Chapters from My Autobiography
by Mark Twain · English · Gutenberg #19987 · 627,634 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Chapters from My Autobiography
Author: Mark Twain
Release date: December 1, 2006 [eBook #19987]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY ***
Produced by Betsie Bush, Chuck Greif, Martin Pettit, John
Greenman, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DXCVIII.
SEPTEMBER 7, 1906
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--I.[1]
BY MARK TWAIN.
PREFATORY NOTE.--Mr. Clemens began to write his autobiography many
years ago, and he continues to add to it day by day. It was his
original intention to permit no publication of his memoirs until
after his death; but, after leaving "Pier No. 70," he concluded
that a considerable portion might now suitably be given to the
public. It is that portion, garnered from the quarter-million of
words already written, which will appear in this REVIEW during the
coming year. No part of the autobiography will be published in book
form during the lifetime of the author.--EDITOR N. A. R.
INTRODUCTION.
I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future
autobiographies when it is published, after my death, and I also intend
that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its
form and method--a form and method whereby the past and the present are
constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire
up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel. Moreover,
this autobiography of mine does not select from my life its showy
episodes, but deals mainly in the common experiences which go to make up
the life of the average human being, because these episodes are of a
sort which he is familiar with in his own life, and in which he sees his
own life reflected and set down in print. The usual, conventional
autobiographer seems to particularly hunt out those occasions in his
career when he came into contact with celebrated persons, whereas his
contacts with the uncelebrated were just as interesting to him, and
would be to his reader, and were vastly more numerous than his
collisions with the famous.
Howells was here yesterday afternoon, and I told him the whole scheme of
this autobiography and its apparently systemless system--only apparently
systemless, for it is not really that. It is a deliberate system, and
the law of the system is that I shall talk about the matter which for
the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else
the moment its interest for me is exhausted. It is a system which
follows no charted course and is not going to follow any such course. It
is a system which is a complete and purposed jumble--a course which
begins nowhere, follows no specified route, and can never reach an end
while I am alive, for the reason that, if I should talk to the
stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never
be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me
in my lifetime. I told Howells that this autobiography of mine would
live a couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take
a fresh start and live the rest of the time.
He said he believed it would, and asked me if I meant to make a library
of it.
I said that that was my design; but that, if I should live long enough,
the set of volumes could not be contained merely in a city, it would
require a State, and that there would not be any multi-billionaire
alive, perhaps, at any time during its existence who would be able to
buy a full set, except on the instalment plan.
Howells applauded, and was full of praises and endorsement, which was
wise in him and judicious. If he had manifested a different spirit, I
would have thrown him out of the window. I like criticism, but it must
be my way.
I.
Back of the Virginia Clemenses is a dim procession of ancestors
stretching back to Noah's time. According to tradition, some of them
were pirates and slavers in Elizabeth's time. But this is no discredit
to them, for so were Drake and Hawkins and the others. It was a
respectable trade, then, and monarchs were partners in it. In my time I
have had desires to be a pirate myself. The reader--if he will look deep
down in his secret heart, will find--but never mind what he will find
there; I am not writing his Autobiography, but mine. Later, according to
tradition, one of the procession was Ambassador to Spain in the time of
James I, or of Charles I, and married there and sent down a strain of
Spanish blood to warm us up. Also, according to tradition, this one or
another--Geoffrey Clement, by name--helped to sentence Charles to death.
I have not examined into these traditions myself, partly because I was
indolent, and partly because I was so busy polishing up this end of the
line and trying to make it showy; but the other Clemenses claim that
they have made the examination and that it stood the test. Therefore I
have always taken for granted that I did help Charles out of his
troubles, by ancestral proxy. My instincts have persuaded me, too.
Whenever we have a strong and persistent and ineradicable instinct, we
may be sure that it is not original with us, but inherited--inherited
from away back, and hardened and perfected by the petrifying influence
of time. Now I have been always and unchangingly bitter against Charles,
and I am quite certain that this feeling trickled down to me through the
veins of my forebears from the heart of that judge; for it is not my
disposition to be bitter against people on my own personal account I am
not bitter against Jeffreys. I ought to be, but I am not. It indicates
that my ancestors of James II's time were indifferent to him; I do not
know why; I never could make it out; but that is what it indicates. And
I have always felt friendly toward Satan. Of course that is ancestral;
it must be in the blood, for I could not have originated it.
... And so, by the testimony of instinct, backed by the assertions of
Clemenses who said they had examined the records, I have always been
obliged to believe that Geoffrey Clement the martyr-maker was an
ancestor of mine, and to regard him with favor, and in fact pride. This
has not had a good effect upon me, for it has made me vain, and that is
a fault. It has made me set myself above people who were less fortunate
in their ancestry than I, and has moved me to take them down a peg, upon
occasion, and say things to them which hurt them before company.
A case of the kind happened in Berlin several years ago. William Walter
Phelps was our Minister at the Emperor's Court, then, and one evening he
had me to dinner to meet Count S., a cabinet minister. This nobleman was
of long and illustrious descent. Of course I wanted to let out the fact
that I had some ancestors, too; but I did not want to pull them out of
their graves by the ears, and I never could seem to get the chance to
work them in in a way that would look sufficiently casual. I suppose
Phelps was in the same difficulty. In fact he looked distraught, now and
then--just as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by
accident, and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough.
But at last, after dinner, he made a try. He took us about his
drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a rude
and ancient engraving. It was a picture of the court that tried Charles
I. There was a pyramid of judges in Puritan slouch hats, and below them
three bare-headed secretaries seated at a table. Mr. Phelps put his
finger upon one of the three, and said with exulting indifference--
"An ancestor of mine."
I put my finger on a judge, and retorted with scathing languidness--
"Ancestor of mine. But it is a small matter. I have others."
It was not noble in me to do it. I have always regretted it since. But
it landed him. I wonder how he felt? However, it made no difference in
our friendship, which shows that he was fine and high, notwithstanding
the humbleness of his origin. And it was also creditable in me, too,
that I could overlook it. I made no change in my bearing toward him, but
always treated him as an equal.
But it was a hard night for me in one way. Mr. Phelps thought I was the
guest of honor, and so did Count S.; but I didn't, for there was nothing
in my invitation to indicate it. It was just a friendly offhand note, on
a card. By the time dinner was announced Phelps was himself in a state
of doubt. Something had to be done; and it was not a handy time for
explanations. He tried to get me to go out with him, but I held back;
then he tried S., and he also declined. There was another guest, but
there was no trouble about him. We finally went out in a pile. There was
a decorous plunge for seats, and I got the one at Mr. Phelps's left, the
Count captured the one facing Phelps, and the other guest had to take
the place of honor, since he could not help himself. We returned to the
drawing-room in the original disorder. I had new shoes on, and they were
tight. At eleven I was privately crying; I couldn't help it, the pain
was so cruel. Conversation had been dead for an hour. S. had been due at
the bedside of a dying official ever since half past nine. At last we
all rose by one blessed impulse and went down to the street door without
explanations--in a pile, and no precedence; and so, parted.
The evening had its defects; still, I got my ancestor in, and was
satisfied.
Among the Virginian Clemenses were Jere. (already mentioned), and
Sherrard. Jere. Clemens had a wide reputation as a good pistol-shot, and
once it enabled him to get on the friendly side of some drummers when
they wouldn't have paid any attention to mere smooth words and
arguments. He was out stumping the State at the time. The drummers were
grouped in front of the stand, and had been hired by the opposition to
drum while he made his speech. When he was ready to begin, he got out
his revolver and laid it before him, and said in his soft, silky way--
"I do not wish to hurt anybody, and shall try not to; but I have got
just a bullet apiece for those six drums, and if you should want to play
on them, don't stand behind them."
Sherrard Clemens was a Republican Congressman from West Virginia in the
war days, and then went out to St. Louis, where the James Clemens branch
lived, and still lives, and there he became a warm rebel. This was after
the war. At the time that he was a Republican I was a rebel; but by the
time he had become a rebel I was become (temporarily) a Republican. The
Clemenses have always done the best they could to keep the political
balances level, no matter how much it might inconvenience them. I did
not know what had become of Sherrard Clemens; but once I introduced
Senator Hawley to a Republican mass meeting in New England, and then I
got a bitter letter from Sherrard from St. Louis. He said that the
Republicans of the North--no, the "mudsills of the North"--had swept
away the old aristocracy of the South with fire and sword, and it ill
became me, an aristocrat by blood, to train with that kind of swine. Did
I forget that I was a Lambton?
That was a reference to my mother's side of the house. As I have already
said, she was a Lambton--Lambton with a p, for some of the American
Lamptons could not spell very well in early times, and so the name
suffered at their hands. She was a native of Kentucky, and married my
father in Lexington in 1823, when she was twenty years old and he
twenty-four. Neither of them had an overplus of property. She brought
him two or three negroes, but nothing else, I think. They removed to the
remote and secluded village of Jamestown, in the mountain solitudes of
east Tennessee. There their first crop of children was born, but as I
was of a later vintage I do not remember anything about it. I was
postponed--postponed to Missouri. Missouri was an unknown new State and
needed attractions.
I think that my eldest brother, Orion, my sisters Pamela and Margaret,
and my brother Benjamin were born in Jamestown. There may have been
others, but as to that I am not sure. It was a great lift for that
little village to have my parents come there. It was hoped that they
would stay, so that it would become a city. It was supposed that they
would stay. And so there was a boom; but by and by they went away, and
prices went down, and it was many years before Jamestown got another
start. I have written about Jamestown in the "Gilded Age," a book of
mine, but it was from hearsay, not from personal knowledge. My father
left a fine estate behind him in the region round about
Jamestown--75,000 acres.[2] When he died in 1847 he had owned it about
twenty years. The taxes were almost nothing (five dollars a year for the
whole), and he had always paid them regularly and kept his title
perfect. He had always said that the land would not become valuable in
his time, but that it would be a commodious provision for his children
some day. It contained coal, copper, iron and timber, and he said that
in the course of time railways would pierce to that region, and then the
property would be property in fact as well as in name. It also produced
a wild grape of a promising sort. He had sent some samples to Nicholas
Longworth, of Cincinnati, to get his judgment upon them, and Mr.
Longworth had said that they would make as good wine as his Catawbas.
The land contained all these riches; and also oil, but my father did not
know that, and of course in those early days he would have cared nothing
about it if he had known it. The oil was not discovered until about
1895. I wish I owned a couple of acres of the land now. In which case I
would not be writing Autobiographies for a living. My father's dying
charge was, "Cling to the land and wait; let nothing beguile it away
from you." My mother's favorite cousin, James Lampton, who figures in
the "Gilded Age" as "Colonel Sellers," always said of that land--and
said it with blazing enthusiasm, too,--"There's millions in
it--millions!" It is true that he always said that about everything--and
was always mistaken, too; but this time he was right; which shows that a
man who goes around with a prophecy-gun ought never to get discouraged;
if he will keep up his heart and fire at everything he sees, he is bound
to hit something by and by.
Many persons regarded "Colonel Sellers" as a fiction, an invention, an
extravagant impossibility, and did me the honor to call him a
"creation"; but they were mistaken. I merely put him on paper as he was;
he was not a person who could be exaggerated. The incidents which looked
most extravagant, both in the book and on the stage, were not inventions
of mine but were facts of his life; and I was present when they were
developed. John T. Raymond's audiences used to come near to dying with
laughter over the turnip-eating scene; but, extravagant as the scene
was, it was faithful to the facts, in all its absurd details. The thing
happened in Lampton's own house, and I was present. In fact I was myself
the guest who ate the turnips. In the hands of a great actor that
piteous scene would have dimmed any manly spectator's eyes with tears,
and racked his ribs apart with laughter at the same time. But Raymond
was great in humorous portrayal only. In that he was superb, he was
wonderful--in a word, great; in all things else he was a pigmy of the
pigmies.
The real Colonel Sellers, as I knew him in James Lampton, was a pathetic
and beautiful spirit, a manly man, a straight and honorable man, a man
with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man born to be
loved; and he was loved by all his friends, and by his family
worshipped. It is the right word. To them he was but little less than a
god. The real Colonel Sellers was never on the stage. Only half of him
was there. Raymond could not play the other half of him; it was above
his level. That half was made up of qualities of which Raymond was
wholly destitute. For Raymond was not a manly man, he was not an
honorable man nor an honest one, he was empty and selfish and vulgar and
ignorant and silly, and there was a vacancy in him where his heart
should have been. There was only one man who could have played the whole
of Colonel Sellers, and that was Frank Mayo.[3]
It is a world of surprises. They fall, too, where one is least expecting
them. When I introduced Sellers into the book, Charles Dudley Warner,
who was writing the story with me, proposed a change of Seller's
Christian name. Ten years before, in a remote corner of the West, he had
come across a man named Eschol Sellers, and he thought that Eschol was
just the right and fitting name for our Sellers, since it was odd and
quaint and all that. I liked the idea, but I said that that man might
turn up and object. But Warner said it couldn't happen; that he was
doubtless dead by this time, a man with a name like that couldn't live
long; and be he dead or alive we must have the name, it was exactly the
right one and we couldn't do without it. So the change was made.
Warner's man was a farmer in a cheap and humble way. When the book had
been out a week, a college-bred gentleman of courtly manners and ducal
upholstery arrived in Hartford in a sultry state of mind and with a
libel suit in his eye, and _his_ name was Eschol Sellers! He had never
heard of the other one, and had never been within a thousand miles of
him. This damaged aristocrat's programme was quite definite and
businesslike: the American Publishing Company must suppress the edition
as far as printed, and change the name in the plates, or stand a suit
for $10,000. He carried away the Company's promise and many apologies,
and we changed the name back to Colonel Mulberry Sellers, in the plates.
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen. Even the existence of
two unrelated men wearing the impossible name of Eschol Sellers is a
possible thing.
James Lampton floated, all his days, in a tinted mist of magnificent
dreams, and died at last without seeing one of them realized. I saw him
last in 1884, when it had been twenty-six years since I ate the basin of
raw turnips and washed them down with a bucket of water in his house. He
was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old
breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail
wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart,
the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all
there; and before I could turn around he was polishing up his Aladdin's
lamp and flashing the secret riches of the world before me. I said to
myself, "I did not overdraw him by a shade, I set him down as he was;
and he is the same man to-day. Cable will recognize him." I asked him to
excuse me a moment, and ran into the next room, which was Cable's; Cable
and I were stumping the Union on a reading tour. I said--
"I am going to leave your door open, so that you can listen. There is a
man in there who is interesting."
I went back and asked Lampton what he was doing now. He began to tell me
of a "small venture" he had begun in New Mexico through his son; "only a
little thing--a mere trifle--partly to amuse my leisure, partly to keep
my capital from lying idle, but mainly to develop the boy--develop the
boy; fortune's wheel is ever revolving, he may have to work for his
living some day--as strange things have happened in this world. But it's
only a little thing--a mere trifle, as I said."
