The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain - All 169 Tales in One Edition. Mark Twain

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СКАЧАТЬ bow their heads discouraged; there be no adornments any more — no roses, nor shrubs, nor graveled walks, nor anything that is a comfort to the eye; and even the paintless old board fence that did make a show of holding us sacred from companionship with beasts and the defilement of heedless feet, has tottered till it overhangs the street, and only advertises the presence of our dismal resting-place and invites yet more derision to it. And now we cannot hide our poverty and tatters in the friendly woods, for the city has stretched its withering arms abroad and taken us in, and all that remains of the cheer of our old home is the cluster of lugubrious forest trees that stand, bored and weary of a city life, with their feet in our coffins, looking into the hazy distance and wishing they were there. I tell you it is disgraceful!

      “You begin to comprehend — you begin to see how it is. While our descendants are living sumptuously on our money, right around us in the city, we have to fight hard to keep skull and bones together. Bless you, there isn’t a grave in our cemetery that doesn’t leak — not one. Every time it rains in the night we have to climb out and roost in the trees, and sometimes we are wakened suddenly by the chilly water trickling down the back of our necks. Then I tell you there is a general heaving up of old graves and kicking over of old monuments, and scampering of old skeletons for the trees! Bless me, if you had gone along there some such nights after twelve you might have seen as many as fifteen of us roosting on one limb, with our joints rattling drearily and the wind wheezing through our ribs! Many a time we have perched there for three or four dreary hours, and then come down, stiff and chilled through and drowsy, and borrowed each other’s skulls to bail out our graves with — if you will glance up in my mouth now as I tilt my head back, you can see that my headpiece is half full of old dry sediment — how top-heavy and stupid it makes me sometimes! Yes, sir, many a time if you had happened to come along just before the dawn you’d have caught us bailing out the graves and hanging our shrouds on the fence to dry. Why, I had an elegant shroud stolen from there one morning — think a party by the name of Smith took it, that resides in a plebeian graveyard over yonder — I think so because the first time I ever saw him he hadn’t anything on but a check shirt, and the last time I saw him, which was at a social gathering in the new cemetery, he was the best-dressed corpse in the company — and it is a significant fact that he left when he saw me; and presently an old woman from here missed her coffin — she generally took it with her when she went anywhere, because she was liable to take cold and bring on the spasmodic rheumatism that originally killed her if she exposed herself to the night air much. She was named Hotchkiss — Anna Matilda Hotchkiss — you might know her? She has two upper front teeth, is tall, but a good deal inclined to stoop, one rib on the left side gone, has one shred of rusty hair hanging from the left side of her head, and one little tuft just above and a little forward of her right ear, has her underjaw wired on one side where it had worked loose, small bone of left forearm gone — lost in a fight — has a kind of swagger in her gait and a ‘gallus’ way of going with her arms akimbo and her nostrils in the air — has been pretty free and easy, and is all damaged and battered up till she looks like a queensware crate in ruins — maybe you have met her?”

      “God forbid!” I involuntarily ejaculated, for somehow I was not looking for that form of question, and it caught me a little off my guard. But I hastened to make amends for my rudeness, and say, “I simply meant I had not had the honor — for I would not deliberately speak discourteously of a friend of yours. You were saying that you were robbed — and it was a shame, too — but it appears by what is left of the shroud you have on that it was a costly one in its day. How did — ”

      A most ghastly expression began to develop among the decayed features and shriveled integuments of my guest’s face, and I was beginning to grow uneasy and distressed, when he told me he was only working up a deep, sly smile, with a wink in it, to suggest that about the time he acquired his present garment a ghost in a neighboring cemetery missed one. This reassured me, but I begged him to confine himself to speech thenceforth, because his facial expression was uncertain. Even with the most elaborate care it was liable to miss fire. Smiling should especially be avoided. What he might honestly consider a shining success was likely to strike me in a very different light. I said I liked to see a skeleton cheerful, even decorously playful, but I did not think smiling was a skeleton’s best hold.

      “Yes, friend,” said the poor skeleton, “the facts are just as I have given them to you. Two of these old graveyards — the one that I resided in and one further along — have been deliberately neglected by our descendants of to-day until there is no occupying them any longer. Aside from the osteological discomfort of it — and that is no light matter this rainy weather — the present state of things is ruinous to property. We have got to move or be content to see our effects wasted away and utterly destroyed.

      “Now, you will hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, that there isn’t a single coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance — now that is an absolute fact. I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box mounted on an express-wagon, but I am talking about your high-toned, silver-mounted burial-case, your monumental sort, that travel under black plumes at the head of a procession and have choice of cemetery lots — I mean folks like the Jarvises, and the Bledsoes and Burlings, and such. They are all about ruined. The most substantial people in our set, they were. And now look at them — utterly used up and poverty-stricken. One of the Bledsoes actually traded his monument to a late barkeeper for some fresh shavings to put under his head. I tell you it speaks volumes, for there is nothing a corpse takes so much pride in as his monument. He loves to read the inscription. He comes after a while to believe what it says himself, and then you may see him sitting on the fence night after night enjoying it. Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more. Now I don’t complain, but confidentially I do think it was a little shabby in my descendants to give me nothing but this old slab of a gravestone — and all the more that there isn’t a compliment on it. It used to have:

      ‘GONE TO HIS JUST REWARD’

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      on it, and I was proud when I first saw it, but by and by I noticed that whenever an old friend of mine came along he would hook his chin on the railing and pull a long face and read along down till he came to that, and then he would chuckle to himself and walk off, looking satisfied and comfortable. So I scratched it off to get rid of those fools. But a dead man always takes a deal of pride in his monument. Yonder goes half a dozen of the Jarvises now, with the family monument along. And Smithers and some hired specters went by with his awhile ago. Hello, Higgins, good-by, old friend! That’s Meredith Higgins — died in ‘44 — belongs to our set in the cemetery — fine old family — great-grandmother was an Injun — I am on the most familiar terms with him — he didn’t hear me was the reason he didn’t answer me. And I am sorry, too, because I would have liked to introduce you. You would admire him. He is the most disjointed, sway-backed, and generally distorted old skeleton you ever saw, but he is full of fun. When he laughs it sounds like rasping two stones together, and he always starts it off with a cheery screech like raking a nail across a windowpane. Hey, Jones! That is old Columbus Jones — shroud cost four hundred dollars — entire trousseau, including monument, twenty-seven hundred. This was in the spring of ‘26. It was enormous style for those days. Dead people came all the way from the Alleghanies to see his things — the party that occupied the grave next to mine remembers it well. Now do you see that individual going along with a piece of a headboard under his arm, one leg-bone below his knee gone, and not a thing in the world on? That is Barstow Dalhousie, and next to Columbus Jones he was the most sumptuously outfitted person that ever entered our cemetery. We are all leaving. We cannot tolerate the treatment we are receiving at the hands of our descendants. They open new cemeteries, but they leave us to our ignominy. They mend the streets, but they never mend anything that is about us or belongs to us. Look at that coffin of mine — yet I tell you in its day it was a piece СКАЧАТЬ