Don Marquis

“ You roll up in your blanket with your feet to the fire and you get to wondering things about things afore you go to sleep. The silentness jest natcherally swamps everything after a while, and then all them queer little noises you never hear in the daytime comes popping and poking through the silentness, or kind o' scratching their way through it sometimes, and makes it kind o' feel more silent than ever. And if you are nigh a crick, purty soon it will sort of get to talking to you, only you can't make out what it's trying to say, and you get to wondering about that, too. ”

“ I seen now the kind of conversations he is always having with himself when he gets jest so drunk and is thinking hard. Only this time it happens to be out loud.
"What is a gentleman?" I asts him, thinking if he wasn't one it might take his mind off himself a little to tell me. "What MAKES one?"
"Authorities differ," says Doctor Kirby, slouching down in his chair, and grinning like he knowed a joke he wasn't going to tell no one. "I heard Doctor Jackson describe himself that way the other day." ”

“ Well, sir, he was a talker, that there doctor was, and he knowed more religious sayings and poetry along with it, than any feller I ever hearn. He goes on and he tells how awful sick people can manage to get and never know it, and no one else never suspicion it, and live along fur years and years that-a-way, and all the time in danger of death. He says it makes him weep when he sees them poor diluted fools going around and thinking they is well men, talking and laughing and marrying and giving in to marriage right on the edge of the grave. He sees dozens of 'em in every town he comes to. ”

“ He meant it, Grimes did. And when he set down they was a hush. And then Will, the chairman, begun to call the roll.
I never been much of a person to have bad dreams or nightmares or things like that. But ever since that night in that schoolhouse, if I do have a nightmare, it takes the shape of that roll being called. Every word was like a spade grating and gritting in damp gravel when a grave is dug. ”

“ The smith, a pleasant soul is he With warts upon his hands—”
He stares at Hank hard and solemn and serious while he is saying that poetry at him. Hank fidgets and turns his eyes away. But the feller touches him on the breast with his finger, and makes him look at him.
“My honest friend,” says the feller, “I am not a preacher. Not right now, anyhow. No! My mission is spreading the glad tidings of good health. Look at me,” and he swells his chest up, and keeps a-holt of Hank's eyes with his'n. ”

“ It made me feel kind of queer, when I thought of that, as if I didn't have no separate place in the world any more than one of them millions of bottles. If any one will shut his eyes and say his own name over and over agin fur quite a spell, he will get kind of wonderized and mesmerized a-doing it—he will begin to wonder who the dickens he is, anyhow, and what he is, and what the difference between him and the next feller is. He will wonder why he happens to be himself and the next feller HIMSELF. He wonders where himself leaves off and the rest of the world begins. ”

“ And I'll tell you why you've talked so much: because no one of you alone would dare to do it, and every man of you in the end wants to go away thinking that the other fellow had the biggest share in it. And no one of you will fire the gun or pull the rope—you'll do it all together, in a crowd, because each one will want to tell himself he only touched the rope, or that his gun missed. ”

“ It didn't look to me to be any place fur a gentle old poet. While that little feller was making that charge you could feel the air getting tingly, like it does before a rain storm.
Some fellers started to clap their hands like at a political rally and to say, "Go it, Billy!" "That's right, Harden!" Which I found out later Billy Harden was in the state legislature, and quite a speaker, and knowed it. Will, the chairman, he pounded down the applause, and then he says to the doctor, pointing to Billy Harden:
"No man shall say of us that we did not give you a fair trial and a square deal. ”

“ We sees something is wrong, and we begins to have a notion of what it is.
The hotel-keeper, he spits out his chew, and goes behind his little counter and takes a five-cent cigar out of his little show case and bites the end off careful. Then he leans his elbows onto his counter and reads our names to himself out of the register book, and looks at us, and from us to the names, and from the names to us, like he is trying to figger out how he come to let us write 'em there. Then he wants to know where we come from before we come to Atlanta, where we had registered from. ”

“ Is your breath short when you walk up stairs? Do your feet swell in warm weather? Are there white spots on your finger nails? Do you draw your breath part of the time through one nostril and part of the time through the other? Do you ever have nightmare? ”

“ We was pinted toward a place on the railroad called Smithtown, but when we found we couldn't get a train from there till ten o'clock that night anyhow, and it was only three miles away, we said we'd stay.
After supper we calculated we'd better move. But the old man wouldn't hear of us walking that three miles. So about eight o'clock he hitched up a mule to a one-hoss wagon, and we jogged along.
They was a yaller moon sneaking up over the edge of the world when we started. It was so low down in the sky yet that it threw long shadders on the road, and they was thick and black ones, too. ”

“ Well, if I was a ghost and had of been Mis' Primrose's husband when I was a human, I wouldn't of come back neither, even if she had of bully-ragged me into one of them death-bed promises. I guess Primrose figgered he had earnt a rest.
If they is ghosts, what comfort they can get out of coming back where they ain't wanted and scaring folks is more'n I can see. It's kind of low down, I think, and foolish too. Them kind of ghosts is like these here overgrown smart alecs that scares kids. They think they are mighty cute, but they ain't. ”

“ He started down from above on jest one string of web, seemingly spinning part of it out of himself as he come, the way they do. I couldn't keep my eyes off'n him.
“Murder,” says the doctor, “is a thing.”
“It is a word,” says the other man, “For a thing. For a thing which sometimes seems necessary. Lynching, war, execution, murder—they are all words for different ways of wiping out human life. Killing sometimes seems wrong, and sometimes right. But right or wrong, and with one word or another tacked to it, it is done when a community wants to get rid of something dangerous to it.” ”