And so it was--as he began it. But under his deft hands it grew, and
blossomed, and spread--oh, beyond imagination. At the end of half an
hour he finished; finished with the remark, uttered in an adorably
languid manner:
"Yes, it is but a trifle, as things go nowadays--a bagatelle--but
amusing. It passes the time. The boy thinks great things of it, but he
is young, you know, and imaginative; lacks the experience which comes of
handling large affairs, and which tempers the fancy and perfects the
judgment. I suppose there's a couple of millions in it, possibly three,
but not more, I think; still, for a boy, you know, just starting in
life, it is not bad. I should not want him to make a fortune--let that
come later. It could turn his head, at his time of life, and in many
ways be a damage to him."
Then he said something about his having left his pocketbook lying on the
table in the main drawing-room at home, and about its being after
banking hours, now, and--
I stopped him, there, and begged him to honor Cable and me by being our
guest at the lecture--with as many friends as might be willing to do us
the like honor. He accepted. And he thanked me as a prince might who
had granted us a grace. The reason I stopped his speech about the
tickets was because I saw that he was going to ask me to furnish them to
him and let him pay next day; and I knew that if he made the debt he
would pay it if he had to pawn his clothes. After a little further chat
he shook hands heartily and affectionately, and took his leave. Cable
put his head in at the door, and said--
"That was Colonel Sellers."
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.
[2] Correction. 1906: it was above 100,000, it appears.
[3] Raymond was playing "Colonel Sellers" in 1876 and along there. About
twenty years later Mayo dramatized "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and played the
title role delightfully.
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DXCIX.
SEPTEMBER 21, 1906.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--II.
BY MARK TWAIN.
II.
My experiences as an author began early in 1867. I came to New York from
San Francisco in the first month of that year and presently Charles H.
Webb, whom I had known in San Francisco as a reporter on _The Bulletin_,
and afterward editor of _The Californian_, suggested that I publish a
volume of sketches. I had but a slender reputation to publish it on, but
I was charmed and excited by the suggestion and quite willing to venture
it if some industrious person would save me the trouble of gathering the
sketches together. I was loath to do it myself, for from the beginning
of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where
the industry ought to be. ("Ought to was" is better, perhaps, though
the most of the authorities differ as to this.)
Webb said I had some reputation in the Atlantic States, but I knew quite
well that it must be of a very attenuated sort. What there was of it
rested upon the story of "The Jumping Frog." When Artemus Ward passed
through California on a lecturing tour, in 1865 or '66, I told him the
"Jumping Frog" story, in San Francisco, and he asked me to write it out
and send it to his publisher, Carleton, in New York, to be used in
padding out a small book which Artemus had prepared for the press and
which needed some more stuffing to make it big enough for the price
which was to be charged for it.
It reached Carleton in time, but he didn't think much of it, and was not
willing to go to the typesetting expense of adding it to the book. He
did not put it in the waste-basket, but made Henry Clapp a present of
it, and Clapp used it to help out the funeral of his dying literary
journal, _The Saturday Press_. "The Jumping Frog" appeared in the last
number of that paper, was the most joyous feature of the obsequies, and
was at once copied in the newspapers of America and England. It
certainly had a wide celebrity, and it still had it at the time that I
am speaking of--but I was aware that it was only the frog that was
celebrated. It wasn't I. I was still an obscurity.
Webb undertook to collate the sketches. He performed this office, then
handed the result to me, and I went to Carleton's establishment with it.
I approached a clerk and he bent eagerly over the counter to inquire
into my needs; but when he found that I had come to sell a book and not
to buy one, his temperature fell sixty degrees, and the old-gold
intrenchments in the roof of my mouth contracted three-quarters of an
inch and my teeth fell out. I meekly asked the privilege of a word with
Mr. Carleton, and was coldly informed that he was in his private office.
Discouragements and difficulties followed, but after a while I got by
the frontier and entered the holy of holies. Ah, now I remember how I
managed it! Webb had made an appointment for me with Carleton; otherwise
I never should have gotten over that frontier. Carleton rose and said
brusquely and aggressively,
"Well, what can I do for you?"
I reminded him that I was there by appointment to offer him my book for
publication. He began to swell, and went on swelling and swelling and
swelling until he had reached the dimensions of a god of about the
second or third degree. Then the fountains of his great deep were broken
up, and for two or three minutes I couldn't see him for the rain. It was
words, only words, but they fell so densely that they darkened the
atmosphere. Finally he made an imposing sweep with his right hand, which
comprehended the whole room and said,
"Books--look at those shelves! Every one of them is loaded with books
that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I
don't. Good morning."
Twenty-one years elapsed before I saw Carleton again. I was then
sojourning with my family at the Schweitzerhof, in Luzerne. He called on
me, shook hands cordially, and said at once, without any preliminaries,
"I am substantially an obscure person, but I have at least one
distinction to my credit of such colossal dimensions that it entitles me
to immortality--to wit: I refused a book of yours, and for this I stand
without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century."
It was a most handsome apology, and I told him so, and said it was a
long-delayed revenge but was sweeter to me than any other that could be
devised; that during the lapsed twenty-one years I had in fancy taken
his life several times every year, and always in new and increasingly
cruel and inhuman ways, but that now I was pacified, appeased, happy,
even jubilant; and that thenceforth I should hold him my true and valued
friend and never kill him again.
I reported my adventure to Webb, and he bravely said that not all the
Carletons in the universe should defeat that book; he would publish it
himself on a ten per cent. royalty. And so he did. He brought it out in
blue and gold, and made a very pretty little book of it, I think he
named it "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other
Sketches," price $1.25. He made the plates and printed and bound the
book through a job-printing house, and published it through the American
News Company.
In June I sailed in the _Quaker City_ Excursion. I returned in November,
and in Washington found a letter from Elisha Bliss, of the American
Publishing Company of Hartford, offering me five per cent. royalty on a
book which should recount the adventures of the Excursion. In lieu of
the royalty, I was offered the alternative of ten thousand dollars cash
upon delivery of the manuscript. I consulted A. D. Richardson and he
said "take the royalty." I followed his advice and closed with Bliss. By
my contract I was to deliver the manuscript in July of 1868. I wrote the
book in San Francisco and delivered the manuscript within contract time.
Bliss provided a multitude of illustrations for the book, and then
stopped work on it. The contract date for the issue went by, and there
was no explanation of this. Time drifted along and still there was no
explanation. I was lecturing all over the country; and about thirty
times a day, on an average, I was trying to answer this conundrum:
"When is your book coming out?"
I got tired of inventing new answers to that question, and by and by I
got horribly tired of the question itself. Whoever asked it became my
enemy at once, and I was usually almost eager to make that appear.
As soon as I was free of the lecture-field I hastened to Hartford to
make inquiries. Bliss said that the fault was not his; that he wanted to
publish the book but the directors of his Company were staid old fossils
and were afraid of it. They had examined the book, and the majority of
them were of the opinion that there were places in it of a humorous
character. Bliss said the house had never published a book that had a
suspicion like that attaching to it, and that the directors were afraid
that a departure of this kind would seriously injure the house's
reputation; that he was tied hand and foot, and was not permitted to
carry out his contract. One of the directors, a Mr. Drake--at least he
was the remains of what had once been a Mr. Drake--invited me to take a
ride with him in his buggy, and I went along. He was a pathetic old
relic, and his ways and his talk were also pathetic. He had a delicate
purpose in view and it took him some time to hearten himself
sufficiently to carry it out, but at last he accomplished it. He
explained the house's difficulty and distress, as Bliss had already
explained it. Then he frankly threw himself and the house upon my mercy
and begged me to take away "The Innocents Abroad" and release the
concern from the contract. I said I wouldn't--and so ended the interview
and the buggy excursion. Then I warned Bliss that he must get to work or
I should make trouble. He acted upon the warning, and set up the book
and I read the proofs. Then there was another long wait and no
explanation. At last toward the end of July (1869, I think), I lost
patience and telegraphed Bliss that if the book was not on sale in
twenty-four hours I should bring suit for damages.
That ended the trouble. Half a dozen copies were bound and placed on
sale within the required time. Then the canvassing began, and went
briskly forward. In nine months the book took the publishing house out
of debt, advanced its stock from twenty-five to two hundred, and left
seventy thousand dollars profit to the good. It was Bliss that told me
this--but if it was true, it was the first time that he had told the
truth in sixty-five years. He was born in 1804.
III.
... This was in 1849. I was fourteen years old, then. We were still
living in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, in the
new "frame" house built by my father five years before. That is, some of
us lived in the new part, the rest in the old part back of it--the "L."
In the autumn my sister gave a party, and invited all the marriageable
young people of the village. I was too young for this society, and was
too bashful to mingle with young ladies, anyway, therefore I was not
invited--at least not for the whole evening. Ten minutes of it was to be
my whole share. I was to do the part of a bear in a small fairy play. I
was to be disguised all over in a close-fitting brown hairy stuff proper
for a bear. About half past ten I was told to go to my room and put on
this disguise, and be ready in half an hour. I started, but changed my
mind; for I wanted to practise a little, and that room was very small. I
crossed over to the large unoccupied house on the corner of Main and
Hill streets,[4] unaware that a dozen of the young people were also
going there to dress for their parts. I took the little black slave boy,
Sandy, with me, and we selected a roomy and empty chamber on the second
floor. We entered it talking, and this gave a couple of half-dressed
young ladies an opportunity to take refuge behind a screen undiscovered.
Their gowns and things were hanging on hooks behind the door, but I did
not see them; it was Sandy that shut the door, but all his heart was in
the theatricals, and he was as unlikely to notice them as I was myself.
That was a rickety screen, with many holes in it, but as I did not know
there were girls behind it, I was not disturbed by that detail. If I had
known, I could not have undressed in the flood of cruel moonlight that
was pouring in at the curtainless windows; I should have died of shame.
Untroubled by apprehensions, I stripped to the skin and began my
practice. I was full of ambition; I was determined to make a hit; I was
burning to establish a reputation as a bear and get further engagements;
so I threw myself into my work with an abandon that promised great
things. I capered back and forth from one end of the room to the other
on all fours, Sandy applauding with enthusiasm; I walked upright and
growled and snapped and snarled; I stood on my head, I flung
handsprings, I danced a lubberly dance with my paws bent and my
imaginary snout sniffing from side to side; I did everything a bear
could do, and many things which no bear could ever do and no bear with
any dignity would want to do, anyway; and of course I never suspected
that I was making a spectacle of myself to any one but Sandy. At last,
standing on my head, I paused in that attitude to take a minute's rest.
There was a moment's silence, then Sandy spoke up with excited interest
and said--
"Marse Sam, has you ever seen a smoked herring?"
"No. What is that?"
"It's a fish."
"Well, what of it? Anything peculiar about it?"
"Yes, suh, you bet you dey is. _Dey eats 'em guts and all!_"
There was a smothered burst of feminine snickers from behind the screen!
All the strength went out of me and I toppled forward like an undermined
tower and brought the screen down with my weight, burying the young
ladies under it. In their fright they discharged a couple of piercing
screams--and possibly others, but I did not wait to count. I snatched my
clothes and fled to the dark hall below, Sandy following. I was dressed
in half a minute, and out the back way. I swore Sandy to eternal
silence, then we went away and hid until the party was over. The
ambition was all out of me. I could not have faced that giddy company
after my adventure, for there would be two performers there who knew my
secret, and would be privately laughing at me all the time. I was
searched for but not found, and the bear had to be played by a young
gentleman in his civilized clothes. The house was still and everybody
asleep when I finally ventured home. I was very heavy-hearted, and full
of a sense of disgrace. Pinned to my pillow I found a slip of paper
which bore a line that did not lighten my heart, but only made my face
burn. It was written in a laboriously disguised hand, and these were its
mocking terms:
"You probably couldn't have played _bear_, but you played _bare_ very
well--oh, very very well!"
We think boys are rude, unsensitive animals, but it is not so in all
cases. Each boy has one or two sensitive spots, and if you can find out
where they are located you have only to touch them and you can scorch
him as with fire. I suffered miserably over that episode. I expected
that the facts would be all over the village in the morning, but it was
not so. The secret remained confined to the two girls and Sandy and me.
That was some appeasement of my pain, but it was far from
sufficient--the main trouble remained: I was under four mocking eyes,
and it might as well have been a thousand, for I suspected all girls'
eyes of being the ones I so dreaded. During several weeks I could not
look any young lady in the face; I dropped my eyes in confusion when any
one of them smiled upon me and gave me greeting; and I said to myself,
"_That is one of them_," and got quickly away. Of course I was meeting
the right girls everywhere, but if they ever let slip any betraying sign
I was not bright enough to catch it. When I left Hannibal four years
later, the secret was still a secret; I had never guessed those girls
out, and was no longer expecting to do it. Nor wanting to, either.
One of the dearest and prettiest girls in the village at the time of my
mishap was one whom I will call Mary Wilson, because that was not her
name. She was twenty years old; she was dainty and sweet, peach-bloomy
and exquisite, gracious and lovely in character, and I stood in awe of
her, for she seemed to me to be made out of angel-clay and rightfully
unapproachable by an unholy ordinary kind of a boy like me. I probably
never suspected her. But--
The scene changes. To Calcutta--forty-seven years later. It was in 1896.
I arrived there on my lecturing trip. As I entered the hotel a divine
vision passed out of it, clothed in the glory of the Indian
sunshine--the Mary Wilson of my long-vanished boyhood! It was a
startling thing. Before I could recover from the bewildering shock and
speak to her she was gone. I thought maybe I had seen an apparition, but
it was not so, she was flesh. She was the granddaughter of the other
Mary, the original Mary. That Mary, now a widow, was up-stairs, and
presently sent for me. She was old and gray-haired, but she looked young
and was very handsome. We sat down and talked. We steeped our thirsty
souls in the reviving wine of the past, the beautiful past, the dear and
lamented past; we uttered the names that had been silent upon our lips
for fifty years, and it was as if they were made of music; with reverent
hands we unburied our dead, the mates of our youth, and caressed them
with our speech; we searched the dusty chambers of our memories and
dragged forth incident after incident, episode after episode, folly
after folly, and laughed such good laughs over them, with the tears
running down; and finally Mary said suddenly, and without any leading
up--
"Tell me! What is the special peculiarity of smoked herrings?"
It seemed a strange question at such a hallowed time as this. And so
inconsequential, too. I was a little shocked. And yet I was aware of a
stir of some kind away back in the deeps of my memory somewhere. It set
me to musing--thinking--searching. Smoked herrings. Smoked herrings. The
peculiarity of smo.... I glanced up. Her face was grave, but there was a
dim and shadowy twinkle in her eye which--All of a sudden I knew! and
far away down in the hoary past I heard a remembered voice murmur, "Dey
eats 'em guts and all!"
"At--last! I've found one of you, anyway! Who was the other girl?"
But she drew the line there. She wouldn't tell me.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] That house still stands.
IV.
... But it was on a bench in Washington Square that I saw the most of
Louis Stevenson. It was an outing that lasted an hour or more, and was
very pleasant and sociable. I had come with him from his house, where I
had been paying my respects to his family. His business in the Square
was to absorb the sunshine. He was most scantily furnished with flesh,
his clothes seemed to fall into hollows as if there might be nothing
inside but the frame for a sculptor's statue. His long face and lank
hair and dark complexion and musing and melancholy expression seemed to
fit these details justly and harmoniously, and the altogether of it
seemed especially planned to gather the rays of your observation and
focalize them upon Stevenson's special distinction and commanding
feature, his splendid eyes. They burned with a smouldering rich fire
under the penthouse of his brows, and they made him beautiful.
