Mark Twain — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 2

I had been three weeks in that café before I noticed the mirror had a crack in it, and I want it understood that I am not a careless man by nature, only a lonesome one, and lonesomeness will blind a man to furniture quicker than blindness itself.

The place was called the Café Fürst, though nothing about it was princely except the ceiling, which was high enough to lose a pigeon in, and the mirror, which ran the length of the back wall and had been silvered sometime around the reign of an emperor nobody living could name with confidence. I took my coffee there every morning at half past eight, Vienna time, which was two-thirty in the morning back home in Hartford, and I sent my dispatches off by wire to a newspaper syndicate that paid me by the column-inch to describe a Europe I was too broke and too proud to actually go out and see. I wrote of the Ringstrasse without walking it above twice. I wrote of the Opera without a ticket. I sat in that one café, at that one table, under that one crack in that one mirror, and I manufactured a continent out of guidebooks and gall, and I want to tell you a man can go entirely to pieces doing that kind of work, the way cheese goes to pieces in a warm room, quietly and by degrees and without anybody noticing until the smell gives it away.

The crack itself ran from the upper left corner down through where a man's reflected collarbone would be, if he stood at the proper angle, and it did a curious thing to the light — it did not so much distort a face as delay it, so that when you turned your head sudden-like, the reflection seemed to catch up a half-second late, like a man answering a question he hadn't quite heard. I got to watching for that lag. I got, if I am honest, to depending on it, the way some men depend on liquor and some on prayer; it was the one unreliable thing in my day that I could absolutely rely on being unreliable, and there is a comfort in that I never expect to explain to a man who has not sat alone in a foreign city for the better part of a winter, filing copy under a byline that might as well have belonged to nobody.

It was on a Tuesday — I remember because Tuesday was the day the fellow who called himself Count Albrecht von Reuss first sat down across from me without an invitation, the way a cat sits on a fence it has already decided is his.

"You are the American who writes the letters," he said. Not a question. He had the trick, common to his tribe, of turning every statement into an accusation you were obliged to answer.

"I write dispatches," I said. "There's a difference, though I couldn't rightly swear to you what it is."

He smiled the way a man smiles who has already spent the money he intends to get off you. He was dressed above his evident means — good coat, bad boots, the classic uniform of the gentleman who has pawned his future to furnish his present — and he had about him that particular glitter of the confidence man who has read just enough history to be dangerous and just little enough to be caught.

"I could tell you things about this city," he said, "that no guidebook prints. Things that would make your syndicate double your wages."

"They'd have to triple 'em first before doubling meant anything," I said, "seeing as a third of nothing is still nothing." But I confess my pulse had picked up its pace some, for a lonesome man will grab at a rogue the same eager way a drowning man grabs at a plank, asking no questions about where the plank has been.

He talked. Lord, how he talked — of a countess with a secret, of a manuscript in a monastery, of a passage under the old wall that the Turks themselves had dug and forgotten, and I sat there taking it down in the private shorthand of my own suspicion, cataloguing his lies the way another man might catalogue butterflies, pinned and labeled and admired for their color even while you knew they were dead.

And behind him, over his shoulder, in that cracked glass, I watched his reflection arrive a half-second after his voice did, as though even his own image could not quite keep up with what he was inventing — and I thought, not for the first time, that a fraud and a lonely correspondent make excellent company for one another, being two species of the same animal, each manufacturing a self to send out into the world because the true one seemed insufficient for the postage.

"Well," I said at last, "let's hear the price of your countess's secret, and we'll see does my syndicate's purse stretch that far or does it just feel like it ought to."

He didn't keep me waiting for it. He named a figure that would have embarrassed a bishop, and named it the way a bishop names a blessing, as if the number itself carried grace enough to cover the asking.

"Three hundred kronen," he said, "for the location of the passage alone. The countess's letters are extra, naturally. A man does not sell a lady's correspondence at wholesale."

"Naturally," I said, and let the word sit there a while, the way you let a coin sit on a counter to see does the other fellow's hand twitch toward it before his mouth does. His hand did not twitch. That was the first thing that told me he was better at this than most, for the amateur always reaches, and the professional has trained his hands to sit still while his face does the reaching for him.

I want to set down here, because I have never told it to another living soul and don't know as I ever will again, that for about the length of time it takes a church bell to finish one stroke, I believed him. Not the countess, not the Turks, not the monastery — I never believed a syllable of the furniture of the story — but I believed in him, the way you can believe in a counterfeit bill even while your thumb is telling you the paper's wrong, because you want awful bad for it to spend. A man three weeks alone in a foreign capital, filing lies about a city he has not walked, will manufacture faith out of the poorest material going, the same as a starving man will find nourishment in the smell of somebody else's dinner.

Then his reflection caught up.

It came a half-beat behind him in the cracked glass, same as always, his shoulder arriving before his collar, his collar before his throat, all of him assembling itself out of that silver seam the way a lie assembles itself out of a man's need to be believed — and I saw, in that delayed sliver of him, not a count and not a rogue but a fellow about my own age, thin through the jaw, a little grey come early, wearing the good coat over the bad boots the exact way I was wearing my dispatches over my poverty, each of us paying the postage on a self we had invented because the true one seemed insufficient for export.

"Herr Graf," I said, "I'll tell you what my syndicate pays. It pays for color. It does not pay for passages under old walls, being as the editor has never seen an old wall and would not know a genuine one from a stage flat, and neither, if we are being Christian about it this fine afternoon, would I."

He did not flinch, I will give him that; he had the trained calm of a man who has heard "no" in nine languages and learned to treat it as a comma rather than a period.

"Then you doubt me," he said, drawing the words out long and mournful, like a man reading his own funeral notice aloud for the pleasure of the rhythm.

"I doubt everybody," I said, "on principle and by trade, and I doubt myself worst of all, which you may take as a professional courtesy since I extend it to so few." And here — for I could feel the sweat starting cold along my collar, the particular chill a man gets when he is about to be more honest than is safe — I told him about the crack in the mirror, and the half-second lag, and how I had taken to watching it the way another man watches a clock, and I said, "I believe, sir, that you and I have been running the identical swindle on this city for some weeks now, only you have been charging by the countess and I have been charging by the column-inch, and there is not the breadth of a kreuzer's difference between the two operations, except that my syndicate has better credit than yours."

For a moment he only looked at me, and something went out of his face that I want to call relief, though I expect a stricter man would call it merely the fatigue of a performer allowed, for once, to sit down between acts.

"The passage," he said at last, quiet now, no bishop's grandeur left in it, "is real enough. I have walked it. It goes nowhere anybody wants to go. That is the trouble with most true things — they are not worth what a lie will fetch."

I paid for his coffee. I did not pay for the countess.

He left before I did, and did not look back at the glass on his way out, and I thought that a curious mercy in a man of his profession, not to want a last look at himself.

I sat on another hour, past my usual time, and watched the crack run its silent line down through where my own collarbone sat doubled in the silver, and I thought how a mirror with a fault in it is a more honest article than one without, for it does not pretend the light arrives all in a piece, the way a man does not arrive all in a piece either, but a half-second late everywhere, catching up to himself his whole life long. Then I paid my bill, and walked out into a Ringstrasse I still had not properly seen, and went home and wrote four hundred words about it for people who would never know the difference, and never, so help me, doubted for one minute that they were the ones being told the truth.