From A
Tom Sawyer Companion by Mark D. Evans:
A Guilty Conscience
Tom and Huck flee into the night and take an oath "to keep
mum." They are unaware that Injun Joe has framed Potter. By the time they
learn of Joe s treachery, Potter is jailed for murder and their oath prevents
them from speaking up in his defense. To ease their consciences, the boys visit
Muffs jail window.
The boys did as they had often done before-went to the cell grating and
gave Potter some tobacco and matches . . .. His
gratitude for their gifts had always smote their consciences before-it cut
deeper than ever, this time. - Tom
Sawyer, chapter 23
As a boy, Mark Twain carried a heavy burden of guilt that resulted from
a gift of some matches. That gift, to a poor unfortunate tramp, caused him
enough anguish to supply him with material to draw upon in creating the dilemma
in which Tom finds himself: keeping a dreadful secret at the expense of the
life of an innocent man held in jail. Twain recalls his own "fearful
secret and gnawing conscience" in the following passage:
The slaughter-house is
gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and so is the small jail (or
"calaboose") which once stood in its neighborhood. A citizen asked,
"Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death
in the calaboose?"
Observe, now, how
history becomes defiled, through lapse of time and the help of the bad memories
of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in
a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion.
When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die.
The calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless,
whisky-sodden tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too
much of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp was
wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and
begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a
troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging
and annoying him. I assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made
for forbearance accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and
friendless condition, touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling
as were left in me, and I went away and got him some matches. . .. An hour or
two afterward the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by the
marshal-large name for a constable, but that was his title. At two in the
morning, the church-bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course I
with the rest. The tramp had used his matches disastrously; he had set his
straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught. When I
reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together,
transfixed with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind
the iron bars, and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood
the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and
intense was the light at his back. That marshal could not be found, and he had
the only key. A battering ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its
blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into
wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not so. The
timbers were too strong; they did not yield. It was said that the man's
death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and that in this
position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As to this, I do not
know. What was seen, after I recognized the face that was pleading through the
bars, was seen by others, not by me.
I saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward; and I believed myself as guilty of the man's death as iff had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. I had not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were found out. The happenings and the impressions of that time are burned into my memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they themselves distressed me then. If anybody spoke of that grisly matter, I was all ears in a moment, and alert to hear what might be said, for I was always dreading and expecting to find out that I was suspected; and so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks, and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye, which had no significance, but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same.
And
how sick it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly and barren of
intent, the remark that "murder will out!" For a boy of ten
years, I was carrying a pretty weighty cargo. - Life on the