“ People don't want him joking around their corpses and he is a fat young man and can't help making puns even in the presence of the departed. Old Mr. Wilcox's eyesight is getting so poor he made a scandal in that town only the week before. He was composing a departed's face into a last smile, but he went too fur with it, and give the departed one of them awful mean, devilish kind of grins, like he had died with a bad temper on. By the time the departed's fambly had found it out, things had went too fur, and the face had set that-a-way, so it wasn't safe to try to change it any. ”

“ Ostrich gets mad too, and sicks Reginald onto her. Watty's wife is awful scared of Reginald, who don't really have ambition enough to bite no one, let alone a lady built so round everywhere he couldn't of got a grip on her. And as fur as wrapping himself around her and squashing her to death, Reginald never seen the day he could reach that fur. Reginald's feelings is plumb friendly toward Dolly when he is turned loose, but she don't know that, and she has some hysterics and faints in earnest this time. ”

“ And the doctor hearn them, too. Fur some reason or other he flushed up and cut a look out of the corner of his eye at Colonel Tom.
We went right through the main street and out toward the edge of town, by the crick, where Miss Lucy's house was. And, if anything, all of us feeling nervouser yet. And saying nothing and not looking at each other. And Colonel Tom rolling cigarettes and fumbling fur matches and lighting them and slinging them away. Fur how does anybody know how women is going to take even the most ordinary little things? ”

“ Colonel Tom thinks of what big folks the Buckner fambly has always been at home. And how high they had always held their heads. And how none of the women has ever been like this before. Nor no disgrace of any kind. And that there kid, if it is alive, is a sign of disgrace. ”

“ But the worst of that is lots of people gets to thinking I am a hobo. Even one or two judges in police courts I got acquainted with had that there idea of me. I always explains that I am not one, and am jest travelling around to see things, and working when I feels like it, and ain't no bum. But frequent I am not believed. And two, three different times I gets to the place where I couldn't hardly of told myself from a hobo, if I hadn't of knowed I wasn't one.
I got right well acquainted with some of them hobos, too. As fur as I can see, they is as much difference in them as in other humans. ”

“ Fur when they was burning past all chancet of saving, with walls and floors a-tumbling and crashing down and sending up great gouts of fresh flame as they fell, the leader sings out an order, and all that is not on their hosses jumps on, and they rides away from the blaze. They come across the square—not galloping now, but taking it easy, laughing and talking and cussing and joking each other—and passed right by my lumber pile agin and down the street they had come. ”

“ So when Elmira says the cistern is full of fish, that woman opens the trap door and looks in. Hank thinks it's Elmira come to get him out. He allows he'll keep quiet in there and make believe he is drowned and give her a good scare and make her sorry fur him. But when the cistern door is opened, he hears a lot of clacking tongues all of a sudden like they was a hen convention on. He allows she has told some of the neighbours, and he'll scare them too. So Hank, he laid low. And the woman as looks in sees nothing, for it's as dark down there as the insides of the whale what swallered Noah. ”

“ So the night before when the word got out in Cottonville that we had some scheme to make the niggers white, the niggers there took up with the idea that the doctor was mebby the feller the bishop had been prophesying about, and for a sign and a omen and a miracle of his grace and powers was going out to Big Bethel to turn 'em white. Poor devils, they didn't see but what being turned white orter be a part of what they was to get from the coming of that there Messiah.
News spreads among niggers quicker than among whites. No one knows how they do it. ”

“ They begun to light the whole town up as light as day, and paint a red patch onto the sky, that must of been noticed fur miles around. It was a mighty purty sight to see 'em burn. The smoke was rolling high, too, and the sparks flying and other things in danger of ketching, and after while a lick of smoke come drifting up my way. I smelt her. It was tobacco burning in them warehouses.
But that town had some fight in her, in spite of being took unexpected that-a-way. It wasn't no coward town. The light from the burning buildings made all the shadders around about seem all the darker. ”

“ One day Doctor Kirby and me was walking along the main street of a little town and we seen a bang-up funeral percession coming. It must of been one of the Grand Army of the Republicans, fur they was some of the old soldiers in buggies riding along behind, and a big string of people follering in more buggies and some on foot. Everybody was looking mighty sollum. But they was one man setting beside the undertaker on the seat of the hearse that was looking sollumer than them all. ”

“ Doctor Kirby makes him quite a speech. I never hearn him make a better one. Doctor Jackson he listens very calm, with his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, and moving his eyebrows up and down like he enjoyed it. But he don't get excited none. Finally Doctor Kirby says he will undertake to show that it will sell—me and him will take a trip down into the black country ourselves and show what can be done with it, and take Sam along fur an object lesson.
Well, they was a lot of rag-chewing. Doctor Jackson don't warm up none, and he asts a million questions. ”

“ The feller that could see her that-a-way and not feel made good by it orter have a whaling. Not the kind of sticky, good feeling that makes you uncomfortable, like being pestered by your conscience to jine a church or quit cussing. But the kind of good that makes you forget they is anything on earth but jest braveness of heart and being willing to bear things you can't help. You knowed the world had hurt her a lot when you seen her standing there; but you didn't have the nerve to pity her none, either. Fur you could see she had got over pitying herself. ”