Summary: Chapter 23
The Royal Nonesuch plays to a capacity audience.
The dauphin, who appears onstage wearing nothing aside from body
paint and some “wild” accoutrements, has the audience howling with
laughter. But the crowd nearly attacks the duke and the dauphin
when they end the show after only a brief performance. The people
in the crowd, embarrassed at having been ripped off, decide to protect
their honor by making certain that everyone in
the town gets ripped off. After the performance, they tell everyone
else in town that the play was wonderful. The second night, therefore,
also brings a capacity crowd.
As the duke has anticipated, the crowd on the
third night consists of the two previous nights’ audiences coming
to get their revenge. Huck and the duke make a getaway to the raft
before the show starts. They have earned $465 over
the three-night run. Jim is shocked that the royals are such “rapscallions.”
Huck explains that history shows nobles to be rapscallions who constantly
lie, steal, and decapitate, but his history knowledge is factually
very questionable.
Huck does not see the point in telling Jim that the duke
and the dauphin are fakes. Jim spends his night watches “moaning
and mourning” for his wife and two children. Though “it don’t seem natural,”
Huck concludes that Jim loves his family as much as white men love
theirs. Jim is torn apart when he hears a thud in the distance that
reminds him of the time he beat his daughter Lizabeth for not doing
what he told her to do. When he was beating her, Jim didn’t realize
that Lizabeth couldn’t hear his instructions because a bout with
scarlet fever had left her deaf.
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Summary: Chapter 24
As the duke and the dauphin tie up the raft to work over
another town, Jim complains about having to wait, frightened, in
the boat, tied up as a runaway slave in order to avoid suspicion,
while the others are gone. In response, the duke disguises Jim in
a calico stage robe and blue face paint and posts a sign on him
that reads, “Sick Arab—but harmless when not out of his head.” The
dauphin, dressed up in his newly bought clothes, decides he wants
to make a big entrance into the next town, so he and Huck board
a steamboat docked several miles above the town.
The dauphin encounters a talkative young man who tells
him about a recently deceased local man, Peter Wilks. Wilks had recently
sent for his two brothers from Sheffield, England—Harvey, whom Peter
had not seen since they were boys, and William, who is deaf and
mute. Wilks left much of his property to these brothers when he
died, but it seems uncertain whether they will ever arrive. The
dauphin wheedles the young traveler, who is en route to South America,
to provide him with details concerning the Wilks family.
Arriving in Wilks’s hometown, the duke and the dauphin
ask for Wilks and feign anguish when told of his death. The dauphin
even makes strange hand gestures to the duke, feigning sign language. The
scene is enough to make Huck “ashamed of the human race.”
