Mark Twain - The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (Illustrated)

“Look here, you miserable ash-cat! you will have to give a little more attention to your manners, or I will throw you out of the window!”

The manikin smiled a smile of malicious content and security, puffed a whiff of smoke contemptuously toward me, and said, with a still more elaborate drawl:

“Come – go gently now; don’t put on too many airs with your betters.”

This cool snub rasped me all over, but it seemed to subjugate me, too, for a moment. The pygmy contemplated me awhile with his weasel eyes, and then said, in a peculiarly sneering way:

“You turned a tramp away from your door this morning.”

I said crustily:

“Perhaps I did, perhaps I didn’t. How do you know?”

“Well, I know. It isn’t any matter how I know.”

“Very well. Suppose I did turn a tramp away from the door – what of it?”

“Oh, nothing; nothing in particular. Only you lied to him.”

“I didn’t! That is, I—”

“Yes, but you did; you lied to him.”

I felt a guilty pang – in truth, I had felt it forty times before that tramp had traveled a block from my door – but still I resolved to make a show of feeling slandered; so I said:

“This is a baseless impertinence. I said to the tramp—”

“There – wait. You were about to lie again. I know what you said to him. You said the cook was gone down-town and there was nothing left from breakfast. Two lies. You knew the cook was behind the door, and plenty of provisions behind her .”

This astonishing accuracy silenced me; and it filled me with wondering speculations, too, as to how this cub could have got his information. Of course he could have culled the conversation from the tramp, but by what sort of magic had he contrived to find out about the concealed cook? Now the dwarf spoke again:

“It was rather pitiful, rather small, in you to refuse to read that poor young woman’s manuscript the other day, and give her an opinion as to its literary value; and she had come so far, too, and so hopefully. Now wasn’t it?”

I felt like a cur! And I had felt so every time the thing had recurred to my mind, I may as well confess. I flushed hotly and said:

“Look here, have you nothing better to do than prowl around prying into other people’s business? Did that girl tell you that?”

“Never mind whether she did or not. The main thing is, you did that contemptible thing. And you felt ashamed of it afterward. Aha! you feel ashamed of it now! ”

This was a sort of devilish glee. With fiery earnestness I responded:

“I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one’s manuscript, because an individual’s verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world: I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty court’s decision anyway.”

“Yes, you said all that. So you did, you juggling, small-souled shuffler! And yet when the happy hopefulness faded out of that poor girl’s face, when you saw her furtively slip beneath her shawl the scroll she had so patiently and honestly scribbled at – so ashamed of her darling now, so proud of it before – when you saw the gladness go out of her eyes and the tears come there, when she crept away so humbly who had come so—”

“Oh, peace! peace! peace! Blister your merciless tongue, haven’t all these thoughts tortured me enough without your coming here to fetch them back again!”

Remorse! remorse! It seemed to me that it would eat the very heart out of me! And yet that small fiend only sat there leering at me with joy and contempt, and placidly chuckling. Presently he began to speak again. Every sentence was an accusation, and every accusation a truth. Every clause was freighted with sarcasm and derision, every slow-dropping word burned like vitriol. The dwarf reminded me of times when I had flown at my children in anger and punished them for faults which a little inquiry would have taught me that others, and not they, had committed. He reminded me of how I had disloyally allowed old friends to be traduced in my hearing, and been too craven to utter a word in their defense. He reminded me of many dishonest things which I had done; of many which I had procured to be done by children and other irresponsible persons; of some which I had planned, thought upon, and longed to do, and been kept from the performance by fear of consequences only. With exquisite cruelty he recalled to my mind, item by item, wrongs and unkindnesses I had inflicted and humiliations I had put upon friends since dead, “who died thinking of those injuries, maybe, and grieving over them,” he added, by way of poison to the stab.

“For instance,” said he, “take the case of your younger brother, when you two were boys together, many a long year ago. He always lovingly trusted in you with a fidelity that your manifold treacheries were not able to shake. He followed you about like a dog, content to suffer wrong and abuse if he might only be with you; patient under these injuries so long as it was your hand that inflicted them. The latest picture you have of him in health and strength must be such a comfort to you! You pledged your honor that if he would let you blindfold him no harm should come to him; and then, giggling and choking over the rare fun of the joke, you led him to a brook thinly glazed with ice, and pushed him in; and how you did laugh! Man, you will never forget the gentle, reproachful look he gave you as he struggled shivering out, if you live a thousand years! Oh! you see it now, you see it now! ”

“Beast, I have seen it a million times, and shall see it a million more! and may you rot away piecemeal, and suffer till doomsday what I suffer now, for bringing it back to me again!”

The dwarf chuckled contentedly, and went on with his accusing history of my career. I dropped into a moody, vengeful state, and suffered in silence under the merciless lash. At last this remark of his gave me a sudden rouse:

“Two months ago, on a Tuesday, you woke up, away in the night, and fell to thinking, with shame, about a peculiarly mean and pitiful act of yours toward a poor ignorant Indian in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains in the winter of eighteen hundred and—”

“Stop a moment, devil! Stop! Do you mean to tell me that even my very thoughts are not hidden from you?”

“It seems to look like that. Didn’t you think the thoughts I have just mentioned?”

“If I didn’t, I wish I may never breathe again! Look here, friend – look me in the eye. Who are you?”

“Well, who do you think?”

“I think you are Satan himself. I think you are the devil.”

“No.”

“No? Then who can you be?”

“Would you really like to know?”

“ Indeed I would.”

“Well, I am your Conscience! ”

In an instant I was in a blaze of joy and exultation. I sprang at the creature, roaring:

“Curse you, I have wished a hundred million times that you were tangible, and that I could get my hands on your throat once! Oh, but I will wreak a deadly vengeance on—”

Folly! Lightning does not move more quickly than my Conscience did! He darted aloft so suddenly that in the moment my fingers clutched the empty air he was already perched on the top of the high bookcase, with his thumb at his nose in token of derision. I flung the poker at him, and missed. I fired the bootjack. In a blind rage I flew from place to place, and snatched and hurled any missile that came handy; the storm of books, inkstands, and chunks of coal gloomed the air and beat about the manikin’s perch relentlessly, but all to no purpose; the nimble figure dodged every shot; and not only that, but burst into a cackle of sarcastic and triumphant laughter as I sat down exhausted. While I puffed and gasped with fatigue and excitement, my Conscience talked to this effect: