Mark Twain — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

Well, I never set out to be keeper of anything, least of all a clock, but there I was of a Tuesday morning, feather duster in one hand and a tallow candle guttering in the other, poking through the county archive's back room where they kept the deeds nobody wanted and the wills nobody could read, when I come upon a case of black walnut, no bigger than a hatbox, with a face of yellowed ivory and hands that moved, so help me, the wrong way round.

I stood and watched it a good while. The minute hand crept backward past the numerals, patient as a man counting his own funeral, and the ticking was ticking sure enough, only every tick seemed to be taking something away instead of adding it, the way a grocer's scale goes down when you lift your thumb off it. I put my ear close and I declare the thing seemed to be breathing out years instead of breathing in seconds.

It was old Professor Wakeman found me there, gawping. He was the scholarly sort, always strolling the stacks with his hands clasped behind him like a bishop inspecting a garden, and he had a way of talking that made a man feel he'd wandered into church without his boots blacked.

"Ah," says he, "you have discovered our little anomaly. A chronometer of singular provenance, sir — I believe it to be an artifact of the Restoration, possibly ecclesiastical, possibly demonic, and in any case wholly unaccounted for in the parish inventory of 1741."

"Looks to me," I says, "like somebody wound her up backwards and never noticed."

He winced like I'd spit on the altar rail. "One does not wind Providence backwards, young man."

"Well, somebody's doing it," I says, "and charging it to the county, most likely."

That was when Sile Hokum come sidling in, and I want to set down here plain that Sile was the kind of rogue who could smell an opportunity through a brick wall, and he had already got wind of the clock two days before the Professor had, and had already been down to the notary's to inquire could a man patent Time itself, and been told no, though not before the notary'd charged him a dollar for the asking.

"Gentlemen," says Sile, rubbing his hands together the way a man rubs a horse he means to sell for more than it's worth, "you are looking at the biggest opportunity to strike this town since the plank road company went bust. That clock don't just run backward — it remembers backward. I had the Widow Tarbox's whole courting history back to '58 out of it inside an hour, and I am fixing to build every lonesome man and woman in this county a paper of their own, all drawn up scientific, so's they can be matched proper, one to the other, same as you'd match a horse to a harness."

"Matched how," says the Professor, faintly, the way a man asks a question he already dreads the answer to.

"Why, by the numbers," says Sile, and pulled out a great sheaf of foolscap covered over in columns — Age, Temper, Church Attendance, Prospects, Disposition Toward Debt — and at the bottom of each sheet a total, ciphered out fine as a bank statement, and he called the whole business a body's "profile," same as you'd profile a hillside for a railroad cut.

Now I had a tell of my own in them days, a way my left hand would commence to tremble whenever I feared I was about to be caught out at something, and it commenced trembling then, for I saw plain enough where this was headed, and I saw plainer still that I would be the one set to copying out them foolscap sheets by candlelight while Sile took the credit and the silver both.

The Professor, for his part, went white round the gills and commenced fanning himself with his hat, murmuring something about the sanctity of the human heart not being reducible to a ledger, which was a fine sentiment and would have carried more weight if he hadn't, not ten minutes before, been fixing to write a monograph pricing the clock's provenance at four hundred dollars to the historical society.

"Providence," I said, "seems to price out about the same either way, Professor, whichever end of the pendulum you're standing on."

He didn't care for that, but he didn't answer it either, and that is generally how you know you've landed a true word on a man — he goes quiet and takes to fanning himself harder.

"""
So there we were, the three of us, hunched round a clock that ate its own minutes, one man reverencing it, one man fixing to sell it by the pound, and myself in the middle wondering which of the two frauds I more resembled, and the ticking went on backward, patient and small and cruel, the way all machinery is patient and small and cruel when a man has found a use for it that its maker never intended nor would have countenanced, and outside the window the real clock on the courthouse struck ten, going forward same as it always had, indifferent to the whole indecent scheme now hatching in the dust behind it.
"""

