Mr. Munchausen <br />Being a True Account of Some of the Recent Adventures beyond the Styx of the L by John Kendrick Bangs (best novels in english TXT) 📗
- Author: John Kendrick Bangs
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Here Beelzy looked gratefully at an invisible something—doubtless the recollection in the thin air of his departed case of whooping cough, for having rescued him from an untimely grave.
“That is rather curious, isn’t it?” queried Sapphira, gazing intently into the boy’s eyes. “I don’t exactly understand how the whooping cough could save anybody’s life, do you, Mr. Munchausen?”
“Beelzy, this lady would have you explain the situation, and I must confess that I am myself somewhat curious to learn the details of this wonderful rescue,” said Mr. Munchausen.
“Well, I must say,” said Beelzy, with a pleased smile at the very great consequence of his exploit in the lady’s eyes, “if I was a-goin’ to start out to save people’s lives generally I wouldn’t have thought a case o’ whoopin’ cough would be of much use savin’ a man from drownin’, and I’m sure if a feller fell out of a balloon it wouldn’t help him much if he had ninety dozen cases o’ whoopin’ cough concealed on his person; but for just so long as I’m the feller that has to come up here every June, an’ shoo the bears out o’ the hotel, I ain’t never goin’ to be without a spell of whoopin’ cough along about that time if I can help it. I wouldn’t have been here now if it hadn’t been for it.”
“You referred just now,” said Sapphira, “to shooing bears out of the hotel. May I inquire what useful function in the ménage of a hotel a bear-shooer performs?”
“What useful what?” asked Beelzy.
“Function—duty—what does the duty of a bear-shooer consist in?” explained Mr. Munchausen. “Is he a blacksmith who shoes bears instead of horses?”
“He’s a bear-chaser,” explained Beelzy, “and I’m it,” he added. “That, Ma’am, is the function of a bear-shooer in the menagerie of a hotel.”
Sapphira having expressed herself as satisfied, Beelzebub continued.
“You see this here house is shut up all winter, and when everybody’s gone and left it empty the bears come down out of the mountains and use it instead of a cave. It’s more cosier and less windier than their dens. So when the last guest has gone, and all the doors are locked, and the band gone into winter quarters, down come the bears and take possession. They generally climb through some open window somewhere. They divide up all the best rooms accordin’ to their position in bear society and settle down to a regular hotel life among themselves.”
“But what do they feed upon?” asked Sapphira.
“Oh they’ll eat anything when they’re hungry,” said Beelzy. “Sofa cushions, parlor rugs, hotel registers—anything they can fasten their teeth to. Last year they came in through the cupola, burrowin’ down through the snow to get at it, and there they stayed enjoyin’ life out o’ reach o’ the wind and storm, snug’s bugs in rugs. Year before last there must ha’ been a hundred of ’em in the hotel when I got here, but one by one I got rid of ’em. Some I smoked out with some cigars Mr. Munchausen gave me the summer before; some I deceived out, gettin’ ’em to chase me through the winders, an’ then doublin’ back on my tracks an’ lockin’ ’em out. It was mighty wearin’ work.
“Last June there was twice as many. By actual tab I shooed two hundred and eight bears and a panther off into the mountains. When the last one as I thought disappeared into the woods I searched the house from top to bottom to see if there was any more to be got rid of. Every blessed one of the five hundred rooms I went through, and not a bear was left that I could see. I can tell you, I was glad, because there was a partickerly ugly run of ’em this year, an’ they gave me a pile o’ trouble. They hadn’t found much to eat in the hotel, an’ they was disappointed and cross. As a matter of fact, the only things they found in the place they could eat was a piano stool and an old hair trunk full o’ paper-covered novels, which don’t make a very hearty meal for two hundred and eight bears and a panther.”
“I should say not,” said Sapphira, “particularly if the novels were as light as most of them are nowadays.”
“I can’t say as to that,” said Beelzy. “I ain’t got time to read ’em and so I ain’t any judge. But all this time I was sufferin’ like hookey with awful spasms of whoopin’ cough. I whooped so hard once it smashed one o’ the best echoes in the place all to flinders, an’ of course that made the work twice as harder. So, naturally, when I found there warn’t another bear left in the hotel, I just threw myself down anywhere, and slept. My! how I slept. I don’t suppose anything ever slept sounder’n I did. And then it happened.”
Beelzy gave his trousers a hitch and let his voice drop to a stage whisper that lent a wondrous impressiveness to his narration.
“As I was a-layin’ there unconscious, dreamin’ of home and father, a great big black hungry bruin weighin’ six hundred and forty-three pounds, that had been hidin’ in the bread oven in the bakery, where I hadn’t thought of lookin’ for him, came saunterin’ along, hummin’ a little tune all by himself, and lickin’ his chops with delight at the idee of havin’ me raw for his dinner. I lay on unconscious of my danger, until he got right up close, an’ then I waked up, an’ openin’ my eyes saw this great black savage thing gloatin’ over me an’ tears of joy runnin’ out of his mouth as he thought of the choice meal he was about to have. He was sniffin’ my bang when I first caught sight of him.”
“Mercy!” cried Sapphira, “I should think you’d have died of fright.”
“At the first whoop Mr. Bear jumped ten feet and fell over backwards on the floor.” Chapter XII.
