The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories, Page 5

  THE McWILLIAMSES AND THE BURGLAR ALARM

  The conversation drifted smoothly and pleasantly along from weatherto crops, from crops to literature, from literature to scandal, fromscandal to religion; then took a random jump, and landed on the subjectof burglar alarms. And now for the first time Mr. McWilliams showedfeeling. Whenever I perceive this sign on this man's dial, I comprehendit, and lapse into silence, and give him opportunity to unload hisheart. Said he, with but ill-controlled emotion:

  "I do not go one single cent on burglar alarms, Mr. Twain--not a singlecent--and I will tell you why. When we were finishing our house, wefound we had a little cash left over, on account of the plumber notknowing it. I was for enlightening the heathen with it, for I was alwaysunaccountably down on the heathen somehow; but Mrs. McWilliams said no,let's have a burglar alarm. I agreed to this compromise. I will explainthat whenever I want a thing, and Mrs. McWilliams wants another thing,and we decide upon the thing that Mrs. McWilliams wants--as we alwaysdo--she calls that a compromise. Very well: the man came up from NewYork and put in the alarm, and charged three hundred and twenty-fivedollars for it, and said we could sleep without uneasiness now. So wedid for awhile--say a month. Then one night we smelled smoke, and Iwas advised to get up and see what the matter was. I lit a candle, andstarted toward the stairs, and met a burglar coming out of a room witha basket of tinware, which he had mistaken for solid silver in the dark.He was smoking a pipe. I said, 'My friend, we do not allow smoking inthis room.' He said he was a stranger, and could not be expected to knowthe rules of the house: said he had been in many houses just as good asthis one, and it had never been objected to before. He added that as faras his experience went, such rules had never been considered to apply toburglars, anyway.

  "I said: 'Smoke along, then, if it is the custom, though I think thatthe conceding of a privilege to a burglar which is denied to a bishop isa conspicuous sign of the looseness of the times. But waiving all that,what business have you to be entering this house in this furtive andclandestine way, without ringing the burglar alarm?'

  "He looked confused and ashamed, and said, with embarrassment: 'I beg athousand pardons. I did not know you had a burglar alarm, else I wouldhave rung it. I beg you will not mention it where my parents may hear ofit, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach ofthe hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization might alltoo rudely sunder the frail bridge which hangs darkling between the paleand evanescent present and the solemn great deeps of the eternities. MayI trouble you for a match?'

  "I said: 'Your sentiments do you honor, but if you will allow me to sayit, metaphor is not your best hold. Spare your thigh; this kind lightonly on the box, and seldom there, in fact, if my experience may betrusted. But to return to business: how did you get in here?'

  "'Through a second-story window.'

  "It was even so. I redeemed the tinware at pawnbroker's rates, less costof advertising, bade the burglar good-night, closed the window afterhim, and retired to headquarters to report. Next morning we sent forthe burglar-alarm man, and he came up and explained that the reason thealarm did not 'go off' was that no part of the house but the first floorwas attached to the alarm. This was simply idiotic; one might as wellhave no armor on at all in battle as to have it only on his legs.The expert now put the whole second story on the alarm, charged threehundred dollars for it, and went his way. By and by, one night, I founda burglar in the third story, about to start down a ladder with a lotof miscellaneous property. My first impulse was to crack his head with abilliard cue; but my second was to refrain from this attention, becausehe was between me and the cue rack. The second impulse was plainly thesoundest, so I refrained, and proceeded to compromise. I redeemed theproperty at former rates, after deducting ten per cent. for use ofladder, it being my ladder, and, next day we sent down for the expertonce more, and had the third story attached to the alarm, for threehundred dollars.

  "By this time the 'annunciator' had grown to formidable dimensions. Ithad forty-seven tags on it, marked with the names of the various roomsand chimneys, and it occupied the space of an ordinary wardrobe. Thegong was the size of a wash-bowl, and was placed above the head of ourbed. There was a wire from the house to the coachman's quarters in thestable, and a noble gong alongside his pillow.

