The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories
was different: the sermon seemed to bristle with accusations; it seemed
aimed straight and specially at people who were concealing deadly sins.
After church they got away from the mob of congratulators as soon as
they could, and hurried homeward, chilled to the bone at they did not
know what--vague, shadowy, indefinite fears. And by chance they caught
a glimpse of Mr. Burgess as he turned a corner. He paid no attention to
their nod of recognition! He hadn't seen it; but they did not know that.
What could his conduct mean? It might mean--it might--mean--oh, a dozen
dreadful things. Was it possible that he knew that Richards could have
cleared him of guilt in that bygone time, and had been silently waiting
for a chance to even up accounts? At home, in their distress they got to
imagining that their servant might have been in the next room listening
when Richards revealed the secret to his wife that he knew of Burgess's
innocence; next Richards began to imagine that he had heard the swish
of a gown in there at that time; next, he was sure he HAD heard it. They
would call Sarah in, on a pretext, and watch her face; if she had been
betraying them to Mr. Burgess, it would show in her manner. They asked
her some questions--questions which were so random and incoherent and
seemingly purposeless that the girl felt sure that the old people's
minds had been affected by their sudden good fortune; the sharp
and watchful gaze which they bent upon her frightened her, and that
completed the business. She blushed, she became nervous and confused,
and to the old people these were plain signs of guilt--guilt of some
fearful sort or other--without doubt she was a spy and a traitor. When
they were alone again they began to piece many unrelated things together
and get horrible results out of the combination. When things had got
about to the worst Richards was delivered of a sudden gasp and his wife
asked:
“Oh, what is it?--what is it?”
“The note--Burgess's note! Its language was sarcastic, I see it now.” He
quoted: “'At bottom you cannot respect me, KNOWING, as you do, of THAT
MATTER OF which I am accused'--oh, it is perfectly plain, now, God help
me! He knows that I know! You see the ingenuity of the phrasing. It was
a trap--and like a fool, I walked into it. And Mary--!”
“Oh, it is dreadful--I know what you are going to say--he didn't return
your transcript of the pretended test-remark.”
“No--kept it to destroy us with. Mary, he has exposed us to some
already. I know it--I know it well. I saw it in a dozen faces after
church. Ah, he wouldn't answer our nod of recognition--he knew what he
had been doing!”
In the night the doctor was called. The news went around in the morning
that the old couple were rather seriously ill--prostrated by the
exhausting excitement growing out of their great windfall, the
congratulations, and the late hours, the doctor said. The town was
sincerely distressed; for these old people were about all it had left to
be proud of, now.
Two days later the news was worse. The old couple were delirious,
and were doing strange things. By witness of the nurses, Richards had
exhibited cheques--for $8,500? No--for an amazing sum--$38,500! What
could be the explanation of this gigantic piece of luck?
The following day the nurses had more news--and wonderful. They had
concluded to hide the cheques, lest harm come to them; but when they
searched they were gone from under the patient's pillow--vanished away.
The patient said:
“Let the pillow alone; what do you want?”
“We thought it best that the cheques--”
“You will never see them again--they are destroyed. They came from
Satan. I saw the hell-brand on them, and I knew they were sent to betray
me to sin.” Then he fell to gabbling strange and dreadful things which
were not clearly understandable, and which the doctor admonished them to
keep to themselves.
Richards was right; the cheques were never seen again.
A nurse must have talked in her sleep, for within two days the forbidden
gabblings were the property of the town; and they were of a surprising
sort. They seemed to indicate that Richards had been a claimant for
the sack himself, and that Burgess had concealed that fact and then
maliciously betrayed it.
Burgess was taxed with this and stoutly denied it. And he said it was
not fair to attach weight to the chatter of a sick old man who was out
of his mind. Still, suspicion was in the air, and there was much talk.
After a day or two it was reported that Mrs. Richards's delirious
deliveries were getting to be duplicates of her husband's. Suspicion
flamed up into conviction, now, and the town's pride in the purity of
its one undiscredited important citizen began to dim down and flicker
toward extinction.
Six days passed, then came more news. The old couple were dying.
Richards's mind cleared in his latest hour, and he sent for Burgess.
Burgess said:
“Let the room be cleared. I think he wishes to say something in
privacy.”
“No!” said Richards; “I want witnesses. I want you all to hear
my confession, so that I may die a man, and not a dog. I was
clean--artificially--like the rest; and like the rest I fell when
temptation came. I signed a lie, and claimed the miserable sack. Mr.