"""
And hatch it did. Well, Sile got his way, same as rogues generally do in this world, for the plain reason that a rogue is willing to work Sundays and a scholar is not, and inside of a month he had two hundred and eleven names down on his foolscap sheets, every one of them ciphered out fine, and he had rented the old millinery shop on Sublette Street and hung a sign out front reading HOKUM'S SCIENTIFIC BUREAU OF MATRIMONIAL PROVIDENCE, with a smaller sign underneath, added later, reading NO REFUNDS.
"""

My part in it, as I had foreseen, was to sit up nights with the backward clock, taking down what it whispered — for that is the only word for it, it did not tick so much as whisper, a small dry sound like a woman going through a dead husband's letters — and what it whispered was always somebody's past, never their future, so that a man wanting to know would he marry well got told instead exactly how his grandmother had disgraced herself at a corn-husking in 1809, which was interesting, and sometimes edifying, but it was not what he had paid his dollar for.

"This here machine's a rearward-looking proposition," I says to Sile one night, "and you are selling it as a forward-looking one, and somewhere in between them two directions is where you are going to get caught."

"Caught by who," says Sile, not even looking up from his ledger.

"By the customers, mostly," I says, "though I misdoubt they'll be the ones to hang you."

He allowed as how a man who worried about being caught had no business in the prophecy trade, and went on totting up his columns, Age, Temper, Prospects, Disposition Toward Debt, same as ever, and I noticed he had added a new column that week, headed simply PAID, and it was the fullest column on the page.

Now the Professor, for his part, had took to coming round the millinery shop of an evening, standing outside on the plank walk with his hands clasped behind him same as always, looking in at the window the way a man looks in at a wake he don't feel he has any business attending, and one night I stepped out to him and offered him a chew of tobacco, which he declined, being a man who held his vices to books and monographs.

"It is a debasement," he says, meaning the shop, "of a sacred mechanism to the level of a — a patent medicine."

"It surely is," I says. "Same as your monograph would've been, only yours was going to debase it to the historical society 'stead of to the lonesome-hearted. I don't know as one debasement outranks the other, Professor, providing both parties get paid."

He fanned himself with his hat, though the evening was cool, and did not answer, which I have already told you is how a man tells you he's been hit square.

It ended the way these things generally end, not with a lightning bolt nor a sermon but with a small mechanical fact asserting itself over the pretensions of everybody concerned, for one night in October, going on eleven o'clock, the clock's hands crept backward past midnight and kept on going, past eleven, past ten, and I watched the numerals slide by same as watching a man's life drain out of a wound, until directly the hands stood at twelve again, having gone the whole circuit backward, and there came a small dry click, no louder than a man cracking a knuckle, and the case went still.

I opened the back of it by candlelight, careful, the way you'd open a bird's egg you suspected was addled, and inside there was nothing but a spring gone flat and a scattering of fine black dust where the works had eaten themselves down to nothing, having spent, near as I could figure, every year it owned in the giving out of other people's histories to a millinery shop full of lonesome fools at a dollar the sheet.

Sile took the news hard, in a business sense, and was heard to remark that a machine which quits on a man right at the height of the season had no more character than a mule, but inside a week he had shifted his whole bureau over to doing the ciphering by hand, same columns, same total, same PAID at the bottom fuller than the rest, for it turned out the customers had never much cared whether the numbers come out of a demonic Restoration chronometer or out of Sile's own head, so long as somebody in authority set them down in columns and told them they added up to something.

The Professor got his monograph after all, on the strength of the dust, which he catalogued reverent as a relic, and read a paper to the historical society entitled "Observations Upon a Mechanism of Uncertain Providence, Now Deceased," and was paid the four hundred dollars regardless of the clock no longer running either way, forward or back, which seemed to me the plainest lesson in the whole business, that a man can generally get paid for a thing's meaning long after the thing itself has quit meaning anything at all.

As for me, I swept up the black dust into a paper twist and kept it a while, and my left hand quit its trembling directly, there being nothing left worth being caught at, and I have thought since that a clock which eats its own time is no stranger, taking the country over, than a bureau which sells a body's future out of columns headed Temper and Prospects and Disposition Toward Debt, the both of them being machinery fitted to a use their makers never intended, and both of them, in the end, getting paid.