  "We should have been comfortable now but for one defect. Every morningat five the cook opened the kitchen door, in the way of business, andrip went that gong! The first time this happened I thought the lastday was come sure. I didn't think it in bed--no, but out of it--for thefirst effect of that frightful gong is to hurl you across the house, andslam you against the wall, and then curl you up, and squirm you like aspider on a stove lid, till somebody shuts the kitchen door. In solidfact, there is no clamor that is even remotely comparable to the direclamor which that gong makes. Well, this catastrophe happened everymorning regularly at five o'clock, and lost us three hours sleep; for,mind you, when that thing wakes you, it doesn't merely wake you inspots; it wakes you all over, conscience and all, and you are good foreighteen hours of wide-awakeness subsequently--eighteen hours of thevery most inconceivable wide-awakeness that you ever experienced in yourlife. A stranger died on our hands one time, and we vacated and left himin our room overnight. Did that stranger wait for the general judgment?No, sir; he got up at five the next morning in the most prompt andunostentatious way. I knew he would; I knew it mighty well. He collectedhis life-insurance, and lived happy ever after, for there was plenty ofproof as to the perfect squareness of his death.

  "Well, we were gradually fading toward a better land, on account of thedaily loss of sleep; so we finally had the expert up again, and he rana wire to the outside of the door, and placed a switch there, wherebyThomas, the butler, always made one little mistake--he switched thealarm off at night when he went to bed, and switched it on again atdaybreak in the morning, just in time for the cook to open the kitchendoor, and enable that gong to slam us across the house, sometimesbreaking a window with one or the other of us. At the end of a week werecognized that this switch business was a delusion and a snare. We alsodiscovered that a band of burglars had been lodging in the house thewhole time--not exactly to steal, for there wasn't much left now, butto hide from the police, for they were hot pressed, and they shrewdlyjudged that the detectives would never think of a tribe of burglarstaking sanctuary in a house notoriously protected by the most imposingand elaborate burglar alarm in America.

  "Sent down for the expert again, and this time he struck a most dazzlingidea--he fixed the thing so that opening the kitchen door would takeoff the alarm. It was a noble idea, and he charged accordingly. Butyou already foresee the result. I switched on the alarm every night atbed-time, no longer trusting on Thomas's frail memory; and as soon asthe lights were out the burglars walked in at the kitchen door, thustaking the alarm off without waiting for the cook to do it in themorning. You see how aggravatingly we were situated. For months wecouldn't have any company. Not a spare bed in the house; all occupied byburglars.

  "Finally, I got up a cure of my own. The expert answered the call, andran another ground wire to the stable, and established a switch there,so that the coachman could put on and take off the alarm. That workedfirst rate, and a season of peace ensued, during which we got toinviting company once more and enjoying life.

  "But by and by the irrepressible alarm invented a new kink. One winter'snight we were flung out of bed by the sudden music of that awful gong,and when we hobbled to the annunciator, turned up the gas, and saw theword 'Nursery' exposed, Mrs. McWilliams fainted dead away, and I cameprecious near doing the same thing myself. I seized my shotgun, andstood timing the coachman whilst that appalling buzzing went on. I knewthat his gong had flung him out, too, and that he would be along withhis gun as soon as he could jump into his clothes. When I judged thatthe time was ripe, I crept to the room next the nursery, glanced throughthe window, and saw the dim outline of the coachman in the yard below,standing at present-arms and waiting for a chanc
e. Then I hopped intothe nursery and fired, and in the same instant the coachman fired at thered flash of my gun. Both of us were successful; I crippled a nurse, andhe shot off all my back hair. We turned up the gas, and telephoned fora surgeon. There was not a sign of a burglar, and no window had beenraised. One glass was absent, but that was where the coachman's chargehad come through. Here was a fine mystery--a burglar alarm 'going off'at midnight of its own accord, and not a burglar in the neighborhood!

  "The expert answered the usual call, and explained that it was a 'Falsealarm.' Said it was easily fixed. So he overhauled the nursery window,charged a remunerative figure for it, and departed.

