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"Whether it be perceptible to yourself or not, your prolixity, I must tell
you, has increased to a remarkable degree," Thomas Bob replied. "Were that not
so, would I remark upon it?" He laughed immoderately; such were the jests of
which he was enamored.
"My prolixity, say you? Why, am I not the same simple, straightforward fellow
I always was, a man to call a spade a spade, and not, with Tacitus, an
implement for digging trenches you will, I pray, forgive my failing to append
the original Latin, which unfortunately I cannot at the moment "
"Enough!" He committed the sin of interruption, sometimes merely a peccadillo
of the most venial sort, but at others approaching the mortal. So I felt it to
be now. This notwithstanding, my acquaintance continued, "Do you not see,
Legrand, how for you have gone down the road towards proving my assertion?"
"No," I said only this and nothing more.
Again, Thomas Bob gave forth with the heartiest expression of his mirth, which
increased my liking for him, for a man who will laugh when the joke is on
himself is more highly to be esteemed than one who either cannot imagine the
possibility of such a thing or who at once is inspired to hatred on becoming
the butt of another's wit. We parted on the friendliest terms. I asked him to
convey my regards to his son, who has lately attained to prominence as an
editor of magazines.
Several days after my meeting with this distinguished gentleman, I had a dream
of such extraordinary clarity indeed, of such verisimilitude as to surpass any
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I had ever known before. Some of these, whether they spring from the lying
gate of ivory or the true gate of horn to which Homer animadverts, are fonts
of delight. Not so the one darkening my slumbers on the night I now describe.
I was black, to begin with. Now, I will not speak to the issue of whether the
negro should by rights be slave or free; that is a discussion for another time
and another place, and one that, the Compromise of
1850 notwithstanding, seems to be as likely to be decided by shot and shell as
by the quills and quillets of fussy barristers. Suffice to say, the Legrands
have not, nor have we ever had, the faintest tincture of colored blood flowing
in our veins.
Yet I was black, black as soot, black as coal, black as ebony, black as India
ink, black as midnight in a sky without stars or moon, black as Satan's soul.
And, when I first came to myself in this dream, I found
I was high amongst the branches of a great tulip tree. Glancing down for even
the briefest instant engendered terror which nearly sufficed to loose my grip
upon the trunk and send me hurtling to my doom, as Lucifer hurtled from the
heavens long, long ago.
Quickly gathering myself, I managed to hang on, and to climb. The branch upon
which I was at length compelled to crawl shuddered under my weight, not least
on account of its rotten state. Whoever would send any man, even a worthless
negro, on such a mission deserves, in my view, nothing less than
horsewhipping. Yet I had no choice; I
must go forward, or face a fate even worse than the likelihood of plunging,
screaming death.
Crawling on, I came upon a human skull spiked to the said branch (a skull
with, as I noted enviously, teeth of an extraordinary whiteness and soundness;
whatever had pained this mortal morsel, the dreaded toothache had kept apart
from his door). I dropped through one of the skull's gaping eye sockets a
scarabaeus beetle of remarkable heft; it glinted of gold as it fell.
And then, as is the way of dreams, I found myself on the ground once more,
digging at a spot chosen by extending a line from the center of the trunk
through the spot where the beetle fell. Imagine my delight upon discovering a
wooden chest banded with iron, of the sort in which pirates were wont to bury
treasure. Imagine my despair upon discovering it to be full of teeth.
Yes, teeth. Never had I seen such a marvelous profusion of dentality all
gathered together at one and the same place. Incisors, eyeteeth, bicuspids,
molars; so many, they might have been a flock of passenger pigeons turned to
rooted enamel. Under the bright sun of my imagined sky, they shone almost as
if they were the gold and jewels for which I had surely hoped.
I reached down and ran my hand through them. The not unpleasing music they
made striking one against another suggested something to me, something not
merely musical but reminding me of Of what I never learned, for I awoke then,
and the answer, if answer there was, vanished and was lost for ever, as is the
way of dreams. Yet the dream itself remained perfect in my memory, suffering [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]