Смешные рассказы / The Funny Stories

The McWilliamses And The Burglar Alarm

The conversation went smoothly and pleasantly from weather to crops, from crops to literature, from literature to scandal, from scandal to religion; then took a random jump, and landed on the subject of burglar alarms. And now for the first time Mr. McWilliams showed feeling. Whenever I notice this sign on this man’s face, I understand it, and keep silence, and give him opportunity to unload his heart.

“I do not spend one single cent on burglar alarms, Mr. Twain – not a single cent – and I will tell you why. When we were finishing our house, we found we had a little cash left over. And Mrs. McWilliams said, let’s have a burglar alarm. I agreed. Very well: the man came up from New York and put in the alarm, and charged three hundred and twenty-five dollars for it, and said we could sleep without uneasiness now. So we did for a while – say a month. Then one night we smelled smoke, and I was told to get up and see what the matter was. I lit a candle, and went to the stairs, and met a burglar coming out of a room with a basket of tinware, which he had mistaken for solid silver in the dark.

“He was smoking a pipe. I said, ‘My friend, we do not allow smoking in this room.’ He said he was a stranger, and could not be expected to know the rules of the house. He said he had been in many houses just as good as this one, and it had never been a problem before. He added that usually such rules had never been considered to apply to burglars, anyway.

“I said: ‘Smoke along, then, if it is the custom, though I think that giving a burglar the privilege which is denied to a bishop is a sign of the looseness of the times. But what business do you have in this house, why have you entered it without ringing the burglar alarm?’

“He looked confused and ashamed, and said, with embarrassment: ‘I beg a thousand pardons. I did not know you had a burglar alarm, or I would have rung it. I beg you not to mention where my parents may hear of it, for they are old and feeble, and such a breach of the conventionalities of our Christian civilization might disappoint them and affect their health. May I trouble you for a match?’

“I said: ‘Here you are. But to return to business: how did you get in here?’

“’Through a window on the second floor.’

“It was even so. I redeemed the tinware at pawnbroker’s rates, bade the burglar good-night, closed the window after him, and retired to headquarters to report. Next morning we sent for the burglar-alarm man, and he came up and explained that the reason the alarm did not ‘go off’ was that no part of the house but the first floor was attached to the alarm. This was simply idiotic; one might as well have no armor on at all but for on his legs. The expert now put the whole second story on the alarm, charged three hundred dollars for it, and went his way. By and by, one night, I found a burglar in the third story, about to go down a ladder with a lot of miscellaneous property. My first impulse was to crack his head with a billiard cue; but I refrained, and proceeded to compromise. I redeemed the property at the familiar rates, after charging ten per cent for use of my ladder. Next day we sent down for the expert once more, and had the third story attached to the alarm, for three hundred dollars.

“By this time the ‘annunciator’ had grown to formidable dimensions. It had forty-seven tags on it, marked with the names of the various rooms and chimneys, and it occupied the space of an ordinary wardrobe. The gong was the size of a washbowl, and was placed above the head of our bed. There was a wire from the house to the coachman’s room in the stable, and a noble gong alongside his pillow.

“We should have been comfortable now but for one defect. Every morning at five the cook opened the kitchen door, and rip went that gong! The first time this happened I thought the last day had come. I didn’t think it in bed – no, but out of it – for the first effect of that frightful gong is to hurl you across the house, and slam you against the wall, and then curl you up like a spider on a stove lid, till somebody closes the kitchen door. Well, this catastrophe happened every morning regularly at five o’clock, and lost us three hours sleep.

“Well, we were gradually fading toward a better land, on account of the daily loss of sleep; so we finally had the expert up again. He ran a wire to the outside of the door, and placed a switch there, where Thomas, the butler, always made one little mistake – he switched the alarm off at night when he went to bed, and switched it on again at daybreak in the morning, just in time for the cook to open the kitchen door, and let that gong slam us across the house, sometimes breaking a window with one or the other of us. At the end of a week we recognized that this switch business was a snare. We also discovered that a band of burglars had been living in the house the whole time – not to steal, for there wasn’t much left now, but to hide from the police. They decided that the detectives would never think of a tribe of burglars taking sanctuary in a house notoriously protected by the most elaborate burglar alarm in America.

“Sent down for the expert again, and this time he struck a most dazzling idea – he fixed the thing so that opening the kitchen door would take off the alarm. It was a noble idea, and he charged accordingly. But you already foresee the result. I switched on the alarm every night at bed-time, no longer trusting on Thomas’s memory; and as soon as the lights were out the burglars walked in at the kitchen door, thus taking the alarm off without waiting for the cook to do it in the morning. For months we couldn’t have any company. Not a spare bed in the house; all occupied by burglars.

“Finally, I got up a cure of my own. The expert answered the call, and ran another wire to the stable, and established a switch there, so that the coachman could put on and take off the alarm. That worked first rate, and we even got to inviting company once more and enjoying life.