* * * * *
I said I thought he was right about the others, but mistaken as to Bret
Harte; in substance I said that Harte was good company and a thin but
pleasant talker; that he was always bright, but never brilliant; that in
this matter he must not be classed with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, nor must
any other man, ancient or modern; that Aldrich was always witty, always
brilliant, if there was anybody present capable of striking his flint at
the right angle; that Aldrich was as sure and prompt and unfailing as
the red-hot iron on the blacksmith's anvil--you had only to hit it
competently to make it deliver an explosion of sparks. I added--
"Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and
humorous sayings. None has equalled him, certainly none has surpassed
him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed these children of
his fancy. Aldrich was always brilliant, he couldn't help it, he is a
fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is not speaking, you
know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and glimmering around in him;
when he speaks the diamonds flash. Yes, he was always brilliant, he will
always be brilliant; he will be brilliant in hell--you will see."
Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, "I hope not."
"Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a
transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset."
* * * * *
There on that bench we struck out a new phrase--one or the other of us,
I don't remember which--"submerged renown." Variations were discussed:
"submerged fame," "submerged reputation," and so on, and a choice was
made; "submerged renown" was elected, I believe. This important matter
rose out of an incident which had been happening to Stevenson in Albany.
While in a book-shop or book-stall there he had noticed a long rank of
small books, cheaply but neatly gotten up, and bearing such titles as
"Davis's Selected Speeches," "Davis's Selected Poetry," Davis's this and
Davis's that and Davis's the other thing; compilations, every one of
them, each with a brief, compact, intelligent and useful introductory
chapter by this same Davis, whose first name I have forgotten. Stevenson
had begun the matter with this question:
"Can you name the American author whose fame and acceptance stretch
widest in the States?"
I thought I could, but it did not seem to me that it would be modest to
speak out, in the circumstances. So I diffidently said nothing.
Stevenson noticed, and said--
"Save your delicacy for another time--you are not the one. For a
shilling you can't name the American author of widest note and
popularity in the States. But I can."
Then he went on and told about that Albany incident. He had inquired of
the shopman--
"Who is this Davis?"
The answer was--
"An author whose books have to have freight-trains to carry them, not
baskets. Apparently you have not heard of him?"
Stevenson said no, this was the first time. The man said--
"Nobody has heard of Davis: you may ask all around and you will see. You
never see his name mentioned in print, not even in advertisement; these
things are of no use to Davis, not any more than they are to the wind
and the sea. You never see one of Davis's books floating on top of the
United States, but put on your diving armor and get yourself lowered
away down and down and down till you strike the dense region, the
sunless region of eternal drudgery and starvation wages--there you'll
find them by the million. The man that gets that market, his fortune is
made, his bread and butter are safe, for those people will never go back
on him. An author may have a reputation which is confined to the
surface, and lose it and become pitied, then despised, then forgotten,
entirely forgotten--the frequent steps in a surface reputation. At
surface reputation, however great, is always mortal, and always killable
if you go at it right--with pins and needles, and quiet slow poison, not
with the club and tomahawk. But it is a different matter with the
submerged reputation--down in the deep water; once a favorite there,
always a favorite; once beloved, always beloved; once respected, always
respected, honored, and believed in. For, what the reviewer says never
finds its way down into those placid deeps; nor the newspaper sneers,
nor any breath of the winds of slander blowing above. Down there they
never hear of these things. Their idol may be painted clay, up then at
the surface, and fade and waste and crumble and blow away, there being
much weather there; but down below he is gold and adamant and
indestructible."
V.
This is from this morning's paper:
MARK TWAIN LETTER SOLD.
_Written to Thomas Nast, it Proposed a Joint Tour._
A Mark Twain autograph letter brought $43 yesterday at the auction
by the Merwin-Clayton Company of the library and correspondence of
the late Thomas Nast, cartoonist. The letter is nine pages
note-paper, is dated Hartford, Nov. 12, 1877, and it addressed to
Nast. It reads in part as follows:
Hartford, _Nov. 12_.
MY DEAR NAST: I did not think I should ever stand on a platform
again until the time was come for me to say I die innocent. But the
same old offers keep arriving that have arriven every year, and
been every year declined--$500 for Louisville, $500 for St. Louis,
$1,000 gold for two nights in Toronto, half gross proceeds for New
York, Boston, Brooklyn, &c. I have declined them all just as usual,
though sorely tempted as usual.
Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, but
because (1) travelling alone is so heart-breakingly dreary, and (2)
shouldering the whole show is such cheer-killing responsibility.
Therefore I now propose to you what you proposed to me in November,
1867--ten years ago, (when I was unknown,) viz.; That you should
stand on the platform and make pictures, and I stand by you and
blackguard the audience. I should enormously enjoy meandering
around (to big towns--don't want to go to little ones) with you for
company.
The letter includes a schedule of cities and the number of
appearances planned for each.
This is as it should be. This is worthy of all praise. I say it myself
lest other competent persons should forget to do it. It appears that
four of my ancient letters were sold at auction, three of them at
twenty-seven dollars, twenty-eight dollars, and twenty-nine dollars
respectively, and the one above mentioned at forty-three dollars. There
is one very gratifying circumstance about this, to wit: that my
literature has more than held its own as regards money value through
this stretch of thirty-six years. I judge that the forty-three-dollar
letter must have gone at about ten cents a word, whereas if I had
written it to-day its market rate would be thirty cents--so I have
increased in value two or three hundred per cent. I note another
gratifying circumstance--that a letter of General Grant's sold at
something short of eighteen dollars. I can't rise to General Grant's
lofty place in the estimation of this nation, but it is a deep happiness
to me to know that when it comes to epistolary literature he can't sit
in the front seat along with me.
This reminds me--nine years ago, when we were living in Tedworth Square,
London, a report was cabled to the American journals that I was dying. I
was not the one. It was another Clemens, a cousin of mine,--Dr. J. Ross
Clemens, now of St. Louis--who was due to die but presently escaped, by
some chicanery or other characteristic of the tribe of Clemens. The
London representatives of the American papers began to flock in, with
American cables in their hands, to inquire into my condition. There was
nothing the matter with me, and each in his turn was astonished, and
disappointed, to find me reading and smoking in my study and worth next
to nothing as a text for transatlantic news. One of these men was a
gentle and kindly and grave and sympathetic Irishman, who hid his sorrow
the best he could, and tried to look glad, and told me that his paper,
the _Evening Sun_, had cabled him that it was reported in New York that
I was dead. What should he cable in reply? I said--
"Say the report is greatly exaggerated."
He never smiled, but went solemnly away and sent the cable in those
words. The remark hit the world pleasantly, and to this day it keeps
turning up, now and then, in the newspapers when people have occasion to
discount exaggerations.
The next man was also an Irishman. He had his New York cablegram in his
hand--from the New York _World_--and he was so evidently trying to get
around that cable with invented softnesses and palliations that my
curiosity was aroused and I wanted to see what it did really say. So
when occasion offered I slipped it out of his hand. It said,
"If Mark Twain dying send five hundred words. If dead send a thousand."
Now that old letter of mine sold yesterday for forty-three dollars. When
I am dead it will be worth eighty-six.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DC.
OCTOBER 5, 1906.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--III.
BY MARK TWAIN.
VI.
To-morrow will be the thirty-sixth anniversary of our marriage. My wife
passed from this life one year and eight months ago, in Florence, Italy,
after an unbroken illness of twenty-two months' duration.
I saw her first in the form of an ivory miniature in her brother
Charley's stateroom in the steamer "Quaker City," in the Bay of Smyrna,
in the summer of 1867, when she was in her twenty-second year. I saw her
in the flesh for the first time in New York in the following December.
She was slender and beautiful and girlish--and she was both girl and
woman. She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life.
Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of
sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless
affection. She was _always_ frail in body, and she lived upon her
spirit, whose hopefulness and courage were indestructible. Perfect
truth, perfect honesty, perfect candor, were qualities of her character
which were born with her. Her judgments of people and things were sure
and accurate. Her intuitions almost never deceived her. In her judgments
of the characters and acts of both friends and strangers, there was
always room for charity, and this charity never failed. I have compared
and contrasted her with hundreds of persons, and my conviction remains
that hers was the most perfect character I have ever met. And I may add
that she was the most winningly dignified person I have ever known. Her
character and disposition were of the sort that not only invites
worship, but commands it. No servant ever left her service who deserved
to remain in it. And, as she could choose with a glance of her eye, the
servants she selected did in almost all cases deserve to remain, and
they _did_ remain. She was always cheerful; and she was always able to
communicate her cheerfulness to others. During the nine years that we
spent in poverty and debt, she was always able to reason me out of my
despairs, and find a bright side to the clouds, and make me see it. In
all that time, I never knew her to utter a word of regret concerning our
altered circumstances, nor did I ever know her children to do the like.
For she had taught them, and they drew their fortitude from her. The
love which she bestowed upon those whom she loved took the form of
worship, and in that form it was returned--returned by relatives,
friends and the servants of her household. It was a strange combination
which wrought into one individual, so to speak, by marriage--her
disposition and character and mine. She poured out her prodigal
affections in kisses and caresses, and in a vocabulary of endearments
whose profusion was always an astonishment to me. I was born _reserved_
as to endearments of speech and caresses, and hers broke upon me as the
summer waves break upon Gibraltar. I was reared in that atmosphere of
reserve. As I have already said, in another chapter, I never knew a
member of my father's family to kiss another member of it except once,
and that at a death-bed. And our village was not a kissing community.
The kissing and caressing ended with courtship--along with the deadly
piano-playing of that day.
She had the heart-free laugh of a girl. It came seldom, but when it
broke upon the ear it was as inspiring as music. I heard it for the last
time when she had been occupying her sickbed for more than a year, and I
made a written note of it at the time--a note not to be repeated.
To-morrow will be the thirty-sixth anniversary. We were married in her
father's house in Elmira, New York, and went next day, by special train,
to Buffalo, along with the whole Langdon family, and with the Beechers
and the Twichells, who had solemnized the marriage. We were to live in
Buffalo, where I was to be one of the editors of the Buffalo "Express,"
and a part owner of the paper. I knew nothing about Buffalo, but I had
made my household arrangements there through a friend, by letter. I had
instructed him to find a boarding-house of as respectable a character as
my light salary as editor would command. We were received at about nine
o'clock at the station in Buffalo, and were put into several sleighs and
driven all over America, as it seemed to me--for, apparently, we turned
all the corners in the town and followed all the streets there were--I
scolding freely, and characterizing that friend of mine in very
uncomplimentary words for securing a boarding-house that apparently had
no definite locality. But there was a conspiracy--and my bride knew of
it, but I was in ignorance. Her father, Jervis Langdon, had bought and
furnished a new house for us in the fashionable street, Delaware Avenue,
and had laid in a cook and housemaids, and a brisk and electric young
coachman, an Irishman, Patrick McAleer--and we were being driven all
over that city in order that one sleighful of those people could have
time to go to the house, and see that the gas was lighted all over it,
and a hot supper prepared for the crowd. We arrived at last, and when I
entered that fairy place my indignation reached high-water mark, and
without any reserve I delivered my opinion to that friend of mine for
being so stupid as to put us into a boarding-house whose terms would be
far out of my reach. Then Mr. Langdon brought forward a very pretty box
and opened it, and took from it a deed of the house. So the comedy ended
very pleasantly, and we sat down to supper.
The company departed about midnight, and left us alone in our new
quarters. Then Ellen, the cook, came in to get orders for the morning's
marketing--and neither of us knew whether beefsteak was sold by the
barrel or by the yard. We exposed our ignorance, and Ellen was fall of
Irish delight over it. Patrick McAleer, that brisk young Irishman, came
in to get his orders for next day--and that was our first glimpse of
him....
Our first child, Langdon Clemens, was born the 7th of November, 1870,
and lived twenty-two months. Susy was born the 19th of March, 1872, and
passed from life in the Hartford home, the 18th of August, 1896. With
her, when the end came, were Jean and Katy Leary, and John and Ellen
(the gardener and his wife). Clara and her mother and I arrived in
England from around the world on the 31st of July, and took a house in
Guildford. A week later, when Susy, Katy and Jean should have been
arriving from America, we got a letter instead.
It explained that Susy was slightly ill--nothing of consequence. But we
were disquieted, and began to cable for later news. This was Friday. All
day no answer--and the ship to leave Southampton next day, at noon.
Clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in case the news should
be bad. Finally came a cablegram saying, "Wait for cablegram in the
morning." This was not satisfactory--not reassuring. I cabled again,
asking that the answer be sent to Southampton, for the day was now
closing. I waited in the post-office that night till the doors were
closed, toward midnight, in the hope that good news might still come,
but there was no message. We sat silent at home till one in the morning,
waiting--waiting for we knew not what. Then we took the earliest morning
train, and when we reached Southampton the message was there. It said
the recovery would be long, but certain. This was a great relief to me,
but not to my wife. She was frightened. She and Clara went aboard the
steamer at once and sailed for America, to nurse Susy. I remained behind
to search for a larger house in Guildford.
That was the 15th of August, 1896. Three days later, when my wife and
Clara were about half-way across the ocean, I was standing in our
dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put
into my hand. It said, "Susy was peacefully released to-day."
It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can
receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable
explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock, and but
gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their
fall import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast
loss--that is all. It will take mind and memory months, and possibly
years, to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole
extent of the loss. A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage
represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and
pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he
misses this, then that, then the other thing. And, when he casts about
for it, he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an
_essential_--there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It
was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. He did not realize that it
was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds
himself balked, hampered, by its absence. It will be years before the
tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know
the magnitude of his disaster.
The 18th of August brought me the awful tidings. The mother and the
sister were out there in mid-Atlantic, ignorant of what was happening;
flying to meet this incredible calamity. All that could be done to
protect them from the full force of the shock was done by relatives and
good friends. They went down the Bay and met the ship at night, but did
not show themselves until morning, and then only to Clara. When she
returned to the stateroom she did not speak, and did not need to. Her
mother looked at her and said:
"Susy is dead."
At half past ten o'clock that night, Clara and her mother completed
their circuit of the globe, and drew up at Elmira by the same train and
in the same car which had borne them and me Westward from it one year,
one month, and one week before. And again Susy was there--not waving her
welcome in the glare of the lights, as she had waved her farewell to us
thirteen months before, but lying white and fair in her coffin, in the
house where she was born.
The last thirteen days of Susy's life were spent in our own house in
Hartford, the home of her childhood, and always the dearest place in the
earth to her. About her she had faithful old friends--her pastor, Mr.
Twichell, who had known her from the cradle, and who had come a long
journey to be with her; her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Crane;
Patrick, the coachman; Katy, who had begun to serve us when Susy was a
child of eight years; John and Ellen, who had been with us many years.
Also Jean was there.
