Alonzo Fitz, and Other Stories. Mark Twain
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went forth into the world. He wandered far and wide and in many states. Time and again, strangers were astounded to see a wasted, pale, and woe-worn man laboriously climb a telegraph-pole in wintry and lonely places, perch sadly there an hour, with his ear at a little box, then come sighing down, and wander wearily away. Sometimes they shot at him, as peasants do at aeronauts, thinking him mad and dangerous. Thus his clothes were much shredded by bullets and his person grievously lacerated. But he bore it all patiently.
In the beginning of his pilgrimage he used often to say, “Ah, if I could but hear the 'Sweet By-and-by'!” But toward the end of it he used to shed tears of anguish and say, “Ah, if I could but hear something else!”
Thus a month and three weeks drifted by, and at last some humane people seized him and confined him in a private mad-house in New York. He made no moan, for his strength was all gone, and with it all heart and all hope. The superintendent, in pity, gave up his own comfortable parlor and bedchamber to him and nursed him with affectionate devotion.
At the end of a week the patient was able to leave his bed for the first time. He was lying, comfortably pillowed, on a sofa, listening to the plaintive Miserere of the bleak March winds and the muffled sound of tramping feet in the street below for it was about six in the evening, and New York was going home from work. He had a bright fire and the added cheer of a couple of student-lamps. So it was warm and snug within, though bleak and raw without; it was light and bright within, though outside it was as dark and dreary as if the world had been lit with Hartford gas. Alonzo smiled feebly to think how his loving vagaries had made him a maniac in the eyes of the world, and was proceeding to pursue his line of thought further, when a faint, sweet strain, the very ghost of sound, so remote and attenuated it seemed, struck upon his ear. His pulses stood still; he listened with parted lips and bated breath. The song flowed on—he waiting, listening, rising slowly and unconsciously from his recumbent position. At last he exclaimed:
“It is! it is she! Oh, the divine hated notes!”
He dragged himself eagerly to the corner whence the sounds proceeded, tore aside a curtain, and discovered a telephone. He bent over, and as the last note died away he burst forthwith the exclamation:
“Oh, thank Heaven, found at last! Speak to me, Rosannah, dearest! The cruel mystery has been unraveled; it was the villain Burley who mimicked my voice and wounded you with insolent speech!”
There was a breathless pause, a waiting age to Alonzo; then a faint sound came, framing itself into language:
“Oh, say those precious words again, Alonzo!”
“They are the truth, the veritable truth, my Rosannah, and you shall have the proof, ample and abundant proof!”
“Oh; Alonzo, stay by me! Leave me not for a moment! Let me feel that you are near me! Tell me we shall never be parted more! Oh, this happy hour, this blessed hour, this memorable hour!”
“We will make record of it, my Rosannah; every year, as this dear hour chimes from the clock, we will celebrate it with thanksgivings, all the years of our life.”
“We will, we will, Alonzo!”
“Four minutes after six, in the evening, my Rosannah, shall henceforth—”
“Twenty-three minutes after twelve, afternoon shall—”
“Why; Rosannah, darling, where are you?”
“In Honolulu, Sandwich Islands. And where are you? Stay by me; do not leave me for a moment. I cannot bear it. Are you at home?”
“No, dear, I am in New York—a patient in the doctor's hands.”
An agonizing shriek came buzzing to Alonzo's ear, like the sharp buzzing of a hurt gnat; it lost power in traveling five thousand miles. Alonzo hastened to say:
“Calm yourself, my child. It is nothing. Already I am getting well under the sweet healing of your presence. Rosannah?”
“Yes, Alonzo? Oh, how you terrified me! Say on.”
“Name the happy day, Rosannah!”
There was a little pause. Then a diffident small voice replied, “I blush—but it is with pleasure, it is with happiness. Would—would you like to have it soon?”
“This very night, Rosannah! Oh, let us risk no more delays. Let it be now!—this very night, this very moment!”
“Oh, you impatient creature! I have nobody here but my good old uncle, a missionary for a generation, and now retired from service—nobody but him and his wife. I would so dearly like it if your mother and your Aunt Susan—”
“Our mother and our Aunt Susan, my Rosannah.”
“Yes, our mother and our Aunt Susan—I am content to word it so if it pleases you; I would so like to have them present.”
“So would I. Suppose you telegraph Aunt Susan. How long would it take her to come?”
“The steamer leaves San Francisco day after tomorrow. The passage is eight days. She would be here the 31st of March.”
“Then name the 1st of April; do, Rosannah, dear.”
“Mercy, it would make us April fools, Alonzo!”
“So we be the happiest ones that that day's suit looks down upon in the whole broad expanse of the globe, why need we care? Call it the 1st of April, dear.”
“Then the 1st of April at shall be, with all my heart!”
“Oh, happiness! Name the hour, too, Rosannah.”
“I like the morning, it is so blithe. Will eight in the morning do, Alonzo?”
“The loveliest hour in the day—since it will make you mine.”
There was a feeble but frantic sound for some little time, as if wool-lipped, disembodied spirits were exchanging kisses; then Rosannah said, “Excuse me just a moment, dear; I have an appointment, and am called to meet it.”
The young girl sought a large parlor and took her place at a window which looked out upon a beautiful scene. To the left one could view the charming Nuuana Valley, fringed with its ruddy flush of tropical flowers and its plumed and graceful cocoa palms; its rising foothills clothed in the shining green of lemon, citron, and orange groves; its storied precipice beyond, where the first Kamehameha drove his defeated foes over to their destruction, a spot that had forgotten its grim history, no doubt, for now it was smiling, as almost always at noonday, under the glowing arches of a succession of rainbows. In front of the window one could see the quaint town, and here and there a picturesque group of dusky natives, enjoying the blistering weather; and far to the right lay the restless ocean, tossing its white mane in the sunshine.
Rosannah stood there, in her filmy white raiment, fanning her flushed and heated face, waiting. A Kanaka boy, clothed in a damaged blue necktie and part of a silk hat, thrust his head in at the door, and announced, “'Frisco haole!”
“Show him in,” said the girl, straightening herself up and assuming a meaning dignity. Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley entered, clad from head to heel in dazzling snow—that is to say, in the lightest and whitest of Irish linen. He moved eagerly forward, but the girl made a gesture and gave him a look which checked him suddenly. She said, coldly, “I am here, as I promised. I believed your assertions, I yielded to your importune lies, and said I would name the day. I name the 1st of April—eight in the morning. NOW GO!”
“Oh, my dearest, if the gratitude of a lifetime—”
“Not a word. Spare me all sight of you, all communication with you, until that hour. No—no supplications; I will have it so.”
When he was gone, she sank exhausted in a chair, for the long siege of troubles she had undergone had wasted her strength. Presently she said, “What a narrow escape! If the hour appointed had been an hour earlier—Oh, horror, what an escape I have made! And to think I had come to imagine