Burgess remembered that I had done him a service, and in gratitude (and
ignorance) he suppressed my claim and saved me. You know the thing that
was charged against Burgess years ago. My testimony, and mine alone,
could have cleared him, and I was a coward and left him to suffer
disgrace--”
“No--no--Mr. Richards, you--”
“My servant betrayed my secret to him--”
“No one has betrayed anything to me--” “--And then he did a natural and
justifiable thing; he repented of the saving kindness which he had done
me, and he EXPOSED me--as I deserved--”
“Never!--I make oath--”
“Out of my heart I forgive him.”
Burgess's impassioned protestations fell upon deaf ears; the dying man
passed away without knowing that once more he had done poor Burgess a
wrong. The old wife died that night.
The last of the sacred Nineteen had fallen a prey to the fiendish sack;
the town was stripped of the last rag of its ancient glory. Its mourning
was not showy, but it was deep.
By act of the Legislature--upon prayer and petition--Hadleyburg was
allowed to change its name to (never mind what--I will not give it
away), and leave one word out of the motto that for many generations had
graced the town's official seal.
It is an honest town once more, and the man will have to rise early that
catches it napping again.
MY FIRST LIE, AND HOW I GOT OUT OF IT
As I understand it, what you desire is information about 'my first lie,
and how I got out of it.' I was born in 1835; I am well along, and my
memory is not as good as it was. If you had asked about my first truth
it would have been easier for me and kinder of you, for I remember that
fairly well. I remember it as if it were last week. The family think it
was week before, but that is flattery and probably has a selfish project
back of it. When a person has become seasoned by experience and has
reached the age of sixty-four, which is the age of discretion, he likes
a family compliment as well as ever, but he does not lose his head over
it as in the old innocent days.
I do not remember my first lie, it is too far back; but I remember my
second one very well. I was nine days old at the time, and had noticed
that if a pin was sticking in me and I advertised it in the usual
fashion, I was lovingly petted and coddled and pitied in a most
agreeable way and got a ration between meals besides.
It was human nature to want to get these riches, and I fell. I lied
about the pin--advertising one when there wasn't any. You would have
done it; George Washington did it, anybody would have done it. During
the first half of my life I never knew a child that was able to rise
about that temptation and keep from telling that lie. Up to 1867 all
the civilised children that were ever born into the world were
liars--including George. Then the safety-pin came in and blocked the
game. But is that reform worth anything? No; for it is reform by force
and has no virtue in it; it merely stops that form of lying, it doesn't
impair the disposition to lie, by a shade. It is the cradle application
of conversion by fire and sword, or of the temperance principle through
prohibition.
To return to that early lie. They found no pin and they realised that
another liar had been added to the world's supply. For by grace of a
rare inspiration a quite commonplace but seldom noticed fact was borne
in upon their understandings--that almost all lies are acts, and speech
has no part in them. Then, if they examined a little further they
recognised that all people are liars from the cradle onwards, without
exception, and that they begin to lie as soon as they wake in the
morning, and keep it up without rest or refreshment until they go
to sleep at night. If they arrived at that truth it probably grieved
them--did, if they had been heedlessly and ignorantly educated by their
books and teachers; for why should a person grieve over a thing which by
the eternal law of his make he cannot help? He didn't invent the law;
it is merely his business to obey it and keep still; join the
universal conspiracy and keep so still that he shall deceive his
fellow-conspirators into imagining that he doesn't know that the law
exists. It is what we all do--we that know. I am speaking of the lie of
silent assertion; we can tell it without saying a word, and we all do
it--we that know. In the magnitude of its territorial spread it is one
of the most majestic lies that the civilisations make it their sacred
and anxious care to guard and watch and propagate.
For instance. It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent
person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember
that in the early days of the emancipation agitation in the North the
agitators got but small help or countenance from any one. Argue and
plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal
stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the
bottom of society--the clammy stillness created and maintained by the
lie of silent assertion--the silent assertion that there wasn't anything
going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.
From the beginning of the Dreyfus case to the end of it all France,
except a couple of dozen moral paladins, lay under the smother of the
silent-assertion lie that no wrong was being done to a persecuted and
unoffending man. The like smother was over England lately, a good half
of the population silently letting on that they were not aware that
Mr. Chamberlain was trying to manufacture a war in South Africa and was
willing to pay fancy prices for the materials.
Now there we have instances of three prominent ostensible civilisations
working the silent-assertion lie. Could one find other instances in
the three countries? I think so. Not so very many perhaps, but say a
billion--just so as to keep within bounds. Are those countries working
that kind of lie, day in and day out, in thousands and thousands of
varieties, without ever resting? Yes, we know that to be true. The
universal conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always
and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity or a sham,
never in the interest of a thing fine or respectable. Is it the most
timid and shabby of all lies? It seems to have the look of it. For
ages and ages it has mutely laboured in the interest of despotisms
and aristocracies and chattel slaveries, and military slaveries, and
religious slaveries, and has kept them alive; keeps them alive yet, here