The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson eBook

The real heir suddenly found himself rich and free, but in a most embarrassing situation.  He could neither read nor write, and his speech was the basest dialect of the Negro quarter.  His gait, his attitudes, his gestures, his bearing, his laugh—­all were vulgar and uncouth; his manners were the manners of a slave.  Money and fine clothes could not mend these defects or cover them up; they only made them more glaring and the more pathetic.  The poor fellow could not endure the terrors of the white man’s parlor, and felt at home and at peace nowhere but in the kitchen.  The family pew was a misery to him, yet he could nevermore enter into the solacing refuge of the “nigger gallery”—­that was closed to him for good and all.  But we cannot follow his curious fate further—­that would be a long story.

The false heir made a full confession and was sentenced to imprisonment for life.  But now a complication came up.  The Percy Driscoll estate was in such a crippled shape when its owner died that it could pay only sixty percent of its great indebtedness, and was settled at that rate.  But the creditors came forward now, and complained that inasmuch as through an error for which THEY were in no way to blame the false heir was not inventoried at the time with the rest of the property, great wrong and loss had thereby been inflicted upon them.  They rightly claimed that “Tom” was lawfully their property and had been so for eight years; that they had already lost sufficiently in being deprived of his services during that long period, and ought not to be required to add anything to that loss; that if he had been delivered up to them in the first place, they would have sold him and he could not have murdered Judge Driscoll; therefore it was not that he had really committed the murder, the guilt lay with the erroneous inventory.  Everybody saw that there was reason in this.  Everybody granted that if “Tom” were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him—­it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life—­that was quite another matter.

As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river.

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO “THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS”

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel.  I know this from experience.  He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story.  He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.  So he goes to work.  To write a novel?  No—­that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale.  But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book.  I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.