretexts40 and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it. The tramp--who was to blame--suffered ten minutes; I, who was not to blame, suffered three months.
The shooting down of poor old Smarr in the main street at noonday supplied me with some more dreams; and in them I always saw again the grotesque41 closing picture--the great family Bible spread open on the profane42 old man's breast by some thoughtful idiot, and rising and sinking to the labored43 breathings, and adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying struggles. We are curiously44 made. In all the throng45 of gaping46 and sympathetic onlookers47 there was not one with common sense enough to perceive that an anvil48 would have been in better taste there than the Bible, less open to sarcastic49 criticism, and swifter in its atrocious work. In my nightmares I gasped50 and struggled for breath under the crush of that vast book for many a night.
All within the space of a couple of years we had two or three other tragedies, and I had the ill luck to be too near by, on each occasion. There was the slave man who was struck down with a chunk51 of slag52 for some small offense53; I saw him die. And the young Californian emigrant54 who was stabbed with a bowie knife by a drunken comrade; I saw the red life gush55 from his breast. And the case of the rowdy young brothers and their harmless old uncle: one of them held the old man down with his knees on his breast while the other one tried repeatedly to kill him with an Allen revolver which wouldn't go off, I happened along just then, of course.
Then there was the case of the young Californian emigrant who got drunk and proposed to raid the "Welshman's house" all alone one dark and threatening night. This house stood halfway56 up Holliday's Hill and its sole occupants were a poor but quite respectable widow and her blameless daughter. The invading ruffian woke the whole village with his ribald yells and coarse challenges and obscenities. I went up there with a comrade--John Briggs, I think--to look and listen. The figure of the man was dimly visible; the women were on their porch, nor visible in the deep shadow of its roof, but we heard the elder woman's voice. She had loaded an old musket57 with slugs, and she warned the man that if he stayed where he was while she counted ten it would cost him his life. She began to count, slowly; he began to laugh. He stopped laughing at "six"; then through the deep stillness, in a steady voice, followed the rest of the tale: "Seven . . . eight . . . nine"--a long pause, we holding our breaths--"ten!" A red spout58 of flame gushed59 out into the night, and the man dropped with his breast riddled60 to rags. Then the rain and the thunder burst loose and the waiting town swarmed61 up the hill in the glare of the lightning like an invasion of ants. Those people saw the rest; I had had my share and was satisfied. I went home to dream, and was not disappointed.
My teaching and training enabled me to see deeper into these tragedies than an ignorant person could have done. I knew what they were for. I tried to disguise it from myself, but down in the secret deeps of my troubled heart I knew--and I knew I knew. They were inventions of Providence62 to beguile63 me to a better life. It sounds curiously innocent and conceited64, now, but to me there was nothing strange about it; it was quite in accordance with the thoughtful and judicious65 ways of Providence as I understood them. It would not have surprised me, nor even overflattered me, if Providence had killed off that whole community in trying to save an asset like me. Educated as I had been, it would have seemed just the thing, and well worth the expense. Why Providence should take such an anxious interest in such a property, that idea never entered my head, and there was no one in that simple hamlet who would have dreamed of putting it there. For one thing, no one was equipped with it.
It is quite true, I took all the tragedies to myself, and tallied66 them off in turn as they happened, saying to myself in each case, with a sigh, "Another one gone--and on my account; this ought to bring me to repentance67; the patience of God will not always endure." And yet privately I believed it would. That is, I believed it in the daytime; but not in the night. With the going down of the sun my faith failed and the clammy fears gathered about my heart. It was then that I repented68. Those were awful nights, nights of despair, nights charged with the bitterness of death. After each tragedy I recognized the warning and repented; repented and begged; begged like a coward, begged like a dog; and not in the interest of those poor people who had been extinguished for my sake, but only in my own interest. It seems selfish, when I look back on it now.
My repentances were very real, very earnest; and after each tragedy they happened every night for a long time. But as a rule they could not stand the daylight. They faded out and shredded69 away and disappeared in the glad splendor70 of the sun. They were the creatures of fear and darkness, and they could not live out of their own place. The day gave me cheer and peace, and at night I repented again. In all my boyhood life I am not sure that I ever tried to lead a better life in the daytime--or wanted to. In my age I should never think of wishing to do such a thing. But in my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse71. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race--never quite sane72 in the night. When "Injun Joe" died . . . But never mind. Somewhere I have already described what a raging hell of repentance I passed through then. I believe that for months I was as pure as the driven snow. After dark.
