Marlow himself headed the procession in a sixty-dollar casket.
MARK TWAIN
It was in Geneva that I got my music box. Everybody orders a watch, in Geneva, and a music box. Neither of these things was a necessity to me, but I ordered both, because I did not like to seem eccentric. The watch is perfectly satisfactory, and I shall not part with it, but as soon as I shall have decided which of my enemies I hate most, and most wish to afflict, I am going to give him my music box. When I asked after the best music-box establishment, I was told to go to that of Monsieur Samuel Troll, fils, in the rue Bonivard. So I went there, and found a young Englishman on duty, to whom I stated my business. He had probably been bothered a good deal with tourists who came merely to sample his goods for curiosity’s sake, without any intention of buying; for he exhibited a most composed indifference concerning the matter in hand. He was not rude—very far from it; indeed he was endowed with an enviable stock of polite graces and affable superiorities—he was indifferent to matters of commerce, that was all; he was not indifferent to other things, such as the weather, the war-news, the opera, and so on; in fact he showed a cheery and vivacious interest in these. Consequently, while we progressed well enough, socially, we did not get along very fast, commercially. Whenever he started a music box to grinding a tune, he immediately began to hum that tune himself, and tap the time on the table, nodding his head from side to side in unison with the measure. He was at his best and happiest and gracefulest, then, and seemed born to accompany a music box. It is true that while the humming was artistic, and carefully and conscientiously done, and compelled one to observe and admire how intimately the performer knew the tune, it was in some sense an obstruction since it allured one’s attention away from the music-box’s efforts, and even made him forget that there was any music box around. It also had the effect of making one suspect that a music box bought in these circumstances might prove a disappointment when it reached home—it might have but a poor and inadequate sound, since of course it would have no hummer attached. It seemed to me wisest to quietly persist in having box after box tried, in the hope that in the end we might run across one with a hummer to it. But no, the hope was vain. We tried fifty boxes, but they were all the wretched old-fashioned tinkling kind, with here and there one freighted with a nerve-wrenching accumulation of aggravating devices—such as little bells, and gongs, and drums, and castanets, and wing-flopping, beak-stretching singing-birds—a most maddening and inhuman invention. Not even a hummer could make this sort endurable.
But at last I was reluctantly shown—in a back room, the holy of holies of the establishment,—a trunk-like box which was altogether satisfactory. It occupied that place in solitary state, and I was told it was of a sort not kept in stock, but only made to order. It had none of the customary deviltries in its composition, but simply produced the soft, long-drawn strains and richly blended chords of flutes and violins playing in concert. Moreover, it needed no hummer; the humming seemed to even mar and mutilate its gentle and tranquilizing music.
I ordered a box like that one—and it was my own fault that I never got it. I thought I had ten favorite tunes, but easily found I had only four. It took me eight months to furnish the other six. Meantime I suppose that that young man had forgotten what kind of a box I had ordered. At any rate when I at last opened the blessed thing in America, the first turn of the crank brought forth an agonizing jingle and squawk and clatter of bells, gongs, drums, and castanets, with never a solitary strain of flute or fiddle! It was like ordering a serenade of angels, and getting a shivaree in place of it. The biggest box, of this sort, in Mr. Troll’s establishment, had loosened half of my teeth with one of its mildest efforts—now here was one full four times as big, gifted with eleven times the destructive power—a machine capable of producing almost instant death. With duties, freights, and so on, it had cost me six hundred and fifty dollars—a pure waste, for I could have got a guillotine for half the money.
I did not know what to do with it. It did not seem safe to have it about the house where innocent and unsuspecting persons might meddle with it and I be held for damages on the inquest; neither would it be right to ask any storage-house to take charge of it without explaining its dangerous nature; I could not keep a policeman to watch it, for I could not afford to pay for that policeman in case he came to grief; I would not trust it in the cellar, for there was a good deal of machinery about it which nobody understood, and there was no sure thing that it would not go off of its own accord, and of course I could not collect any insurance on the damage it would do the house, for a fire-risk does not cover destruction wrought by a music box; I thought of burying it, but the sexton did not like to handle it. There was really no way out of the scrape. One neighbor took it home, at last, and put some wires to it, and started in to use it for a burglar alarm; but the first time it went off, (it was doing the Anvil Chorus,) this man, instead of rising up and killing the burglars, went quaking to them and offered them all his wealth to kill the music box.
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