At the hour when my wife and Clara set sail for America, Susy was in no
danger. Three hours later there came a sudden change for the worse.
Meningitis set in, and it was immediately apparent that she was
death-struck. That was Saturday, the 15th of August.
"That evening she took food for the last time," (Jean's letter to me).
The next morning the brain-fever was raging. She walked the floor a
little in her pain and delirium, then succumbed to weakness and returned
to her bed. Previously she had found hanging in a closet a gown which
she had seen her mother wear. She thought it was her mother, dead, and
she kissed it, and cried. About noon she became blind (an effect of the
disease) and bewailed it to her uncle.
From Jean's letter I take this sentence, which needs no comment:
"About one in the afternoon Susy spoke for the last time."
It was only one word that she said when she spoke that last time, and it
told of her longing. She groped with her hands and found Katy, and
caressed her face, and said "Mamma."
How gracious it was that, in that forlorn hour of wreck and ruin, with
the night of death closing around her, she should have been granted that
beautiful illusion--that the latest vision which rested upon the clouded
mirror of her mind should have been the vision of her mother, and the
latest emotion she should know in life the joy and peace of that dear
imagined presence.
About two o'clock she composed herself as if for sleep, and never moved
again. She fell into unconsciousness and so remained two days and five
hours, until Tuesday evening at seven minutes past seven, when the
release came. She was twenty-four years and five months old.
On the 23d, her mother and her sisters saw her laid to rest--she that
had been our wonder and our worship.
In one of her own books I find some verses which I will copy here.
Apparently, she always put borrowed matter in quotation marks. These
verses lack those marks, and therefore I take them to be her own:
Love came at dawn, when all the world was fair,
When crimson glories' bloom and sun were rife;
Love came at dawn, when hope's wings fanned the air,
And murmured, "I am life."
Love came at eve, and when the day was done,
When heart and brain were tired, and slumber pressed;
Love came at eve, shut out the sinking sun,
And whispered, "I am rest."
The summer seasons of Susy's childhood were spent at Quarry Farm, on the
hills east of Elmira, New York; the other seasons of the year at the
home in Hartford. Like other children, she was blithe and happy, fond of
play; unlike the average of children, she was at times much given to
retiring within herself, and trying to search out the hidden meanings of
the deep things that make the puzzle and pathos of human existence, and
in all the ages have baffled the inquirer and mocked him. As a little
child aged seven, she was oppressed and perplexed by the maddening
repetition of the stock incidents of our race's fleeting sojourn here,
just as the same thing has oppressed and perplexed maturer minds from
the beginning of time. A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat
and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble
for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them;
infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and
their vanities; those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life
is turned to aching grief. The burden of pain, care, misery, grows
heavier year by year; at length, ambition is dead, pride is dead; vanity
is dead; longing for release is in their place. It comes at last--the
only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them--and they vanish from a
world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing;
where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; there they
have left no sign that they have existed--a world which will lament them
a day and forget them forever. Then another myriad takes their place,
and copies all they did, and goes along the same profitless road, and
vanishes as they vanished--to make room for another, and another, and a
million other myriads, to follow the same arid path through the same
desert, and accomplish what the first myriad, and all the myriads that
came after it, accomplished--nothing!
"Mamma, what is it all for?" asked Susy, preliminarily stating the
above details in her own halting language, after long brooding over them
alone in the privacy of the nursery.
A year later, she was groping her way alone through another sunless bog,
but this time she reached a rest for her feet. For a week, her mother
had not been able to go to the nursery, evenings, at the child's prayer
hour. She spoke of it--was sorry for it, and said she would come
to-night, and hoped she could continue to come every night and hear Susy
pray, as before. Noticing that the child wished to respond, but was
evidently troubled as to how to word her answer, she asked what the
difficulty was. Susy explained that Miss Foote (the governess) had been
teaching her about the Indians and their religious beliefs, whereby it
appeared that they had not only a God, but several. This had set Susy to
thinking. As a result of this thinking, she had stopped praying. She
qualified this statement--that is, she modified it--saying she did not
now pray "in the same way" as she had formerly done. Her mother said:
"Tell me about it, dear."
"Well, mamma, the Indians believed they knew, but now we know they were
wrong. By and by, it can turn out that we are wrong. So now I only pray
that there may be a God and a Heaven--or something better."
I wrote down this pathetic prayer in its precise wording, at the time,
in a record which we kept of the children's sayings, and my reverence
for it has grown with the years that have passed over my head since
then. Its untaught grace and simplicity are a child's, but the wisdom
and the pathos of it are of all the ages that have come and gone since
the race of man has lived, and longed, and hoped, and feared, and
doubted.
To go back a year--Susy aged seven. Several times her mother said to
her:
"There, there, Susy, you mustn't cry over little things."
This furnished Susy a text for thought She had been breaking her heart
over what had seemed vast disasters--a broken toy; a picnic cancelled by
thunder and lightning and rain; the mouse that was growing tame and
friendly in the nursery caught and killed by the cat--and now came this
strange revelation. For some unaccountable reason, these were not vast
calamities. Why? How is the size of calamities measured? What is the
rule? There must be some way to tell the great ones from the small
ones; what is the law of these proportions? She examined the problem
earnestly and long. She gave it her best thought from time to time, for
two or three days--but it baffled her--defeated her. And at last she
gave up and went to her mother for help.
"Mamma, what is '_little_ things'?"
It seemed a simple question--at first. And yet, before the answer could
be put into words, unsuspected and unforeseen difficulties began to
appear. They increased; they multiplied; they brought about another
defeat. The effort to explain came to a standstill. Then Susy tried to
help her mother out--with an instance, an example, an illustration. The
mother was getting ready to go down-town, and one of her errands was to
buy a long-promised toy-watch for Susy.
"If you forgot the watch, mamma, would that be a little thing?"
She was not concerned about the watch, for she knew it would not be
forgotten. What she was hoping for was that the answer would unriddle
the riddle, and bring rest and peace to her perplexed little mind.
The hope was disappointed, of course--for the reason that the size of a
misfortune is not determinate by an outsider's measurement of it, but
only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected
by it. The king's lost crown is a vast matter to the king, but of no
consequence to the child. The lost toy is a great matter to the child,
but in the king's eyes it is not a thing to break the heart about. A
verdict was reached, but it was based upon the above model, and Susy was
granted leave to measure her disasters thereafter with her own
tape-line.
As a child, Susy had a passionate temper; and it cost her much remorse
and many tears before she learned to govern it, but after that it was a
wholesome salt, and her character was the stronger and healthier for its
presence. It enabled her to be good with dignity; it preserved her not
only from being good for vanity's sake, but from even the appearance of
it. In looking back over the long vanished years, it seems but natural
and excusable that I should dwell with longing affection and preference
upon incidents of her young life which made it beautiful to us, and that
I should let its few small offences go unsummoned and unreproached.
In the summer of 1880, when Susy was just eight years of age, the
family were at Quarry Farm, as usual at that season of the year.
Hay-cutting time was approaching, and Susy and Clara were counting the
hours, for the time was big with a great event for them; they had been
promised that they might mount the wagon and ride home from the fields
on the summit of the hay mountain. This perilous privilege, so dear to
their age and species, had never been granted them before. Their
excitement had no bounds. They could talk of nothing but this
epoch-making adventure, now. But misfortune overtook Susy on the very
morning of the important day. In a sudden outbreak of passion, she
corrected Clara--with a shovel, or stick, or something of the sort. At
any rate, the offence committed was of a gravity clearly beyond the
limit allowed in the nursery. In accordance with the rule and custom of
the house, Susy went to her mother to confess, and to help decide upon
the size and character of the punishment due. It was quite understood
that, as a punishment could have but one rational object and
function--to act as a reminder, and warn the transgressor against
transgressing in the same way again--the children would know about as
well as any how to choose a penalty which would be rememberable and
effective. Susy and her mother discussed various punishments, but none
of them seemed adequate. This fault was an unusually serious one, and
required the setting up of a danger-signal in the memory that would not
blow out nor burn out, but remain a fixture there and furnish its saving
warning indefinitely. Among the punishments mentioned was deprivation of
the hay-wagon ride. It was noticeable that this one hit Susy hard.
Finally, in the summing up, the mother named over the list and asked:
"Which one do you think it ought to be, Susy?"
Susy studied, shrank from her duty, and asked:
"Which do you think, mamma?"
"Well, Susy, I would rather leave it to you. _You_ make the choice
yourself."
It cost Susy a struggle, and much and deep thinking and weighing--but
she came out where any one who knew her could have foretold she would.
"Well, mamma, I'll make it the hay-wagon, because you know the other
things might not make me remember not to do it again, but if I don't get
to ride on the hay-wagon I can remember it easily."
In this world the real penalty, the sharp one, the lasting one, never
falls otherwise than on the wrong person. It was not _I_ that corrected
Clara, but the remembrance of poor Susy's lost hay-ride still brings
_me_ a pang--after twenty-six years.
Apparently, Susy was born with humane feelings for the animals, and
compassion for their troubles. This enabled her to see a new point in an
old story, once, when she was only six years old--a point which had been
overlooked by older, and perhaps duller, people for many ages. Her
mother told her the moving story of the sale of Joseph by his brethren,
the staining of his coat with the blood of the slaughtered kid, and the
rest of it. She dwelt upon the inhumanity of the brothers; their cruelty
toward their helpless young brother; and the unbrotherly treachery which
they practised upon him; for she hoped to teach the child a lesson in
gentle pity and mercifulness which she would remember. Apparently, her
desire was accomplished, for the tears came into Susy's eyes and she was
deeply moved. Then she said:
"Poor little kid!"
A child's frank envy of the privileges and distinctions of its elders is
often a delicately flattering attention and the reverse of unwelcome,
but sometimes the envy is not placed where the beneficiary is expecting
it to be placed. Once, when Susy was seven, she sat breathlessly
absorbed in watching a guest of ours adorn herself for a ball. The lady
was charmed by this homage; this mute and gentle admiration; and was
happy in it. And when her pretty labors were finished, and she stood at
last perfect, unimprovable, clothed like Solomon in all his glory, she
paused, confident and expectant, to receive from Susy's tongue the
tribute that was burning in her eyes. Susy drew an envious little sigh
and said:
"I wish _I_ could have crooked teeth and spectacles!"
Once, when Susy was six months along in her eighth year, she did
something one day in the presence of company, which subjected her to
criticism and reproof. Afterward, when she was alone with her mother, as
was her custom she reflected a little while over the matter. Then she
set up what I think--and what the shade of Burns would think--was a
quite good philosophical defence.
"Well, mamma, you know I didn't see myself, and so I couldn't know how
it looked."
In homes where the near friends and visitors are mainly literary
people--lawyers, judges, professors and clergymen--the children's ears
become early familiarized with wide vocabularies. It is natural for them
to pick up any words that fall in their way; it is natural for them to
pick up big and little ones indiscriminately; it is natural for them to
use without fear any word that comes to their net, no matter how
formidable it may be as to size. As a result, their talk is a curious
and funny musketry clatter of little words, interrupted at intervals by
the heavy artillery crash of a word of such imposing sound and size that
it seems to shake the ground and rattle the windows. Sometimes the child
gets a wrong idea of a word which it has picked up by chance, and
attaches to it a meaning which impairs its usefulness--but this does not
happen as often as one might expect it would. Indeed, it happens with an
infrequency which may be regarded as remarkable. As a child, Susy had
good fortune with her large words, and she employed many of them. She
made no more than her fair share of mistakes. Once when she thought
something very funny was going to happen (but it didn't), she was racked
and torn with laughter, by anticipation. But, apparently, she still felt
sure of her position, for she said, "If it had happened, I should have
been transformed [transported] with glee."
And earlier, when she was a little maid of five years, she informed a
visitor that she had been in a church only once, and that was the time
when Clara was "crucified" [christened]....
In Heidelberg, when Susy was six, she noticed that the Schloss gardens
were populous with snails creeping all about everywhere. One day she
found a new dish on her table and inquired concerning it, and learned
that it was made of snails. She was awed and impressed, and said:
"Wild ones, mamma?"
She was thoughtful and considerate of others--an acquired quality, no
doubt. No one seems to be born with it. One hot day, at home in
Hartford, when she was a little child, her mother borrowed her fan
several times (a Japanese one, value five cents), refreshed herself with
it a moment or two, then handed it back with a word of thanks. Susy knew
her mother would use the fan all the time if she could do it without
putting a deprivation upon its owner. She also knew that her mother
could not be persuaded to do that. A relief most be devised somehow;
Susy devised it. She got five cents out of her money-box and carried it
to Patrick, and asked him to take it down-town (a mile and a half) and
buy a Japanese fan and bring it home. He did it--and thus thoughtfully
and delicately was the exigency met and the mother's comfort secured. It
is to the child's credit that she did not save herself expense by
bringing down another and more costly kind of fan from up-stairs, but
was content to act upon the impression that her mother desired the
Japanese kind--content to accomplish the desire and stop with that,
without troubling about the wisdom or unwisdom of it.
Sometimes, while she was still a child, her speech fell into quaint and
strikingly expressive forms. Once--aged nine or ten--she came to her
mother's room, when her sister Jean was a baby, and said Jean was crying
in the nursery, and asked if she might ring for the nurse. Her mother
asked:
"Is she crying hard?"--meaning cross, ugly.
"Well, no, mamma. It is a weary, lonesome cry."
It is a pleasure to me to recall various incidents which reveal the
delicacies of feeling that were so considerable a part of her budding
character. Such a revelation came once in a way which, while creditable
to her heart, was defective in another direction. She was in her
eleventh year then. Her mother had been making the Christmas purchases,
and she allowed Susy to see the presents which were for Patrick's
children. Among these was a handsome sled for Jimmy, on which a stag was
painted; also, in gilt capitals, the word "Deer." Susy was excited and
joyous over everything, until she came to this sled. Then she became
sober and silent--yet the sled was the choicest of all the gifts. Her
mother was surprised, and also disappointed, and said:
"Why, Susy, doesn't it please you? Isn't it fine?"
Susy hesitated, and it was plain that she did not want to say the thing
that was in her mind. However, being urged, she brought it haltingly
out:
"Well, mamma, it _is_ fine, and of course it _did_ cost a good
deal--but--but--why should that be mentioned?"
Seeing that she was not understood, she reluctantly pointed to that word
"Deer." It was her orthography that was at fault, not her heart. She had
inherited both from her mother.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCI.
OCTOBER 19, 1906.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--IV.
BY MARK TWAIN.
When Susy was thirteen, and was a slender little maid with plaited tails
of copper-tinged brown hair down her back, and was perhaps the busiest
bee in the household hive, by reason of the manifold studies, health
exercises and recreations she had to attend to, she secretly, and of her
own motion, and out of love, added another task to her labors--the
writing of a biography of me. She did this work in her bedroom at night,
and kept her record hidden. After a little, the mother discovered it and
filched it, and let me see it; then told Susy what she had done, and how
pleased I was, and how proud. I remember that time with a deep
pleasure. I had had compliments before, but none that touched me like
this; none that could approach it for value in my eyes. It has kept that
place always since. I have had no compliment, no praise, no tribute from
any source, that was so precious to me as this one was and still is. As
I read it _now_, after all these many years, it is still a king's
message to me, and brings me the same dear surprise it brought me
then--with the pathos added, of the thought that the eager and hasty
hand that sketched it and scrawled it will not touch mine again--and I
feel as the humble and unexpectant must feel when their eyes fall upon
the edict that raises them to the ranks of the noble.