“I did,” said Beelzy, politely, “but I came to life again in a minute. ‘Oh Lor!’ says I, as I see how hungry he was. ‘This here’s the end o’ me;’ at which the bear looked me straight in the eye, licked his chops again, and was about to take a nibble off my right ear when ‘Whoop!’ I had a spasm of whoopin’. Well, Ma’am, I guess you know what that means. There ain’t nothin’ more uncanny, more terrifyin’ in the whole run o’ human noises, barrin’ a German Opery, than the whoop o’ the whoopin’ cough. At the first whoop Mr. Bear jumped ten feet and fell over backwards onto the floor; at the second he scrambled to his feet and put for the door, but stopped and looked around hopin’ he was mistaken, when I whooped a third time. The third did the business. That third whoop would have scared Indians. It was awful. It was like a tornado blowin’ through a fog-horn with a megaphone in front of it. When he heard that, Mr. Bear turned on all four of his heels and started on a scoot up into the woods that must have carried him ten miles before I quit coughin’.
“An’ that’s why, Ma’am, I say that when you’ve got to shoo bears for a livin’, an attack o’ whoopin’ cough is a useful thing to have around.”
Saying which, Beelzy departed to find Number 433’s left boot which he had left at Number 334’s door by some odd mistake.
“What do you think of that, Mr. Munchausen?” asked Sapphira, as Beelzy left the room.
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Munchausen, with a sigh. “I’m inclined to think that I am a trifle envious of him. The rest of us are not in his class.”
WRIGGLETTO
It was in the afternoon of a beautiful summer day, and Mr. Munchausen had come up from the simmering city of Cimmeria to spend a day or two with Diavolo and Angelica and their venerable parents. They had all had dinner, and were now out on the back piazza overlooking the magnificent river Styx, which flowed from the mountains to the sea, condescending on its way thither to look in upon countless insignificant towns which had grown up on its banks, among which was the one in which Diavolo and Angelica had been born and lived all their lives. Mr. Munchausen was lying comfortably in a hammock, collecting his thoughts.
Angelica was somewhat depressed, but Diavolo was jubilant and all because in the course of a walk they had had that morning Diavolo had killed a snake.
“It was fine sport,” said Diavolo. “He was lying there in the sun, and I took a stick and put him out of his misery in two minutes.”
Here Diavolo illustrated the process by whacking the Baron over his waist-coat with a small malacca stick he carried.
“Well, I didn’t like it,” said Angelica. “I don’t care for snakes, but somehow or other it seems to me we’d ought to have left him alone. He wasn’t hurting anybody off there. If he’d come walking on our place, that would have been one thing, but we went walking where he was, and he had as much right to take a sun-bath there as we had.”
“That’s true enough,” put in Mr. Munchausen, resolved after Diavolo’s whack, to side against him. “You’ve just about hit it, Angelica. It wasn’t polite of you in the first place, to disturb his snakeship in his nap, and having done so, I can’t see why Diavolo wanted to kill him.”
“Oh, pshaw!” said Diavolo, airily. “What’s snakes good for except to kill? I’ll kill ’em every chance I get. They aren’t any good.”
“All right,” said Mr. Munchausen, quietly. “I suppose you know all about it; but I know a thing or two about snakes myself that do not exactly agree with what you say. They are some good sometimes, and, as a matter of fact, as a general rule, they are less apt to attack you without reason than you are to attack them. A snake is rather inclined to mind its own business unless he finds it necessary to do otherwise. Occasionally too you’ll find a snake with a truly amiable character. I’ll never forget my old pet Wriggletto, for instance, and as long as I remember him I can’t help having a warm corner for snakes in my heart.”
Here Mr. Munchausen paused and puffed thoughtfully on his cigar as a far-away half-affectionate look came into his eye.
“Who was Wriggletto?” asked Diavolo, transferring a half dollar from Mr. Munchausen’s pocket to his own.
“Who was he?” cried Mr. Munchausen. “You don’t mean to say that I have never told you about Wriggletto, my pet boa-constrictor, do you?”
“You never told me,” said Angelica. “But I’m not everybody. Maybe you’ve told some other little Imps.”
“No, indeed!” said Mr. Munchausen. “You two are the only little Imps I tell stories to, and as far as I am concerned, while I admit you are not everybody you are somebody and that’s more than everybody is. Wriggletto was a boa-constrictor I once knew in South America, and he was without exception, the most remarkable bit of a serpent I ever met. Genial, kind, intelligent, grateful and useful, and, after I’d had him a year or two, wonderfully well educated. He could write with himself as well as you or I can with a pen. There’s a recommendation for you. Few men are all that—and few boa-constrictors either, as far as that goes. I admit Wriggletto was an exception to the general run of serpents, but he was all that I claim for him, nevertheless.”
“What kind of a snake did you say he was?” asked Diavolo.
“A boa-constrictor,” said Mr. Munchausen, “and I knew him from his childhood. I first encountered Wriggletto about ten miles out of Para on the river Amazon. He was being swallowed by a larger boa-constrictor, and I saved his life by catching hold of his tail and pulling him out just as the other was getting ready to give the last gulp which would have taken Wriggletto in completely, and placed him beyond all hope of ever being saved.”
“What was the other boa doing while you were saving Wriggletto?” asked Diavolo, who was fond always of hearing both sides to every question, and whose father, therefore, hoped he might some day grow up to be a great judge, or at least serve with distinction upon a jury.
“He couldn’t do anything,” returned Mr. Munchausen. “He was powerless as long as Wriggletto’s head stuck in his throat and just before I got
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