They faded out and shredded away and disappeared in the glad splendor of the sun. They were the creatures of fear and darkness, and they could not live out of their own place. The day gave me cheer and peace, and at night I repented again. In all my boyhood life I am not sure that I ever tried to lead a better life in the daytime — or wanted to. In my age I should never think of wishing to do such a thing. But in my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race — never quite sane in the night. When “Injun Joe” died. … But never mind: in another chapter I have already described what a raging hell of repentance I passed through then. I believe that for months I was as pure as the driven snow. After dark.
It was back in those far-distant days — 1848 or ‘9 — that Jim Wolf came to us. He was from Shelbyville, a hamlet thirty or forty miles back in the country, and he brought all his native sweetnesses and gentlenesses and simplicities with him. He was approaching seventeen, a grave and slender lad, trustful, honest, a creature to love and cling to. And he was incredibly bashful.
It is to this kind that untoward things happen. My sister gave a “candypull” on a winter’s night. I was too young to be of the company, and Jim was too diffident. I was sent up to bed early, and Jim followed of his own motion. His room was in the new part of the house, and his window looked out on the roof of the L annex. That roof was six inches deep in snow, and the snow had an ice-crust upon it which was as slick as glass. Out of the comb of the roof projected a short chimney, a common resort for sentimental cats on moonlight nights — and this was a moonlight night. Down at the eaves, below the chimney, a canopy of dead vines spread away to some posts, making a cozy shelter, and after an hour or two the rollicking crowd of young ladies and gentlemen grouped themselves in its shade, with their saucers of liquid and piping-hot candy disposed about them on the frozen ground to cool. There was joyous chaffing and joking and laughter — peal upon peal of it.
About this time a couple of old disreputable tomcats got up on the chimney and started a heated argument about something; also about this time I gave up trying to get to sleep, and went visiting to Jim’s room. He was awake and fuming about the cats and their intolerable yowling. I asked him, mockingly, why he didn’t climb out and drive them away. He was nettled, and said overboldly that for two cents he would.
It was a rash remark, and was probably repented of before it was fairly out of his mouth. But it was too late — he was committed. I knew him; and I knew he would rather break his neck than back down, if I egged him on judiciously.
“Oh, of course you would! Who’s doubting it?”
It galled him, and he burst out, with sharp irritation —
“Maybe you doubt it!”
“I? Oh no, I shouldn’t think of such a thing. You are always doing wonderful things. With your mouth.”
He was in a passion, now. He snatched on his yarn socks and began to raise the window, saying in a voice unsteady with anger —
“You think I dasn’t — you do! Think what you blame please — I don’t care what you think. I’ll show you!”
The window made him rage; it wouldn’t stay up. I said —
“Never mind, I’ll hold it.”
Indeed, I would have done anything to help. I was only a boy, and was already in a radiant heaven of anticipation. He climbed carefully out, clung to the windowsill until his feet were safely placed, then began to pick his perilous way on all fours along the glassy comb, a foot and a hand on each side of it. I believe I enjoy it now as much as I did then: yet it is a good deal over fifty years ago. The frosty breeze flapped his short shirt about his lean legs; the crystal roof shone like polished marble in the intense glory of the moon; the unconscious cats sat erect upon the chimney, alertly watching each other, lashing their tails and pouring out their hollow grievances; and slowly and cautiously Jim crept on, flapping as he went, the gay and frolicsome young creatures under the vine-canopy unaware, and outraging these solemnities with their misplaced laughter. Every time Jim slipped I had a hope; but always on he crept and disappointed it. At last he was within reaching distance. He paused, raised himself carefully up, measured his distance deliberately, then made a frantic grab at the nearest cat — and missed. Of course he lost his balance. His heels flew up, he struck on his back, and like a rocket he darted down the roof feet first, crashed through the dead vines and landed in a sitting posture in fourteen saucers of red-hot candy, in the midst of all that party — and dressed as he was: this lad who could not look a girl in the face with his clothes on. There was a wild scramble and a storm of shrieks, and Jim fled up the stairs, dripping broken crockery all the way.
(1867.)
The incident was ended. But I was not done with it yet, though I supposed I was. Eighteen or twenty years later I arrived in New York from California, and by that time I had failed in all my other undertakings and had stumbled into literature without intending it. This was early in 1867. I was offered a large sum to write something for the “Sunday Mercury,” and I answered with the tale of “Jim Wolf and the Cats.” I also collected the money for it — twenty-five dollars. It seemed over-pay, but I did not say anything about that, for I was not so scrupulous then as I am now.
A year or two later “Jim Wolf and the Cats” appeared in a Tennessee paper in a new dress — as to spelling; spelling borrowed from Artemus Ward. The appropriator of the tale had a wide reputation in the West, and was exceedingly popular. Deservedly so, I think. He wrote some of the breeziest and funniest things I have ever read, and did his work with distinguished ease and fluency. His name has passed out of my memory.
A couple of years went by; then the original story — my own version — cropped up again and went floating around in the spelling, and with my name to it. Soon first one paper and then another fell upon me rigorously for “stealing” Jim Wolf and the Cats from the Tennessee man. I got a merciless beating, but I did not mind it. It’s all in the game. Besides, I had learned, a good while before that, that it is not wise to keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive. Few slanders can stand the wear of silence.
(1873.)
(1900.)
But I was not done with Jim and the Cats yet. In 1873 I was lecturing in London, in the Queen’s Concert Rooms, Hanover Square, and was living at the Langham Hotel, Portland place. I had no domestic household, and no official household except George Dolby, lecture-agent, and Charles Warren Stoddard, the California poet, now (1900) Professor of English Literature in the Roman Catholic University, Washington. Ostensibly Stoddard was my private secretary; in reality he was merely my comrade — I hired him in order to have his company. As secretary there was nothing for him to do except to scrapbook the daily reports of the great trial of the Tichborne Claimant for perjury. But he made a sufficient job out of that, for the reports filled six columns a day and he usually postponed the scrapbooking until Sunday; then he had 36 columns to cut out and paste in — a proper labor for Hercules. He did his work well, but if he had been older and feebler it would have killed him once a week. Without doubt he does his literary lectures well, but also without doubt he prepares them fifteen minutes before he is due on his platform and thus gets into them a freshness and sparkle which they might lack if they underwent the staling process of overstudy.
He was good company when he was awake. He was refined, sensitive, charming, gentle, generous, honest himself and unsuspicious of other people’s honesty, and I think he was the purest male I have known, in mind and speech. George Dolby was something of a contrast to him, but the two were very friendly and sociable together, nevertheless.