Yesterday while I was rummaging in a pile of ancient note-books of mine
which I had not seen for years, I came across a reference to that
biography. It is quite evident that several times, at breakfast and
dinner, in those long-past days, I was posing for the biography. In
fact, I clearly remember that I _was_ doing that--and I also remember
that Susy detected it. I remember saying a very smart thing, with a good
deal of an air, at the breakfast-table one morning, and that Susy
observed to her mother privately, a little later, that papa was doing
that for the biography.
I cannot bring myself to change any line or word in Susy's sketch of me,
but will introduce passages from it now and then just as they came in
their quaint simplicity out of her honest heart, which was the beautiful
heart of a child. What comes from that source has a charm and grace of
its own which may transgress all the recognized laws of literature, if
it choose, and yet be literature still, and worthy of hospitality. I
shall print the whole of this little biography, before I have done with
it--every word, every sentence.
The spelling is frequently desperate, but it was Susy's, and it shall
stand. I love it, and cannot profane it. To me, it is gold. To correct
it would alloy it, not refine it. It would spoil it. It would take from
it its freedom and flexibility and make it stiff and formal. Even when
it is most extravagant I am not shocked. It is Susy's spelling, and she
was doing the best she could--and nothing could better it for me....
Susy began the biography in 1885, when I was in the fiftieth year of my
age, and she just entering the fourteenth of hers. She begins in this
way:
We are a very happy family. We consist of Papa, Mamma, Jean, Clara
and me. It is papa I am writing about, and I shall have no trouble
in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a _very_ striking
character.
But wait a minute--I will return to Susy presently.
In the matter of slavish imitation, man is the monkey's superior all the
time. The average man is destitute of independence of opinion. He is not
interested in contriving an opinion of his own, by study and reflection,
but is only anxious to find out what his neighbor's opinion is and
slavishly adopt it. A generation ago, I found out that the latest review
of a book was pretty sure to be just a reflection of the _earliest_
review of it; that whatever the first reviewer found to praise or
censure in the book would be repeated in the latest reviewer's report,
with nothing fresh added. Therefore more than once I took the precaution
of sending my book, in manuscript, to Mr. Howells, when he was editor of
the "Atlantic Monthly," so that he could prepare a review of it at
leisure. I knew he would say the truth about the book--I also knew that
he would find more merit than demerit in it, because I already knew that
that was the condition of the book. I allowed no copy of it to go out to
the press until after Mr. Howells's notice of it had appeared. That book
was always safe. There wasn't a man behind a pen in all America that had
the courage to find anything in the book which Mr. Howells had not
found--there wasn't a man behind a pen in America that had spirit enough
to say a brave and original thing about the book on his own
responsibility.
I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama,
is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real
value--certainly no large value. When Charles Dudley Warner and I were
about to bring out "The Gilded Age," the editor of the "Daily Graphic"
persuaded me to let him have an advance copy, he giving me his word of
honor that no notice of it would appear in his paper until after the
"Atlantic Monthly" notice should have appeared. This reptile published a
review of the book within three days afterward. I could not really
complain, because he had only given me his word of honor as security; I
ought to have required of him something substantial. I believe his
notice did not deal mainly with the merit of the book, or the lack of
it, but with my moral attitude toward the public. It was charged that I
had used my reputation to play a swindle upon the public; that Mr.
Warner had written as much as half of the book, and that I had used my
name to float it and give it currency; a currency--so the critic
averred--which it could not have acquired without my name, and that this
conduct of mine was a grave fraud upon the people. The "Graphic" was not
an authority upon any subject whatever. It had a sort of distinction, in
that it was the first and only illustrated daily newspaper that the
world had seen; but it was without character; it was poorly and cheaply
edited; its opinion of a book or of any other work of art was of no
consequence. Everybody knew this, yet all the critics in America, one
after the other, copied the "Graphic's" criticism, merely changing the
phraseology, and left me under that charge of dishonest conduct. Even
the great Chicago "Tribune," the most important journal in the Middle
West, was not able to invent anything fresh, but adopted the view of the
humble "Daily Graphic," dishonesty-charge and all.
However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and
missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the
burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself.
But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a
crime, and I am not unused to that.
What I have been travelling toward all this time is this: the first
critic that ever had occasion to describe my personal appearance
littered his description with foolish and inexcusable errors whose
aggregate furnished the result that I was distinctly and distressingly
unhandsome. That description floated around the country in the papers,
and was in constant use and wear for a quarter of a century. It seems
strange to me that apparently no critic in the country could be found
who could look at me and have the courage to take up his pen and destroy
that lie. That lie began its course on the Pacific coast, in 1864, and
it likened me in personal appearance to Petroleum V. Nasby, who had been
out there lecturing. For twenty-five years afterward, no critic could
furnish a description of me without fetching in Nasby to help out my
portrait. I knew Nasby well, and he was a good fellow, but in my life I
have not felt malignant enough about any more than three persons to
charge those persons with resembling Nasby. It hurts me to the heart. I
was always handsome. Anybody but a critic could have seen it. And it
had long been a distress to my family--including Susy--that the critics
should go on making this wearisome mistake, year after year, when there
was no foundation for it. Even when a critic wanted to be particularly
friendly and complimentary to me, he didn't dare to go beyond my
clothes. He never ventured beyond that old safe frontier. When he had
finished with my clothes he had said all the kind things, the pleasant
things, the complimentary things he could risk. Then he dropped back on
Nasby.
Yesterday I found this clipping in the pocket of one of those ancient
memorandum-books of mine. It is of the date of thirty-nine years ago,
and both the paper and the ink are yellow with the bitterness that I
felt in that old day when I clipped it out to preserve it and brood over
it, and grieve about it. I will copy it here, to wit:
A correspondent of the Philadelphia "Press," writing of one of
Schuyler Colfax's receptions, says of our Washington correspondent:
"Mark Twain, the delicate humorist, was present: quite a lion, as
he deserves to be. Mark is a bachelor, faultless in taste, whose
snowy vest is suggestive of endless quarrels with Washington
washerwomen; but the heroism of Mark is settled for all time, for
such purity and smoothness were never seen before. His lavender
gloves might have been stolen from some Turkish harem, so delicate
were they in size; but more likely--anything else were more likely
than that. In form and feature he bears some resemblance to the
immortal Nasby; but whilst Petroleum is brunette to the core, Twain
is golden, amber-hued, melting, blonde."
Let us return to Susy's biography now, and get the opinion of one who is
unbiassed:
_From Susy's Biography._
Papa's appearance has been described many times, but very
incorrectly. He has beautiful gray hair, not any too thick or any
too long, but just right; a Roman nose, which greatly improves the
beauty of his features; kind blue eyes and a small mustache. He has
a wonderfully shaped head and profile. He has a very good
figure--in short, he is an extrodinarily fine looking man. All his
features are perfect, except that he hasn't extrodinary teeth. His
complexion is very fair, and he doesn't ware a beard. He is a very
good man and a very funny one. He _has_ got a temper, but we all of
us have in this family. He is the loveliest man I ever saw or ever
hope to see--and oh, so absent-minded. He does tell perfectly
delightful stories. Clara and I used to sit on each arm of his
chair and listen while he told us stories about the pictures on the
wall.
I remember the story-telling days vividly. They were a difficult and
exacting audience--those little creatures.
Along one side of the library, in the Hartford home, the bookshelves
joined the mantelpiece--in fact there were shelves on both sides of the
mantelpiece. On these shelves, and on the mantelpiece, stood various
ornaments. At one end of the procession was a framed oil-painting of a
cat's head, at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl,
life-size--called Emmeline, because she looked just about like that--an
impressionist water-color. Between the one picture and the other there
were twelve or fifteen of the bric-à-brac things already mentioned; also
an oil-painting by Elihu Vedder, "The Young Medusa." Every now and then
the children required me to construct a romance--always impromptu--not a
moment's preparation permitted--and into that romance I had to get all
that bric-à-brac and the three pictures. I had to start always with the
cat and finish with Emmeline. I was never allowed the refreshment of a
change, end-for-end. It was not permissible to introduce a bric-à-brac
ornament into the story out of its place in the procession.
These bric-à-bracs were never allowed a peaceful day, a reposeful day, a
restful Sabbath. In their lives there was no Sabbath, in their lives
there was no peace; they knew no existence but a monotonous career of
violence and bloodshed. In the course of time, the bric-à-brac and the
pictures showed wear. It was because they had had so many and such
tumultuous adventures in their romantic careers.
As romancer to the children I had a hard time, even from the beginning.
If they brought me a picture, in a magazine, and required me to build a
story to it, they would cover the rest of the page with their pudgy
hands to keep me from stealing an idea from it. The stories had to come
hot from the bat, always. They had to be absolutely original and fresh.
Sometimes the children furnished me simply a character or two, or a
dozen, and required me to start out at once on that slim basis and
deliver those characters up to a vigorous and entertaining life of
crime. If they heard of a new trade, or an unfamiliar animal, or
anything like that, I was pretty sure to have to deal with those things
in the next romance. Once Clara required me to build a sudden tale out
of a plumber and a "bawgunstrictor," and I had to do it. She didn't
know what a boa-constrictor was, until he developed in the tale--then
she was better satisfied with it than ever.
_From Susy's Biography._
Papa's favorite game is billiards, and when he is tired and wishes
to rest himself he stays up all night and plays billiards, it seems
to rest his head. He smokes a great deal almost incessantly. He has
the mind of an author exactly, some of the simplest things he cant
understand. Our burglar-alarm is often out of order, and papa had
been obliged to take the mahogany-room off from the alarm
altogether for a time, because the burglar-alarm had been in the
habit of ringing even when the mahogany-room was closed. At length
he thought that perhaps the burglar-alarm might be in order, and he
decided to try and see; accordingly he put it on and then went down
and opened the window; consequently the alarm bell rang, it would
even if the alarm had been in order. Papa went despairingly
upstairs and said to mamma, "Livy the mahogany-room won't go on. I
have just opened the window to see."
"Why, Youth," mamma replied "if you've opened the window, why of
coarse the alarm will ring!"
"That's what I've opened it for, why I just went down to see if it
would ring!"
Mamma tried to explain to papa that when he wanted to go and see
whether the alarm would ring while the window was closed he
_mustn't_ go and open the window--but in vain, papa couldn't
understand, and got very impatient with mamma for trying to make
him believe an impossible thing true.
This is a frank biographer, and an honest one; she uses no sand-paper on
me. I have, to this day, the same dull head in the matter of conundrums
and perplexities which Susy had discovered in those long-gone days.
Complexities annoy me; they irritate me; then this progressive feeling
presently warms into anger. I cannot get far in the reading of the
commonest and simplest contract--with its "parties of the first part,"
and "parties of the second part," and "parties of the third
part,"--before my temper is all gone. Ashcroft comes up here every day
and pathetically tries to make me understand the points of the lawsuit
which we are conducting against Henry Butters, Harold Wheeler, and the
rest of those Plasmon buccaneers, but daily he has to give it up. It is
pitiful to see, when he bends his earnest and appealing eyes upon me and
says, after one of his efforts, "Now you _do_ understand _that_, don't
you?"
I am always obliged to say, "I _don't_, Ashcroft. I wish I could
understand it, but I don't. Send for the cat."
In the days which Susy is talking about, a perplexity fell to my lot one
day. F. G. Whitmore was my business agent, and he brought me out from
town in his buggy. We drove by the _porte-cochère_ and toward the
stable. Now this was a _single_ road, and was like a spoon whose handle
stretched from the gate to a great round flower-bed in the neighborhood
of the stable. At the approach to the flower-bed the road divided and
circumnavigated it, making a loop, which I have likened to the bowl of
the spoon. As we neared the loop, I saw that Whitmore was laying his
course to port, (I was sitting on the starboard side--the side the house
was on), and was going to start around that spoon-bowl on that left-hand
side. I said,
"Don't do that, Whitmore; take the right-hand side. Then I shall be next
to the house when we get to the door."
He said, "_That_ will not happen in _any case_, it doesn't make any
difference which way I go around this flower-bed."
I explained to him that he was an ass, but he stuck to his proposition,
and I said,
"Go on and try it, and see."
He went on and tried it, and sure enough he fetched me up at the door on
the very side that he had said I would be. I was not able to believe it
then, and I don't believe it yet.
I said, "Whitmore, that is merely an accident. You can't do it again."
He said he could--and he drove down into the street, fetched around,
came back, and actually did it again. I was stupefied, paralyzed,
petrified, with these strange results, but they did not convince me. I
didn't believe he could do it another time, but he did. He said he could
do it all day, and fetch up the same way every time. By that time my
temper was gone, and I asked him to go home and apply to the Asylum and
I would pay the expenses; I didn't want to see him any more for a week.
I went up-stairs in a rage and started to tell Livy about it, expecting
to get her sympathy for me and to breed aversion in her for Whitmore;
but she merely burst into peal after peal of laughter, as the tale of my
adventure went on, for her head was like Susy's: riddles and
complexities had no terrors for it. Her mind and Susy's were analytical;
I have tried to make it appear that mine was different. Many and many a
time I have told that buggy experiment, hoping against hope that I would
some time or other find somebody who would be on my side, but it has
never happened. And I am never able to go glibly forward and state the
circumstances of that buggy's progress without having to halt and
consider, and call up in my mind the spoon-handle, the bowl of the
spoon, the buggy and the horse, and my position in the buggy: and the
minute I have got that far and try to turn it to the left it goes to
ruin; I can't see how it is ever going to fetch me out right when we get
to the door. Susy is right in her estimate. I can't understand things.
That burglar-alarm which Susy mentions led a gay and careless life, and
had no principles. It was generally out of order at one point or
another; and there was plenty of opportunity, because all the windows
and doors in the house, from the cellar up to the top floor, were
connected with it. However, in its seasons of being out of order it
could trouble us for only a very little while: we quickly found out that
it was fooling us, and that it was buzzing its blood-curdling alarm
merely for its own amusement. Then we would shut it off, and send to New
York for the electrician--there not being one in all Hartford in those
days. When the repairs were finished we would set the alarm again and
reestablish our confidence in it. It never did any real business except
upon one single occasion. All the rest of its expensive career was
frivolous and without purpose. Just that one time it performed its duty,
and its whole duty--gravely, seriously, admirably. It let fly about two
o'clock one black and dreary March morning, and I turned out promptly,
because I knew that it was not fooling, this time. The bath-room door
was on my side of the bed. I stepped in there, turned up the gas, looked
at the annunciator, and turned off the alarm--so far as the door
indicated was concerned--thus stopping the racket. Then I came back to
bed. Mrs. Clemens opened the debate:
"What was it?"
"It was the cellar door."
"Was it a burglar, do you think?"
"Yes," I said, "of course it was. Did you suppose it was a Sunday-school
superintendent?"
