The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) (56 page)

She couldn't think of anything further to do, now, so she
thought she would wash the other side of her face, but she couldn't
remember which one it was, so she gave it up, and sat down and
went to nodding and blinking; and between nods she would jerk
herself together and make remarks. I heard her say-

"One of them's the Duplicate, the other's the Original, but I
can't tell t'other from which, and I don't suppose they can. I am
sure I couldn't if I were them. The missuses said it was the
Duplicate that broke in there last night, and I voted with the
majority for policy's sake, which is a servant's only protection from trouble, but I would like to know how they knew. I don't believe
they could tell them apart if they were stripped. Now my idea is-"

I interrupted, and intoned musingly, as if to myself,-

and stopped there, and seemed to sink into a reverie.

It gave her a start! She muttered-

"That's the Duplicate. Duplicates know languages-everything,
sometimes, and then again they don't know anything at all. That is
what Fischer says, though of course it could have been his Duplicate that said it, there's never any telling, in this bewitched place,
whether you are talking to a person himself, or only to his heathen
image. And Fischer says they haven't any morals nor any principles
-though of course it could have been his Duplicate that said
it-one never knows. Half the time when you say to a person he
said so-and-so, he says he didn't-so then you recognize it was the
other one. As between living in such a place as this and being crazy,
you don't know which it is, the most of the time. I would rather be
a cat and not have any Duplicate, then I always know which one I
am. Otherwise, not. If they haven't any principles, it was this
Duplicate that broke in there, though of course, being drunk he
wouldn't know which one he was, and so it could be the other
without him suspecting it, which leaves the matter where it was
before-not certain enough to be certain, and just uncertain
enough to be uncertain. So I don't see that anything's decided. In
fact I know it isn't. Still, I think this one that wailed is the
Duplicate, because sometimes they know all languages a minute,
and next minute they don't know their own, if they've got one,
whereas a man doesn't. Doesn't, and can't even learn it-can't learn
cat-language, anyway. It's what Fischer says-Fischer or his Duplicate. So this is the one-that's decided. He couldn't talk cataract,
nor ever learn it, either, if it was the Christian one .. . . . I'm
awful tired!"

I didn't let on, but pretended to be dozing; my brother was a little further along than that-he was softly snoring. I wanted to
wait and see, if I could, what was troubling the cat, for it seemed
plain to me that she had something on her mind, she certainly was
not at her ease. By and by she cleared her throat, and I stirred up
and looked at her, as much as to say, "well, I'm listening-proceed."
Then she said, with studied politeness-

"It is very late. I am sorry to disturb you gentlemen, but I am
very tired, and would like to go to bed."

"Oh, dear me," I said, "don't wait up on our account I beg of you.
Turn right in!"

She looked astonished.

"With you present?" she said.

So then I was astonished myself, but did not reveal it.

"Do you mind it?" I asked.

"Do I mind it! You will grant, I make no doubt, that so extraordinary a question is hardly entitled to the courtesy of an answer from
one of my sex. You are offensive, sir; I beg that you will relieve me
of your company at once, and take your friend with you."

"Remove him? I could not do that. He is my guest, and it is his
place to make the first move. This is my room."

I said it with a submerged chuckle, as knowing quite well, that
soft-spoken as it was, it would knock some of the starch out of her.
As indeed it did.

'Your room! Oh, I beg a thousand pardons, I am ashamed of my
rude conduct, and will go at once. I assure you sir, I was the
innocent victim of a mistake: I thought it was my room."

"And so it is. There has been no mistake. Don't you see?-there
is your bed."

She looked whither I was pointing, and said with surprise-

"How strange that is! it wasn't there five seconds ago. Oh, isn't it
a love!"

She made a spring for it-cat-like, forgetting the old interest in
the new one; and feminine-like, eager to feast her native appetite
for pretty things upon its elegancies and daintinesses. And really it
was a daisy! It was a canopied four-poster, of rare wood, richly
carved, with bed twenty inches wide and thirty long, sumptuously bepillowed and belaced and beruffled and besatined and all that;
and when she had petted it and patted it and searched it and sniffed
it all over, she cried out in an agony of delight and longing-

"Oh, I would just love to stretch out on that!"

The enthusiasm of it melted me, and I said heartily-

"Turn right in, Mary Florence Fortescue Baker G. Nightingale,
and make yourself at home-that is the magician's own present to
you, and it shows you he's no imitation-friend, but the true thing!"

"Oh, what a pretty name!" she cried; "is it mine for sure enough,
and may I keep it? Where did you get it?"

"I don't know-the magician hooked it from somewhere, he is
always at that, and it just happened to come into my mind at the
psychological moment, and I'm glad it did, for your sake, for it's a
dandy! Turn in, now, Baker G., and make yourself entirely at
home."

"You are so good, dear Duplicate, and I am just as grateful as I
can be, but-but-well, you see how it is. I have never roomed
with any person not of my own sex, and-"

"You will be perfectly safe here, Mary, I assure you, and-"

"I should be an ingrate to doubt it, and I do not doubt it, be sure
of that; but at this particular time-at this time of all others-erwell, you know, for a smaller matter than this, Miss Marget is
already compromised beyond repair, I fear, and if I-"

"Say no more, Mary Florence, you are perfectly right, perfectly.
My dressing-room is large and comfortable, I can get along quite
well without it, and I will carry your bed in there. Come along . . .
Now then, there you are! Snug and nice and all right, isn't it?
Contemplate that! Satisfactory?-yes?"