  "What we suffered from false alarms for the next three years nostylographic pen can describe. During the next three months I alwaysflew with my gun to the room indicated, and the coachman always salliedforth with his battery to support me. But there was never anything toshoot at--windows all tight and secure. We always sent down for theexpert next day, and he fixed those particular windows so they wouldkeep quiet a week or so, and always remembered to send us a bill aboutlike this:

  Wire ............................$2.15 Nipple........................... .75 Two hours' labor ................ 1.50 Wax.............................. .47 Tape............................. .34 Screws........................... .15 Recharging battery .............. .98 Three hours' labor .............. 2.25 String........................... .02 Lard ............................ .66 Pond's Extract .................. 1.25 Springs at 50.................... 2.00 Railroad fares................... 7.25

  "At length a perfectly natural thing came about--after we had answeredthree or four hundred false alarms--to wit, we stopped answering them.Yes, I simply rose up calmly, when slammed across the house bythe alarm, calmly inspected the annunciator, took note of the roomindicated; and then calmly disconnected that room from the alarm, andwent back to bed as if nothing had happened. Moreover, I left that roomoff permanently, and did not send for the expert. Well, it goes withoutsaying that in the course of time all the rooms were taken off, and theentire machine was out of service.

  "It was at this unprotected time that the heaviest calamity of allhappened. The burglars walked in one night and carried off the burglaralarm! yes, sir, every hide and hair of it: ripped it out, tooth andnail; springs, bells, gongs, battery, and all; they took a hundred andfifty miles of copper wire; they just cleaned her out, bag and baggage,and never left us a vestige of her to swear at--swear by, I mean.

  "We had a time of it to get her back; but we accomplished it finally,for money. The alarm firm said that what we needed now was to have herput in right--with their new patent springs in the windows to make falsealarms impossible, and their new patent clock attached to take off andput on the alarm morning and night without human assistance. That seemeda good scheme. They promised to have the whole thing finished in tendays. They began work, and we left for the summer. They worked a coupleof days; then they left for the summer. After which the burglars movedin, and began their summer vacation. When we returned in the fall, thehouse was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have beenat work. We refurnished, and then sent down to hurry up the expert. Hecame up and finished the job, and said: 'Now this clock is set to put onthe alarm every night at 10, and take it off every morning at 5:45.All you've got to do is to wind her up every week, and then leave heralone--she will take care of the alarm herself.'

  "After that we had a most tranquil season during three months. The billwas prodigious, of course, and I had said I would not pay it until thenew machinery had proved itself to be flawless. The time stipulated wasthree months. So I paid the bill, and the very next day the alarm wentto buzzing like ten thousand bee swarms at ten o'clock in the morning.I turned the hands around twelve hours, according to instructions, andthis took off the alarm; but there was another hitch at night, and I hadto set her ahead twelve hours once more to get her to put the alarm onagain. That sort of nonsense went on a week or two, then the expert cameup and put in a new clock. He came up every three months during the nextthree years, and put in a new clock. But it was always a failure. Hisclocks all had the same perverse defect: they would put the alarm on inthe daytime, and they would not put it on at night; and if you forcedit on yourself, they would take it off again the minute your back wasturned.

  "Now there is the history of that burglar alarm--everything just asit happened; nothing extenuated, and naught set down in malice. Yes,sir,--and when I had slept nine years with burglars, and maintained anexpensive burglar alarm the whole time, for their protection, not mine,and at my sole cost--for not a d---d cent could I ever get THEM tocontribute--I just said to Mrs. McWilliams that I had had enough of thatkind of pie; so with her full consent I took the whole thing out andtraded it off for a dog, and shot the dog. I don't know what you thinkabout it, Mr. Twain; but I think those things are made solely in theinterest of the burglars. Yes, sir, a burglar alarm combines in itsperson all that is objectionable about a fire, a riot, and a harem, andat the same time had none of the compensating advantages, of one sort oranother, that customarily belong with that combination. Good-by: I getoff here."