"No. What do you suppose he wants?"
"I suppose he wants jewelry, but he is not acquainted with the house and
he thinks it is in the cellar. I don't like to disappoint a burglar whom
I am not acquainted with, and who has done me no harm, but if he had
had common sagacity enough to inquire, I could have told him we kept
nothing down there but coal and vegetables. Still it may be that he is
acquainted with the place, and that what he really wants is coal and
vegetables. On the whole, I think it is vegetables he is after."
"Are you going down to see?"
"No; I could not be of any assistance. Let him select for himself; I
don't know where the things are."
Then she said, "But suppose he comes up to the ground floor!"
"That's all right. We shall know it the minute he opens a door on that
floor. It will set off the alarm."
Just then the terrific buzzing broke out again. I said,
"He has arrived. I told you he would. I know all about burglars and
their ways. They are systematic people."
I went into the bath-room to see if I was right, and I was. I shut off
the dining-room and stopped the buzzing, and came back to bed. My wife
said,
"What do you suppose he is after now?"
I said, "I think he has got all the vegetables he wants and is coming up
for napkin-rings and odds and ends for the wife and children. They all
have families--burglars have--and they are always thoughtful of them,
always take a few necessaries of life for themselves, and fill out with
tokens of remembrance for the family. In taking them they do not forget
us: those very things represent tokens of his remembrance of us, and
also of our remembrance of him. We never get them again; the memory of
the attention remains embalmed in our hearts."
"Are you going down to see what it is he wants now?"
"No," I said, "I am no more interested than I was before. They are
experienced people,--burglars; _they_ know what they want; I should be
no help to him. I _think_ he is after ceramics and bric-à-brac and such
things. If he knows the house he knows that that is all that he can find
on the dining-room floor."
She said, with a strong interest perceptible in her tone, "Suppose he
comes up here!"
I said, "It is all right. He will give us notice."
"What shall we do then then?"
"Climb out of the window."
She said, a little restively, "Well, what is the use of a burglar-alarm
for us?"
"You have seen, dear heart, that it has been useful up to the present
moment, and I have explained to you how it will be continuously useful
after he gets up here."
That was the end of it. He didn't ring any more alarms. Presently I
said,
"He is disappointed, I think. He has gone off with the vegetables and
the bric-à-brac, and I think he is dissatisfied."
We went to sleep, and at a quarter before eight in the morning I was
out, and hurrying, for I was to take the 8.29 train for New York. I
found the gas burning brightly--full head--all over the first floor. My
new overcoat was gone; my old umbrella was gone; my new patent-leather
shoes, which I had never worn, were gone. The large window which opened
into the _ombra_ at the rear of the house was standing wide. I passed
out through it and tracked the burglar down the hill through the trees;
tracked him without difficulty, because he had blazed his progress with
imitation silver napkin-rings, and my umbrella, and various other things
which he had disapproved of; and I went back in triumph and proved to my
wife that he _was_ a disappointed burglar. I had suspected he would be,
from the start, and from his not coming up to our floor to get human
beings.
Things happened to me that day in New York. I will tell about them
another time.
_From Susy's Biography._
Papa has a peculiar gait we like, it seems just to sute him, but
most people do not; he always walks up and down the room while
thinking and between each coarse at meals.
A lady distantly related to us came to visit us once in those days. She
came to stay a week, but all our efforts to make her happy failed, we
could not imagine why, and she got up her anchor and sailed the next
morning. We did much guessing, but could not solve the mystery. Later we
found out what the trouble was. It was my tramping up and down between
the courses. She conceived the idea that I could not stand her society.
That word "Youth," as the reader has perhaps already guessed, was my
wife's pet name for me. It was gently satirical, but also affectionate.
I had certain mental and material peculiarities and customs proper to a
much younger person than I was.
_From Susy's Biography._
Papa is very fond of animals particularly of cats, we had a dear
little gray kitten once that he named "Lazy" (papa always wears
gray to match his hair and eyes) and he would carry him around on
his shoulder, it was a mighty pretty sight! the gray cat sound
asleep against papa's gray coat and hair. The names that he has
given our different cats, are realy remarkably funny, they are
namely Stray Kit, Abner, Motley, Fraeulein, Lazy, Bufalo Bill,
Cleveland, Sour Mash, and Pestilence and Famine.
At one time when the children were small, we had a very black mother-cat
named Satan, and Satan had a small black offspring named Sin. Pronouns
were a difficulty for the children. Little Clara came in one day, her
black eyes snapping with indignation, and said,
"Papa, Satan ought to be punished. She is out there at the greenhouse
and there she stays and stays, and his kitten is down-stairs crying."
_From Susy's Biography._
Papa uses very strong language, but I have an idea not nearly so
strong as when he first maried mamma. A lady acquaintance of his is
rather apt to interupt what one is saying, and papa told mamma that
he thought he should say to the lady's husband "I am glad your wife
wasn't present when the Deity said 'Let there be light.'"
It is as I have said before. This is a frank historian. She doesn't
cover up one's deficiencies, but gives them an equal showing with one's
handsomer qualities. Of course I made the remark which she has
quoted--and even at this distant day I am still as much as half
persuaded that if that lady had been present when the Creator said, "Let
there be light," she would have interrupted Him and we shouldn't ever
have got it.
_From Susy's Biography._
Papa said the other day, "I am a mugwump and a mugwump is pure from
the marrow out." (Papa knows that I am writing this biography of
him, and he said this for it.) He doesn't like to go to church at
all, why I never understood, until just now, he told us the other
day that he couldn't bear to hear any one talk but himself, but
that he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting
tired, of course he said this in joke, but I've no dought it was
founded on truth.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCII.
NOVEMBER 2, 1906.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--V.
BY MARK TWAIN.
Susy's remark about my strong language troubles me, and I must go back
to it. All through the first ten years of my married life I kept a
constant and discreet watch upon my tongue while in the house, and went
outside and to a distance when circumstances were too much for me and I
was obliged to seek relief. I prized my wife's respect and approval
above all the rest of the human race's respect and approval. I dreaded
the day when she should discover that I was but a whited sepulchre
partly freighted with suppressed language. I was so careful, during ten
years, that I had not a doubt that my suppressions had been successful.
Therefore I was quite as happy in my guilt as I could have been if I had
been innocent.
But at last an accident exposed me. I went into the bath-room one
morning to make my toilet, and carelessly left the door two or three
inches ajar. It was the first time that I had ever failed to take the
precaution of closing it tightly. I knew the necessity of being
particular about this, because shaving was always a trying ordeal for
me, and I could seldom carry it through to a finish without verbal
helps. Now this time I was unprotected, but did not suspect it. I had no
extraordinary trouble with my razor on this occasion, and was able to
worry through with mere mutterings and growlings of an improper sort,
but with nothing noisy or emphatic about them--no snapping and barking.
Then I put on a shirt. My shirts are an invention of my own. They open
in the back, and are buttoned there--when there are buttons. This time
the button was missing. My temper jumped up several degrees in a moment,
and my remarks rose accordingly, both in loudness and vigor of
expression. But I was not troubled, for the bath-room door was a solid
one and I supposed it was firmly closed. I flung up the window and threw
the shirt out. It fell upon the shrubbery where the people on their way
to church could admire it if they wanted to; there was merely fifty feet
of grass between the shirt and the passer-by. Still rumbling and
thundering distantly, I put on another shirt. Again the button was
absent. I augmented my language to meet the emergency, and threw that
shirt out of the window. I was too angry--too insane--to examine the
third shirt, but put it furiously on. Again the button was absent, and
that shirt followed its comrades out of the window. Then I straightened
up, gathered my reserves, and let myself go like a cavalry charge. In
the midst of that great assault, my eye fell upon that gaping door, and
I was paralyzed.
It took me a good while to finish my toilet. I extended the time
unnecessarily in trying to make up my mind as to what I would best do in
the circumstances. I tried to hope that Mrs. Clemens was asleep, but I
knew better. I could not escape by the window. It was narrow, and suited
only to shirts. At last I made up my mind to boldly loaf through the
bedroom with the air of a person who had not been doing anything. I made
half the journey successfully. I did not turn my eyes in her direction,
because that would not be safe. It is very difficult to look as if you
have not been doing anything when the facts are the other way, and my
confidence in my performance oozed steadily out of me as I went along. I
was aiming for the left-hand door because it was furthest from my wife.
It had never been opened from the day that the house was built, but it
seemed a blessed refuge for me now. The bed was this one, wherein I am
lying now, and dictating these histories morning after morning with so
much serenity. It was this same old elaborately carved black Venetian
bedstead--the most comfortable bedstead that ever was, with space enough
in it for a family, and carved angels enough surmounting its twisted
columns and its headboard and footboard to bring peace to the sleepers,
and pleasant dreams. I had to stop in the middle of the room. I hadn't
the strength to go on. I believed that I was under accusing eyes--that
even the carved angels were inspecting me with an unfriendly gaze. You
know how it is when you are convinced that somebody behind you is
looking steadily at you. You _have_ to turn your face--you can't help
it. I turned mine. The bed was placed as it is now, with the foot where
the head ought to be. If it had been placed as it should have been, the
high headboard would have sheltered me. But the footboard was no
sufficient protection, for I could be seen over it. I was exposed. I was
wholly without protection. I turned, because I couldn't help it--and my
memory of what I saw is still vivid, after all these years.
Against the white pillows I saw the black head--I saw that young and
beautiful face; and I saw the gracious eyes with a something in them
which I had never seen there before. They were snapping and flashing
with indignation. I felt myself crumbling; I felt myself shrinking away
to nothing under that accusing gaze. I stood silent under that
desolating fire for as much as a minute, I should say--it seemed a very,
very long time. Then my wife's lips parted, and from them issued--_my
latest bath-room remark_. The language perfect, but the expression
velvety, unpractical, apprenticelike, ignorant, inexperienced, comically
inadequate, absurdly weak and unsuited to the great language. In my
lifetime I had never heard anything so out of tune, so inharmonious, so
incongruous, so ill-suited to each other as were those mighty words set
to that feeble music. I tried to keep from laughing, for I was a guilty
person in deep need of charity and mercy. I tried to keep from
bursting, and I succeeded--until she gravely said, "There, now you know
how it sounds."
Then I exploded; the air was filled with my fragments, and you could
hear them whiz. I said, "Oh Livy, if it sounds like _that_ I will never
do it again!"
Then she had to laugh herself. Both of us broke into convulsions, and
went on laughing until we were physically exhausted and spiritually
reconciled.
The children were present at breakfast--Clara aged six and Susy
eight--and the mother made a guarded remark about strong language;
guarded because she did not wish the children to suspect anything--a
guarded remark which censured strong language. Both children broke out
in one voice with this comment, "Why, mamma, papa uses it!"
I was astonished. I had supposed that that secret was safe in my own
breast, and that its presence had never been suspected. I asked,
"How did you know, you little rascals?"
"Oh," they said, "we often listen over the balusters when you are in the
hall explaining things to George."
_From Susy's Biography._
One of papa's latest books is "The Prince and the Pauper" and it is
unquestionably the best book he has ever written, some people want
him to keep to his old style, some gentleman wrote him, "I enjoyed
Huckleberry Finn immensely and am glad to see that you have
returned to your old style." That enoyed me that enoyed me greatly,
because it trobles me [Susy was troubled by that word, and
uncertain; she wrote a u above it in the proper place, but
reconsidered the matter and struck it out] to have so few people
know papa, I mean realy know him, they think of Mark Twain as a
humorist joking at everything; "And with a mop of reddish brown
hair which sorely needs the barbars brush a roman nose, short
stubby mustache, a sad care-worn face, with maney crow's feet" etc.
That is the way people picture papa, I have wanted papa to write a
book that would reveal something of his kind sympathetic nature,
and "The Prince and the Pauper" partly does it. The book is full of
lovely charming ideas, and oh the language! It is _perfect_. I
think that one of the most touching scenes in it, is where the
pauper is riding on horseback with his nobles in the "recognition
procession" and he sees his mother oh and then what followed! How
she runs to his side, when she sees him throw up his hand palm
outward, and is rudely pushed off by one of the King's officers,
and then how the little pauper's consceince troubles him when he
remembers the shameful words that were falling from his lips, when
she was turned from his side "I know you not woman" and how his
grandeurs were stricken valueless, and his pride consumed to ashes.
It is a wonderfully beautiful and touching little scene, and papa
has described it so wonderfully. I never saw a man with so much
variety of feeling as papa has; now the "Prince and the Pauper" is
full of touching places; but there is most always a streak of humor
in them somewhere. Now in the coronation--in the stirring
coronation, just after the little king has got his crown back again
papa brings that in about the Seal, where the pauper says he used
the Seal "to crack nuts with." Oh it is so funny and nice! Papa
very seldom writes a passage without some humor in it somewhere,
and I dont think he ever will.
The children always helped their mother to edit my books in manuscript.
She would sit on the porch at the farm and read aloud, with her pencil
in her hand, and the children would keep an alert and suspicious eye
upon her right along, for the belief was well grounded in them that
whenever she came across a particularly satisfactory passage she would
strike it out. Their suspicions were well founded. The passages which
were so satisfactory to them always had an element of strength in them
which sorely needed modification or expurgation, and were always sure to
get it at their mother's hand. For my own entertainment, and to enjoy
the protests of the children, I often abused my editor's innocent
confidence. I often interlarded remarks of a studied and felicitously
atrocious character purposely to achieve the children's brief delight,
and then see the remorseless pencil do its fatal work. I often joined my
supplications to the children's for mercy, and strung the argument out
and pretended to be in earnest. They were deceived, and so was their
mother. It was three against one, and most unfair. But it was very
delightful, and I could not resist the temptation. Now and then we
gained the victory and there was much rejoicing. Then I privately struck
the passage out myself. It had served its purpose. It had furnished
three of us with good entertainment, and in being removed from the book
by me it was only suffering the fate originally intended for it.
_From Susy's Biography._
Papa was born in Missouri. His mother is Grandma Clemens (Jane
Lampton Clemens) of Kentucky. Grandpa Clemens was of the F.F.V's of
Virginia.
Without doubt it was I that gave Susy that impression. I cannot imagine
why, because I was never in my life much impressed by grandeurs which
proceed from the accident of birth. I did not get this indifference from
my mother. She was always strongly interested in the ancestry of the
house. She traced her own line back to the Lambtons of Durham,
England--a family which had been occupying broad lands there since Saxon
times. I am not sure, but I think that those Lambtons got along without
titles of nobility for eight or nine hundred years, then produced a
great man, three-quarters of a century ago, and broke into the peerage.
My mother knew all about the Clemenses of Virginia, and loved to
aggrandize them to me, but she has long been dead. There has been no one
to keep those details fresh in my memory, and they have grown dim.
There was a Jere. Clemens who was a United States Senator, and in his
day enjoyed the usual Senatorial fame--a fame which perishes whether it
spring from four years' service or forty. After Jere. Clemens's fame as
a Senator passed away, he was still remembered for many years on account
of another service which he performed. He shot old John Brown's Governor
Wise in the hind leg in a duel. However, I am not very clear about this.