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mingle
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| vt.使混合，使相混；vi.混合起来；相交往 | |
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unaware
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| a.不知道的，未意识到的 | |
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chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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theatricals
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| n.（业余性的）戏剧演出，舞台表演艺术；职业演员；戏剧的( theatrical的名词复数 )；剧场的；炫耀的；戏剧性的 | |
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apprehensions
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| 疑惧 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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capered
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| v.跳跃，雀跃( caper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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growled
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| v.（动物）发狺狺声， （雷）作隆隆声( growl的过去式和过去分词 )；低声咆哮着说 | |
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snarled
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| v.（指狗）吠，嗥叫， （人）咆哮( snarl的过去式和过去分词 )；咆哮着说，厉声地说 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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sniffing
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| n.探查法v.以鼻吸气，嗅，闻( sniff的现在分词 )；抽鼻子（尤指哭泣、患感冒等时出声地用鼻子吸气）；抱怨，不以为然地说 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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smothered
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| （使）窒息， （使）透不过气( smother的过去式和过去分词 )； 覆盖； 忍住； 抑制 | |
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privately
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| adv.以私人的身份，悄悄地，私下地 | |
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civilized
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| a.有教养的，文雅的 | |
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laboriously
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| adv.艰苦地；费力地；辛勤地；（文体等）佶屈聱牙地 | |
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scorch
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| v.烧焦，烤焦；高速疾驶；n.烧焦处，焦痕 | |
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miserably
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| adv.痛苦地；悲惨地；糟糕地；极度地 | |
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appeasement
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| n.平息，满足 | |
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dreaded
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| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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mishap
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| n.不幸的事，不幸；灾祸 | |
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exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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apparition
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| n.幽灵，神奇的现象 | |
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lamented
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| adj.被哀悼的，令人遗憾的v.（为…）哀悼，痛哭，悲伤( lament的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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reverent
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| adj.恭敬的，虔诚的 | |
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caressed
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| 爱抚或抚摸…( caress的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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chambers
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| n.房间( chamber的名词复数 )；（议会的）议院；卧室；会议厅 | |
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folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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peculiarity
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| n.独特性，特色；特殊的东西；怪癖 | |
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hoary
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| adj.古老的；鬓发斑白的 | |
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murmur
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| n.低语，低声的怨言；v.低语，低声而言 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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harry
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| vt.掠夺，蹂躏，使苦恼 | |
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pretexts
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| n.借口，托辞( pretext的名词复数 ) | |
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grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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profane
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| adj.亵神的，亵渎的；vt.亵渎，玷污 | |
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labored
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| adj.吃力的，谨慎的v.努力争取(for)( labor的过去式和过去分词 )；苦干；详细分析；（指引擎）缓慢而困难地运转 | |
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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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throng
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| n.人群，群众；v.拥挤，群集 | |
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46
gaping
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| adj.口的；张口的；敞口的；多洞穴的v.目瞪口呆地凝视( gape的现在分词 )；张开，张大 | |
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onlookers
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| n.旁观者，观看者( onlooker的名词复数 ) | |
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anvil
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| n.铁钻 | |
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sarcastic
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| adj.讥讽的，讽刺的，嘲弄的 | |
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gasped
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| v.喘气( gasp的过去式和过去分词 )；喘息；倒抽气；很想要 | |
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chunk
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| n.厚片，大块，相当大的部分（数量） | |
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slag
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| n.熔渣，铁屑，矿渣；v.使变成熔渣，变熔渣 | |
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offense
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| n.犯规，违法行为；冒犯，得罪 | |
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emigrant
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| adj.移居的，移民的；n.移居外国的人，移民 | |
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gush
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| v.喷，涌；滔滔不绝(说话)；n.喷，涌流；迸发 | |
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halfway
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| adj.中途的，不彻底的，部分的；adv.半路地，在中途，在半途 | |
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musket
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| n.滑膛枪 | |
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spout
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| v.喷出，涌出；滔滔不绝地讲；n.喷管；水柱 | |
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gushed
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| v.喷，涌( gush的过去式和过去分词 )；滔滔不绝地说话 | |
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riddled
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| adj.布满的；充斥的；泛滥的v.解谜，出谜题(riddle的过去分词形式) | |
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swarmed
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| 密集( swarm的过去式和过去分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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providence
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| n.深谋远虑，天道，天意；远见；节约；上帝 | |
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beguile
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| vt.欺骗，消遣 | |
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64
conceited
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| adj.自负的，骄傲自满的 | |
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judicious
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| adj.明智的，明断的，能作出明智决定的 | |
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tallied
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| v.计算，清点( tally的过去式和过去分词 )；加标签（或标记）于；（使）符合；（使）吻合 | |
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repentance
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| n.懊悔 | |
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68
repented
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| 对（自己的所为）感到懊悔或忏悔( repent的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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69
shredded
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| shred的过去式和过去分词 | |
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70
splendor
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| n.光彩；壮丽，华丽；显赫，辉煌 | |
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71
remorse
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| n.痛恨，悔恨，自责 | |
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72
sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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