She cordially confessed that it was. So I sat down and chatted
along while she went around and examined that place all over, and
pawed everything and sampled the smell of each separate detail,
like an old hand, for she was getting the hang of her trade by now;
then she made a final and special examination of the button on our
communicating-door, and stretched herself up on her hind-toes and
fingered it till she got the trick of buttoning-out inquisitives and
undesirables down fine and ship-shape, then she thanked me hand somely for fetching the bed and taking so much trouble; and gave
me good-night, and when I asked if it would disturb her if I talked
a while with my guest, she said no, talk as much as we pleased, she
was tired enough to sleep through thunderstorms and earthquakes.
So I said, right cordially-

"Good-night, Mary G., and schlafen Sie wohl!" and passed out
and left her to her slumbers. As delicate-minded a cat as ever I've
struck, and I've known a many of them.

I STIRRED my brother up, and we talked the time away while
waiting for the magician to come. I said his coming was a most
uncertain thing, for he was irregular, and not at all likely to come
when wanted, but Schwarz was anxious to stay and take the
chances; so we did as I have said-talked and waited. He told me a
great deal about his life and ways as a dream-sprite, and did it in a
skipping and disconnected fashion proper to his species. He would
side-track a subject right in the middle of a sentence if another
subject attracted him, and he did this without apology or explanation-well, just as a dream would, you know. His talk was scatteringly seasoned with strange words and phrases, picked up in a
thousand worlds, for he had been everywhere. Sometimes he could
tell me their meaning and where he got them, but not always; in
fact not very often, the dream-memory being pretty capricious, he
said-sometimes good, oftener bad, and always flighty. "Side-track,"
for instance. He was not able to remember where he had picked
that up, but thought it was in a star in the belt of Orion where he
had spent a summer one night with some excursionists from Sirius
whom he had met in space. That was as far as he could remember
with anything like certainty; as to when it was, that was a blank
with him; perhaps it was in the past, maybe it was in the future, he
couldn't tell which it was, and probably didn't know, at the time it happened. Couldn't know, in fact, for Past and Future were human
terms and not comprehendable by him, past and future being all
one thing to a dream-sprite, and not distinguishable the one from
the other. "And not important, anyway." How natural that
sounded, coming from him! His notions of the important were just
simply elementary, as you may say.

He often dropped phrases which had clear meanings to him, but
which he labored in vain to make comprehensible by me. It was
because they came from countries where none of the conditions
resembled the conditions I had been used to; some from comets
where nothing was solid, and nobody had legs; some from our sun,
where nobody was comfortable except when white-hot, and where
you needn't talk to people about cold and darkness, for you would
not be able to explain the words so that they could understand what
you were talking about; some from invisible black planets swimming in eternal midnight and thick-armored in perpetual ice, where
the people have no eyes, nor any use for them, and where you
might wear yourself out trying to make them understand what you
meant by such words as warmth and light, you wouldn't ever
succeed; and some from general space-that sea of ether which has
no shores, and stretches on, and on, and arrives nowhere; which is a
waste of black gloom and thick darkness through which you may
rush forever at thought-speed, encountering at weary long intervals
spirit-cheering archipelagoes of suns which rise sparkling far in
front of you, and swiftly grow and swell, and burst into blinding
glories of light, apparently measureless in extent, but you plunge
through and in a moment they are far behind, a twinkling archipelago again, and in another moment they are blotted out in darkness;
constellations, these? yes; and the earliest of them the property of
your own solar system; the rest of that unending flight is through
solar systems not known to men.

And he said that in that flight one came across such interesting
dream-sprites! coming from a billion worlds, bound for a billion
others; always friendly, always glad to meet up with you, always
full of where they'd been and what they'd seen, and dying to tell you about it; doing it in a million foreign languages, which sometimes you understood and sometimes you didn't, and the tongue
you understood to-day you forgot to-morrow, there being nothing
permanent about a dream-sprite's character, constitution, beliefs,
opinions, intentions, likes, dislikes, or anything else; all he cares for
is to travel, and talk, and see wonderful things and have a good
time. Schwarz said dream-sprites are well-disposed toward their
fleshly brothers, and did what they could to make them partakers of
the wonders of their travels, but it couldn't be managed except on a
poor and not-worth-while scale, because they had to communicate
through the flesh-brothers' Waking-Self imagination, and that medium-oh, well, it was like "emptying rainbows down a rat-hole."

His tone was not offensive. I think his tone was never that, and
was never meant to be that; it was all right enough, but his
phrasing was often hurtful, on account of the ideal frankness of it.
He said he was once out on an excursion to Jupiter with some
fellows about a million years ago, when—

I stopped him there, and said-

"I am only seventeen, and you said you were born with me."

"Yes," he said, "I've been with you only about two million years,
I believe-counting as you count; we don't measure time at all.
Many a time I've been abroad five or ten or twenty thousand years
in a single night; I'm always abroad when you are asleep; I always
leave, the moment you fall asleep, and I never return until you
wake up. You are dreaming all the time I am gone, but you get
little or nothing of what I see-never more than some cheap odds
and ends, such as your groping Mortal Mind is competent to
perceive-and sometimes there's nothing for you at all, in a whole
night's adventures, covering many centuries; it's all above your dull
Mortal Mind's reach."

Then he dropped into his "chances." That is to say, he went to
discussing my health-as coldly as if I had been a piece of mere
property that he was commercially interested in, and which ought
to be thoughtfully and prudently taken care of for his sake. And he
even went into particulars, by gracious! advising me to be very
careful about my diet, and to take a good deal of exercise, and keep regular hours, and avoid dissipation and religion, and not get married, because a family brought love, and distributed it among many
objects, and intensified it, and this engendered wearing cares and
anxieties, and when the objects suffered or died the miseries and
anxieties multiplied and broke the heart and shortened life;
whereas if I took good care of myself and avoided these indiscretions, there was no reason why he should not live ten million years
and be hap-