It may be that Governor Wise shot _him_ in the hind leg. However, I
don't think it is important. I think that the only thing that is really
important is that one of them got shot in the hind leg. It would have
been better and nobler and more historical and satisfactory if both of
them had got shot in the hind leg--but it is of no use for me to try to
recollect history. I never had a historical mind. Let it go. Whichever
way it happened I am glad of it, and that is as much enthusiasm as I can
get up for a person bearing my name. But I am forgetting the first
Clemens--the one that stands furthest back toward the really original
_first_ Clemens, which was Adam.
_From Susy's Biography._
Clara and I are sure that papa played the trick on Grandma, about
the whipping, that is related in "The Adventures of Tom Sayer":
"Hand me that switch." The switch hovered in the air, the peril was
desperate--"My, look behind you Aunt!" The old lady whirled around
and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled on the instant,
scrambling up the high board fence and dissapeared over it.
Susy and Clara were quite right about that.
Then Susy says:
And we know papa played "Hookey" all the time. And how readily
would papa pretend to be dying so as not to have to go to school!
These revelations and exposures are searching, but they are just If I am
as transparent to other people as I was to Susy, I have wasted much
effort in this life.
Grandma couldn't make papa go to school, no she let him go into a
printing-office to learn the trade. He did so, and gradually picked
up enough education to enable him to do about as well as those who
were more studious in early life.
It is noticeable that Susy does not get overheated when she is
complimenting me, but maintains a proper judicial and biographical calm.
It is noticeable, also, and it is to her credit as a biographer, that
she distributes compliment and criticism with a fair and even hand.
My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed
it. She had none at all with my brother Henry, who was two years younger
than I, and I think that the unbroken monotony of his goodness and
truthfulness and obedience would have been a burden to her but for the
relief and variety which I furnished in the other direction. I was a
tonic. I was valuable to her. I never thought of it before, but now I
see it. I never knew Henry to do a vicious thing toward me, or toward
any one else--but he frequently did righteous ones that cost me as
heavily. It was his duty to report me, when I needed reporting and
neglected to do it myself, and he was very faithful in discharging that
duty. He is "Sid" in "Tom Sawyer." But Sid was not Henry. Henry was a
very much finer and better boy than ever Sid was.
It was Henry who called my mother's attention to the fact that the
thread with which she had sewed my collar together to keep me from going
in swimming, had changed color. My mother would not have discovered it
but for that, and she was manifestly piqued when she recognized that
that prominent bit of circumstantial evidence had escaped her sharp eye.
That detail probably added a detail to my punishment. It is human. We
generally visit our shortcomings on somebody else when there is a
possible excuse for it--but no matter, I took it out of Henry. There is
always compensation for such as are unjustly used. I often took it out
of him--sometimes as an advance payment for something which I hadn't yet
done. These were occasions when the opportunity was too strong a
temptation, and I had to draw on the future. I did not need to copy this
idea from my mother, and probably didn't. Still she wrought upon that
principle upon occasion.
If the incident of the broken sugar-bowl is in "Tom Sawyer"--I don't
remember whether it is or not--that is an example of it. Henry never
stole sugar. He took it openly from the bowl. His mother knew he
wouldn't take sugar when she wasn't looking, but she had her doubts
about me. Not exactly doubts, either. She knew very well I _would._ One
day when she was not present, Henry took sugar from her prized and
precious old English sugar-bowl, which was an heirloom in the
family--and he managed to break the bowl. It was the first time I had
ever had a chance to tell anything on him, and I was inexpressibly glad.
I told him I was going to tell on him, but he was not disturbed. When my
mother came in and saw the bowl lying on the floor in fragments, she was
speechless for a minute. I allowed that silence to work; I judged it
would increase the effect. I was waiting for her to ask "Who did
that?"--so that I could fetch out my news. But it was an error of
calculation. When she got through with her silence she didn't ask
anything about it--she merely gave me a crack on the skull with her
thimble that I felt all the way down to my heels. Then I broke out with
my injured innocence, expecting to make her very sorry that she had
punished the wrong one. I expected her to do something remorseful and
pathetic. I told her that I was not the one--it was Henry. But there was
no upheaval. She said, without emotion, "It's all right. It isn't any
matter. You deserve it for something you've done that I didn't know
about; and if you haven't done it, why then you deserve it for something
that you are going to do, that I sha'n't hear about."
There was a stairway outside the house, which led up to the rear part of
the second story. One day Henry was sent on an errand, and he took a tin
bucket along. I knew he would have to ascend those stairs, so I went up
and locked the door on the inside, and came down into the garden, which
had been newly ploughed and was rich in choice firm clods of black mold.
I gathered a generous equipment of these, and ambushed him. I waited
till he had climbed the stairs and was near the landing and couldn't
escape. Then I bombarded him with clods, which he warded off with his
tin bucket the best he could, but without much success, for I was a good
marksman. The clods smashing against the weather-boarding fetched my
mother out to see what was the matter, and I tried to explain that I was
amusing Henry. Both of them were after me in a minute, but I knew the
way over that high board fence and escaped for that time. After an hour
or two, when I ventured back, there was no one around and I thought the
incident was closed. But it was not. Henry was ambushing me. With an
unusually competent aim for him, he landed a stone on the side of my
head which raised a bump there that felt like the Matterhorn. I carried
it to my mother straightway for sympathy, but she was not strongly
moved. It seemed to be her idea that incidents like this would
eventually reform me if I harvested enough of them. So the matter was
only educational. I had had a sterner view of it than that, before.
It was not right to give the cat the "Pain-Killer"; I realize it now. I
would not repeat it in these days. But in those "Tom Sawyer" days it was
a great and sincere satisfaction to me to see Peter perform under its
influence--and if actions _do_ speak as loud as words, he took as much
interest in it as I did. It was a most detestable medicine, Perry
Davis's Pain-Killer. Mr. Pavey's negro man, who was a person of good
judgment and considerable curiosity, wanted to sample it, and I let him.
It was his opinion that it was made of hell-fire.
Those were the cholera days of '49. The people along the Mississippi
were paralyzed with fright. Those who could run away, did it. And many
died of fright in the flight. Fright killed three persons where the
cholera killed one. Those who couldn't flee kept themselves drenched
with cholera preventives, and my mother chose Perry Davis's Pain-Killer
for me. She was not distressed about herself. She avoided that kind of
preventive. But she made me promise to take a teaspoonful of Pain-Killer
every day. Originally it was my intention to keep the promise, but at
that time I didn't know as much about Pain-Killer as I knew after my
first experiment with it. She didn't watch Henry's bottle--she could
trust Henry. But she marked my bottle with a pencil, on the label, every
day, and examined it to see if the teaspoonful had been removed. The
floor was not carpeted. It had cracks in it, and I fed the Pain-Killer
to the cracks with very good results--no cholera occurred down below.
It was upon one of these occasions that that friendly cat came waving
his tail and supplicating for Pain-Killer--which he got--and then went
into those hysterics which ended with his colliding with all the
furniture in the room and finally going out of the open window and
carrying the flower-pots with him, just in time for my mother to arrive
and look over her glasses in petrified astonishment and say, "What in
the world is the matter with Peter?"
I don't remember what my explanation was, but if it is recorded in that
book it may not be the right one.
Whenever my conduct was of such exaggerated impropriety that my mother's
extemporary punishments were inadequate, she saved the matter up for
Sunday, and made me go to church Sunday night--which was a penalty
sometimes bearable, perhaps, but as a rule it was not, and I avoided it
for the sake of my constitution. She would never believe that I had been
to church until she had applied her test: she made me tell her what the
text was. That was a simple matter, and caused me no trouble. I didn't
have to go to church to get a text. I selected one for myself. This
worked very well until one time when my text and the one furnished by a
neighbor, who had been to church, didn't tally. After that my mother
took other methods. I don't know what they were now.
In those days men and boys wore rather long cloaks in the winter-time.
They were black, and were lined with very bright and showy Scotch
plaids. One winter's night when I was starting to church to square a
crime of some kind committed during the week, I hid my cloak near the
gate and went off and played with the other boys until church was over.
Then I returned home. But in the dark I put the cloak on wrong side out,
entered the room, threw the cloak aside, and then stood the usual
examination. I got along very well until the temperature of the church
was mentioned. My mother said,
"It must have been impossible to keep warm there on such a night."
I didn't see the art of that remark, and was foolish enough to explain
that I wore my cloak all the time that I was in church. She asked if I
kept it on from church home, too. I didn't see the bearing of that
remark. I said that that was what I had done. She said,
"You wore it in church with that red Scotch plaid outside and glaring?
Didn't that attract any attention?"
Of course to continue such a dialogue would have been tedious and
unprofitable, and I let it go, and took the consequences.
That was about 1849. Tom Nash was a boy of my own age--the postmaster's
son. The Mississippi was frozen across, and he and I went skating one
night, probably without permission. I cannot see why we should go
skating in the night unless without permission, for there could be no
considerable amusement to be gotten out of skating at night if nobody
was going to object to it. About midnight, when we were more than half a
mile out toward the Illinois shore, we heard some ominous rumbling and
grinding and crashing going on between us and the home side of the
river, and we knew what it meant--the ice was breaking up. We started
for home, pretty badly scared. We flew along at full speed whenever the
moonlight sifting down between the clouds enabled us to tell which was
ice and which was water. In the pauses we waited; started again whenever
there was a good bridge of ice; paused again when we came to naked water
and waited in distress until a floating vast cake should bridge that
place. It took us an hour to make the trip--a trip which we made in a
misery of apprehension all the time. But at last we arrived within a
very brief distance of the shore. We waited again; there was another
place that needed bridging. All about us the ice was plunging and
grinding along and piling itself up in mountains on the shore, and the
dangers were increasing, not diminishing. We grew very impatient to get
to solid ground, so we started too early and went springing from cake to
cake. Tom made a miscalculation, and fell short. He got a bitter bath,
but he was so close to shore that he only had to swim a stroke or
two--then his feet struck hard bottom and he crawled out. I arrived a
little later, without accident. We had been in a drenching perspiration,
and Tom's bath was a disaster for him. He took to his bed sick, and had
a procession of diseases. The closing one was scarlet-fever, and he came
out of it stone deaf. Within a year or two speech departed, of course.
But some years later he was taught to talk, after a fashion--one
couldn't always make out what it was he was trying to say. Of course he
could not modulate his voice, since he couldn't hear himself talk. When
he supposed he was talking low and confidentially, you could hear him in
Illinois.
Four years ago (1902) I was invited by the University of Missouri to
come out there and receive the honorary degree of LL.D. I took that
opportunity to spend a week in Hannibal--a city now, a village in my
day. It had been fifty-three years since Tom Nash and I had had that
adventure. When I was at the railway station ready to leave Hannibal,
there was a crowd of citizens there. I saw Tom Nash approaching me
across a vacant space, and I walked toward him, for I recognized him at
once. He was old and white-headed, but the boy of fifteen was still
visible in him. He came up to me, made a trumpet of his hands at my ear,
nodded his head toward the citizens and said confidentially--in a yell
like a fog-horn--
"Same damned fools, Sam!"
_From Susy's Biography._
Papa was about twenty years old when he went on the Mississippi as
a pilot. Just before he started on his tripp Grandma Clemens asked
him to promise her on the Bible not to touch intoxicating liquors
or swear, and he said "Yes, mother, I will," and he kept that
promise seven years when Grandma released him from it.
Under the inspiring influence of that remark, what a garden of forgotten
reforms rises upon my sight!
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCIII.
NOVEMBER 16, 1906.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--VI.
BY MARK TWAIN.
_From Susy's Biography_.
Papa made arrangements to read at Vassar College the 1st of May,
and I went with him. We went by way of New York City. Mamma went
with us to New York and stayed two days to do some shopping. We
started Tuesday, at 1/2 past two o'clock in the afternoon, and
reached New York about 1/4 past six. Papa went right up to General
Grants from the station and mamma and I went to the Everett House.
Aunt Clara came to supper with us up in our room....
We and Aunt Clara were going were going to the theatre right after
supper, and we expected papa to take us there and to come home as
early as he could. But we got through dinner and he didn't come,
and didn't come, and mamma got more perplexed and worried, but at
last we thought we would have to go without him. So we put on our
things and started down stairs but before we'd goten half down we
met papa coming up with a great bunch of roses in his hand. He
explained that the reason he was so late was that his watch stopped
and he didn't notice and kept thinking it an hour earlier than it
really was. The roses he carried were some Col. Fred Grant sent to
mamma. We went to the theatre and enjoyed "Adonis" [word illegible]
acted very much. We reached home about 1/2 past eleven o'clock and
went right to bed. Wednesday morning we got up rather late and had
breakfast about 1/2 past nine o'clock. After breakfast mamma went
out shopping and papa and I went to see papa's agent about some
business matters. After papa had gotten through talking to Cousin
Charlie, [Webster] papa's agent, we went to get a friend of papa's,
Major Pond, to go and see a Dog Show with us. Then we went to see
the dogs with Major Pond and we had a delightful time seeing so
many dogs together; when we got through seeing the dogs papa
thought he would go and see General Grant and I went with him--this
was April 29, 1885. Papa went up into General Grant's room and he
took me with him, I felt greatly honored and delighted when papa
took me into General Grant's room and let me see the General and
Col. Grant, for General Grant is a man I shall be glad all my life
that I have seen. Papa and General Grant had a long talk together
and papa has written an account of his talk and visit with General
Grant for me to put into this biography.
Susy has inserted in this place that account of mine--as follows:
April 29, 1885.
I called on General Grant and took Susy with me. The General was
looking and feeling far better than he had looked or felt for some
months. He had ventured to work again on his book that morning--the
first time he had done any work for perhaps a month. This morning's
work was his first attempt at dictating, and it was a thorough
success, to his great delight. He had always said that it would be
impossible for him to dictate anything, but I had said that he was
noted for clearness of statement, and as a narrative was simply a
statement of consecutive facts, he was consequently peculiarly
qualified and equipped for dictation. This turned out to be true.
For he had dictated two hours that morning to a shorthand writer,
had never hesitated for words, had not repeated himself, and the
manuscript when finished needed no revision. The two hours' work
was an account of Appomattox--and this was such an extremely
important feature that his book would necessarily have been
severely lame without it. Therefore I had taken a shorthand writer
there before, to see if I could not get him to write at least a few
lines about Appomattox.[5] But he was at that time not well enough
to undertake it. I was aware that of all the hundred versions of
Appomattox, not one was really correct. Therefore I was extremely
anxious that he should leave behind him the truth. His throat was
not distressing him, and his voice was much better and stronger
than usual. He was so delighted to have gotten Appomattox
accomplished once more in his life--to have gotten the matter off
his mind--that he was as talkative as his old self. He received
Susy very pleasantly, and then fell to talking about certain
matters which he hoped to be able to dictate next day; and he said
in substance that, among other things, he wanted to settle once for
all a question that had been bandied about from mouth to mouth and
from newspaper to newspaper. That question was, "With whom
originated the idea of the march to the sea? Was it Grant's, or was
it Sherman's idea?" Whether I, or some one else (being anxious to
get the important fact settled) asked him with whom the idea
originated, I don't remember. But I remember his answer. I shall
always remember his answer. General Grant said:
"Neither of us originated the idea of Sherman's march to the sea.
