Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain [106]
Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria. In November I was living in Fräulein Dahlweiner’s pension, 1a, Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talk German to me—by request. One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows—all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marblevisaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watchroom yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement—for any even the slightest movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined myself a death sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons! So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually? If the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy? But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way with a humbled crest.
Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure, when she exclaimed—
“Come with me! I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know. He has been a night watchman there.”
He was a living man, but he did not look it. He was abed, and had his head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless, his deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast, was talonlike, it was so bony and long-fingered. The widow began her introduction of me. The man’s eyes opened slowly, and glittered wickedly out from the twilight of their caverns; he frowned a black frown; he lifted his lean hand and waved us peremptorily away. But the widow kept straight on, till she had got out the fact that I was a stranger and an American. The man’s face changed at once; brightened, became even eager—and the next moment he and I were alone together.
I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English; thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest.
This consumptive and I became good friends. I visited him every day, and we talked about everything. At least, about everything but wives and children. Let anybody’s wife or anybody’s child be mentioned, and three things always followed: the most gracious and loving and tender light glimmered in the man’s eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its place came that deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever saw his lids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and then for that day; lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently heard nothing that I said; took no notice of my goodbyes, and plainly did not know, by either sight or hearing, when I left the room.
When I had been this Karl Ritter’s daily and sole intimate during two months, he one day said, abruptly—
“I will tell you my story.”
A DYING MAN’S CONFESSION.
Then he went on as follows:—
I have never given up, until now. But now I have given up. I am going to die. I made up my mind last night