I knew I was not expected to reply, therefore I did not give him my views on the somewhat complex question and he soon went on:—
“Taking a man, for example, when it is first known that he is to have an existence, his mother cries, and his father says he wouldn’t have had it happen for the world, or for fifty thousand dollars, although he may not have a dollar he can truthfully call his own. After a season of piling his clothes all in one place at night on the part of the coming man’s father, and grief and suffering on the part of his mother, he is finally born, and the women of the neighborhood come in to see which one of his parents he resembles, although it should be known beforehand that he will be like the uglier one in face and disposition. This may ALWAYS be depended upon; it NEVER fails. When he is a month old, or on the first regular bill-day after his birth, his father quarrels with the doctor for bringing him into the world at all, and pays the price in great anger, and under protest, vowing that he will never again give the old quack opportunity to rob him. When he is three or four months old, his father and mother quarrel as to whether he shall be named for her people or his folks. This settled, he is attacked with colic, followed in rapid succession by the numerous distressing complaints which nobody ever escaped. After this comes his boyhood, which he always remembers as being particularly disagreeable, as he never gets enough to eat, and is constantly being found fault with and whipped. At last he is started to school, where a man who is a tyrant because he is not a lawyer (or a woman who is cross because she is not married) endures him during the hours of the day when the outside is most attractive. From this he runs away, and serves an apprenticeship with the world, making so many mistakes, and doing so many foolish things, that he is crestfallen the remainder of his life. Then he marries the wrong woman, and has the experience of his father over again, meanwhile working like a slave to get something ahead. But he does not succeed, as he has a faculty of doing that which he ought not to do, although he strives very earnestly to become a great man, and make his father ashamed of himself, and after a life of misery, a boy comes out of his front door on a morning after a stormy and windy night, and hangs crape on the knob. If there is a newspaper in the town where he lives, he is given a magnificent column, to induce the relatives to buy large numbers of extra copies to send away. The next day a hearse and six gentlemen in black clothes and white cotton gloves appear at his front gate. The neighbors come straggling in to see what the mourners will do, and an hour after that a surly sexton, who is wondering who will pay him, begins to rattle clods on his coffin, whereupon the carriages on the outer edge begin to drive hurriedly away, as if too much time had been spent with him already, and in a few minutes he is an inhabitant of the silent city whose residents quietly wait to be gathered as brands for the burning. If he happened to be possessed of an extra farm, or a store, or ready money, his afflicted relatives prove that he had been crazy several years before his death, that they may divide his effects to suit themselves, and which they afterwards spend in ribald and riotous living. The principal merit of this brief sketch, as the newspaper writers say, is its entire truthfulness. Deceased”—he inclined his head towards the coffin—“had an experience like that I have mentioned, except that she was a woman. Peace to her dust.”
He spoke of his sister as “Deceased” as though that had been her name, instead of Maggie, or Jennie, or whatever it really was.
“Now that she is Up There,” Mr. Biggs continued, after a short silence, waving his right hand toward the ceiling, “I do not care if I mention that Deceased had an unhappy disposition. She had that tendency when a very little girl (being an angel now, she will recognize what I am saying as the truth, and commend me for it), and was usually disagreeable to those around her. Whether her complaint was poor health or disappointed hopes I do not know, but as a man who believes that it is best to tell the truth at all hazards, I confess to you she died friendless. If there is not secret joy in this house that she is dead, then my philosophy avails me nothing, and I am as a ship on an unknown sea without rudder or compass.”
The expression of “a ship without rudder or compass” seemed to please him, for he repeated it quite eloquently.
“Speaking of ships reminds me of my late brother-in-law, whom I have never seen. When he promised to marry the clay which reposes in yon coffin, I was away from home—the exact facts are that I was chased away by my father, a quiet and honest worker in wood who objected to my noise and lying—but for a reason which seems to actuate all fools, I wrote home that I should never be entirely content until I had murdered the man who had bewitched my sister. I can’t tell at this time what caused me to do it, unless it was knowledge of a custom that whenever a girl marries, her brothers and father make fools of themselves (and at that time I was not above custom), for Captain Deming was a very worthy young man. I think he was greatly disgusted at the absurd manner in which we carried on, and if his spirit has been released from the deep, and is hovering around this place, I desire that he hear my declaration that I am ashamed of myself.”
The little man was dramatic again, and waved his hands downward to represent the deep, and upward to represent the heavens.
“None of us liked the girl,” he surprised me by confessing, “and I think that there was some dissatisfaction that she did not marry, and rid my father of her keeping, but the moment there was a prospect she WOULD marry, we all began to object, though I cannot imagine why. At that time I was working in a stable in a town in the West, and I wrote to Captain Deming that only pressing business engagements prevented my coming on and snatching the girl from his relentless clutches, advising my father at the same time by letter not to scruple to burn, shoot, or stab to save the family from impending disgrace. I believe he did sharpen up his hatchet and saw with a vague idea of sawing the Deming body in two, and then cutting it to pieces. I am also informed that he said in the hearing of the Captain one evening that he would rather see the girl in her grave, and when the ceremony was finally performed, he made himself still further ridiculous by remarking to my mother in the presence of the guests that it was all her fault.”
He was apparently greatly amused by the recollection of this ridiculous circumstance, and stopped to laugh to himself, although I thought it was only an expression of satisfaction that he was finally rid of Mrs. Deming. Perhaps he had been wanting to laugh all day, and was now telling me jokes as an excuse.
“I made a great spectacle of myself in the town where I lived, by going about in a dejected and wretched condition, and saying that the Princess, my sister, had married a low fellow who followed the sea, and a few months after that, when I was anxious to boast of Captain Deming, my brother-in-law, I was compelled to move to another place, as the two stories would not fit in the same town. For this reason I went further west, and finally turned up in the Smoky Hills. I believe I never told you before how I happened to come west.”