The enemy did it."
He went on to say that the enemy, however, necessarily originated a
great many of the plans that the general on the opposite side gets
the credit for; at the same time that the enemy is doing that, he
is laying open other moves which the opposing general sees and
takes advantage of. In this case, Sherman had a plan all thought
out, of course. He meant to destroy the two remaining railroads in
that part of the country, and that would finish up that region. But
General Hood did not play the military part that he was expected to
play. On the contrary, General Hood made a dive at Chattanooga.
This left the march to the sea open to Sherman, and so after
sending part of his army to defend and hold what he had acquired in
the Chattanooga region, he was perfectly free to proceed, with the
rest of it, through Georgia. He saw the opportunity, and he would
not have been fit for his place if he had not seized it.
"He wrote me" (the General is speaking) "what his plan was, and I
sent him word to go ahead. My staff were opposed to the movement."
(I think the General said they tried to persuade him to stop
Sherman. The chief of his staff, the General said, even went so far
as to go to Washington without the General's knowledge and get the
ear of the authorities, and he succeeded in arousing their fears to
such an extent that they telegraphed General Grant to stop
Sherman.)
Then General Grant said, "Out of deference to the Government, I
telegraphed Sherman and stopped him twenty-four hours; and then
considering that that was deference enough to the Government, I
telegraphed him to go ahead again."
I have not tried to give the General's language, but only the
general idea of what he said. The thing that mainly struck me was
his terse remark that the enemy originated the idea of the march to
the sea. It struck me because it was so suggestive of the General's
epigrammatic fashion--saying a great deal in a single crisp
sentence. (This is my account, and signed "Mark Twain.")
_Susy Resumes._
After papa and General Grant had had their talk, we went back to
the hotel where mamma was, and papa told mamma all about his
interview with General Grant. Mamma and I had a nice quiet
afternoon together.
That pair of devoted comrades were always shutting themselves up
together when there was opportunity to have what Susy called "a cozy
time." From Susy's nursery days to the end of her life, she and her
mother were close friends; intimate friends, passionate adorers of each
other. Susy's was a beautiful mind, and it made her an interesting
comrade. And with the fine mind she had a heart like her mother's. Susy
never had an interest or an occupation which she was not glad to put
aside for that something which was in all cases more precious to her--a
visit with her mother. Susy died at the right time, the fortunate time
of life; the happy age--twenty-four years. At twenty-four, such a girl
has seen the best of life--life as a happy dream. After that age the
risks begin; responsibility comes, and with it the cares, the sorrows,
and the inevitable tragedy. For her mother's sake I would have brought
her back from the grave if I could, but I would not have done it for my
own.
_From Susy's Biography_.
Then papa went to read in public; there were a great many authors
that read, that Thursday afternoon, beside papa; I would have liked
to have gone and heard papa read, but papa said he was going to
read in Vassar just what he was planning to read in New York, so I
stayed at home with mamma.
The next day mamma planned to take the four o'clock car back to
Hartford. We rose quite early that morning and went to the Vienna
Bakery and took breakfast there. From there we went to a German
bookstore and bought some German books for Clara's birthday.
Dear me, the power of association to snatch mouldy dead memories out of
their graves and make them walk! That remark about buying foreign books
throws a sudden white glare upon the distant past; and I see the long
stretch of a New York street with an unearthly vividness, and John Hay
walking down it, grave and remorseful. I was walking down it too, that
morning, and I overtook Hay and asked him what the trouble was. He
turned a lustreless eye upon me and said:
"My case is beyond cure. In the most innocent way in the world I have
committed a crime which will never be forgiven by the sufferers, for
they will never believe--oh, well, no, I was going to say they would
never believe that I did the thing innocently. The truth is they will
know that I acted innocently, because they are rational people; but what
of that? I never can look them in the face again--nor they me, perhaps."
Hay was a young bachelor, and at that time was on the "Tribune" staff.
He explained his trouble in these words, substantially:
"When I was passing along here yesterday morning on my way down-town to
the office, I stepped into a bookstore where I am acquainted, and asked
if they had anything new from the other side. They handed me a French
novel, in the usual yellow paper cover, and I carried it away. I didn't
even look at the title of it. It was for recreation reading, and I was
on my way to my work. I went mooning and dreaming along, and I think I
hadn't gone more than fifty yards when I heard my name called. I
stopped, and a private carriage drew up at the sidewalk and I shook
hands with the inmates--mother and young daughter, excellent people.
They were on their way to the steamer to sail for Paris. The mother
said,
"'I saw that book in your hand and I judged by the look of it that it
was a French novel. Is it?'
"I said it was.
"She said, 'Do let me have it, so that my daughter can practise her
French on it on the way over.'
"Of course I handed her the book, and we parted. Ten minutes ago I was
passing that bookstore again, and I stepped in and fetched away another
copy of that book. Here it is. Read the first page of it. That is
enough. You will know what the rest is like. I think it must be the
foulest book in the French language--one of the foulest, anyway. I would
be ashamed to offer it to a harlot--but, oh dear, I gave it to that
sweet young girl without shame. Take my advice; don't give away a book
until you have examined it."
_From Susy's Biography._
Then mamma and I went to do some shopping and papa went to see
General Grant. After we had finnished doing our shopping we went
home to the hotel together. When we entered our rooms in the hotel
we saw on the table a vase full of exquisett red roses. Mamma who
is very fond of flowers exclaimed "Oh I wonder who could have sent
them." We both looked at the card in the midst of the roses and saw
that it was written on in papa's handwriting, it was written in
German. 'Liebes Geshchenk on die mamma.' [I am sure I didn't say
"on"--that is Susy's spelling, not mine; also I am sure I didn't
spell Geschenk so liberally as all that.--S. L. C.] Mamma was
delighted. Papa came home and gave mamma her ticket; and after
visiting a while with her went to see Major Pond and mamma and I
sat down to our lunch. After lunch most of our time was taken up
with packing, and at about three o'clock we went to escort mamma to
the train. We got on board the train with her and stayed with her
about five minutes and then we said good-bye to her and the train
started for Hartford. It was the first time I had ever beene away
from home without mamma in my life, although I was 13 yrs. old.
Papa and I drove back to the hotel and got Major Pond and then went
to see the Brooklyn Bridge we went across it to Brooklyn on the
cars and then walked back across it from Brooklyn to New York. We
enjoyed looking at the beautiful scenery and we could see the
bridge moove under the intense heat of the sun. We had a perfectly
delightful time, but weer pretty tired when we got back to the
hotel.
The next morning we rose early, took our breakfast and took an
early train to Poughkeepsie. We had a very pleasant journey to
Poughkeepsie. The Hudson was magnificent--shrouded with beautiful
mist. When we arived at Poughkeepsie it was raining quite hard;
which fact greatly dissapointed me because I very much wanted to
see the outside of the buildings of Vassar College and as it rained
that would be impossible. It was quite a long drive from the
station to Vasser College and papa and I had a nice long time to
discuss and laugh over German profanity. One of the German phrases
papa particularly enjoys is "O heilige maria Mutter Jesus!" Jean
has a German nurse, and this was one of her phrases, there was a
time when Jean exclaimed "Ach Gott!" to every trifle, but when
mamma found it out she was shocked and instantly put a stop to it.
It brings that pretty little German girl vividly before me--a sweet and
innocent and plump little creature with peachy cheeks; a clear-souled
little maiden and without offence, notwithstanding her profanities, and
she was loaded to the eyebrows with them. She was a mere child. She was
not fifteen yet. She was just from Germany, and knew no English. She was
always scattering her profanities around, and they were such a
satisfaction to me that I never dreamed of such a thing as modifying
her. For my own sake, I had no disposition to tell on her. Indeed I took
pains to keep her from being found out. I told her to confine her
religious exercises to the children's quarters, and urged her to
remember that Mrs. Clemens was prejudiced against pieties on week-days.
To the children, the little maid's profanities sounded natural and
proper and right, because they had been used to that kind of talk in
Germany, and they attached no evil importance to it. It grieves me that
I have forgotten those vigorous remarks. I long hoarded them in my
memory as a treasure. But I remember one of them still, because I heard
it so many times. The trial of that little creature's life was the
children's hair. She would tug and strain with her comb, accompanying
her work with her misplaced pieties. And when finally she was through
with her triple job she always fired up and exploded her thanks toward
the sky, where they belonged, in this form: "_Gott sei Dank ich bin
fertig mit'm Gott verdammtes Haar!_" (I believe I am not quite brave
enough to translate it.)
_From Susy's Biography_.
We at length reached Vassar College and she looked very finely, her
buildings and her grounds being very beautiful. We went to the
front doore and range the bell. The young girl who came to the
doore wished to know who we wanted to see. Evidently we were not
expected. Papa told her who we wanted to see and she showed us to
the parlor. We waited, no one came; and waited, no one came, still
no one came. It was beginning to seem pretty awkward, "Oh well this
is a pretty piece of business," papa exclaimed. At length we heard
footsteps coming down the long corridor and Miss C, (the lady who
had invited papa) came into the room. She greeted papa very
pleasantly and they had a nice little chatt together. Soon the lady
principal also entered and she was very pleasant and agreable. She
showed us to our rooms and said she would send for us when dinner
was ready. We went into our rooms, but we had nothing to do for
half an hour exept to watch the rain drops as they fell upon the
window panes. At last we were called to dinner, and I went down
without papa as he never eats anything in the middle of the day. I
sat at the table with the lady principal and enjoyed very much
seeing all the young girls trooping into the dining-room. After
dinner I went around the College with the young ladies and papa
stayed in his room and smoked. When it was supper time papa went
down and ate supper with us and we had a very delightful supper.
After supper the young ladies went to their rooms to dress for the
evening. Papa went to his room and I went with the lady principal.
At length the guests began to arive, but papa still remained in his
room until called for. Papa read in the chapell. It was the first
time I had ever heard him read in my life--that is in public. When
he came out on to the stage I remember the people behind me
exclaimed "Oh how queer he is! Isn't he funny!" I thought papa was
very funny, although I did not think him queer. He read "A Trying
Situation" and "The Golden Arm," a ghost story that he heard down
South when he was a little boy. "The Golden Arm" papa had told me
before, but he had startled me so that I did not much wish to hear
it again. But I had resolved this time to be prepared and not to
let myself be startled, but still papa did, and very very much; he
startled the whole roomful of people and they jumped as one man.
The other story was also very funny and interesting and I enjoyed
the evening inexpressibly much. After papa had finished reading we
all went down to the collation in the dining-room and after that
there was dancing and singing. Then the guests went away and papa
and I went to bed. The next morning we rose early, took an early
train for Hartford and reached Hartford at 1/2 past 2 o'clock. We
were very glad to get back.
How charitably she treats that ghastly experience! It is a dear and
lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away
indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features
of an experience. Susy had that disposition, and it was one of the
jewels of her character that had come to her straight from her mother.
It is a feature that was left out of me at birth. And, at seventy, I
have not yet acquired it. I did not go to Vassar College professionally,
but as a guest--as a guest, and gratis. Aunt Clara (now Mrs. John B.
Stanchfield) was a graduate of Vassar and it was to please her that I
inflicted that journey upon Susy and myself. The invitation had come to
me from both the lady mentioned by Susy and the President of the
College--a sour old saint who has probably been gathered to his fathers
long ago; and I hope they enjoy him; I hope they value his society. I
think I can get along without it, in either end of the next world.
We arrived at the College in that soaking rain, and Susy has described,
with just a suggestion of dissatisfaction, the sort of reception we got.
Susy had to sit in her damp clothes half an hour while we waited in the
parlor; then she was taken to a fireless room and left to wait there
again, as she has stated. I do not remember that President's name, and I
am sorry. He did not put in an appearance until it was time for me to
step upon the platform in front of that great garden of young and lovely
blossoms. He caught up with me and advanced upon the platform with me
and was going to introduce me. I said in substance:
"You have allowed me to get along without your help thus far, and if you
will retire from the platform I will try to do the rest without it."
I did not see him any more, but I detest his memory. Of course my
resentment did not extend to the students, and so I had an unforgettable
good time talking to them. And I think they had a good time too, for
they responded "as one man," to use Susy's unimprovable phrase.
Girls are charming creatures. I shall have to be twice seventy years old
before I change my mind as to that. I am to talk to a crowd of them this
afternoon, students of Barnard College (the sex's annex to Columbia
University), and I think I shall have as pleasant a time with those
lasses as I had with the Vassar girls twenty-one years ago.
_From Susy's Biography._
I stopped in the middle of mamma's early history to tell about our
tripp to Vassar because I was afraid I would forget about it, now I
will go on where I left off. Some time after Miss Emma Nigh died
papa took mamma and little Langdon to Elmira for the summer. When
in Elmira Langdon began to fail but I think mamma did not know just
what was the matter with him.
I was the cause of the child's illness. His mother trusted him to my
care and I took him a long drive in an open barouche for an airing. It
was a raw, cold morning, but he was well wrapped about with furs and, in
the hands of a careful person, no harm would have come to him. But I
soon dropped into a reverie and forgot all about my charge. The furs
fell away and exposed his bare legs. By and by the coachman noticed
this, and I arranged the wraps again, but it was too late. The child was
almost frozen. I hurried home with him. I was aghast at what I had done,
and I feared the consequences. I have always felt shame for that
treacherous morning's work and have not allowed myself to think of it
when I could help it. I doubt if I had the courage to make confession at
that time. I think it most likely that I have never confessed until now.
_From Susy's Biography._
At last it was time for papa to return to Hartford, and Langdon was
real sick at that time, but still mamma decided to go with him,
thinking the journey might do him good. But after they reached
Hartford he became very sick, and his trouble prooved to be
diptheeria. He died about a week after mamma and papa reached
Hartford. He was burried by the side of grandpa at Elmira, New
York. [Susy rests there with them.--S. L. C.] After that, mamma
became very very ill, so ill that there seemed great danger of
death, but with a great deal of good care she recovered. Some
months afterward mamma and papa [and Susy, who was perhaps fourteen
or fifteen months old at the time.--S. L. C.] went to Europe and
stayed for a time in Scotland and England. In Scotland mamma and
papa became very well equanted with Dr. John Brown, the author of
"Rab and His Friends," and he mett, but was not so well equanted
with, Mr. Charles Kingsley, Mr. Henry M. Stanley, Sir Thomas Hardy
grandson of the Captain Hardy to whom Nellson said "Kiss me Hardy,"
when dying on shipboard, Mr. Henry Irving, Robert Browning, Sir
Charles Dilke, Mr. Charles Reade, Mr. William Black, Lord Houghton,
Frank Buckland, Mr. Tom Hughes, Anthony Trollope, Tom Hood, son of
the poet--and mamma and papa were quite well equanted with Dr.
Macdonald and family, and papa met Harrison Ainsworth.
I remember all these men very well indeed, except the last one. I do not
recall Ainsworth. By my count, Susy mentions fourteen men. They are all
dead except Sir Charles Dilke.
We met a great many other interesting people, among them Lewis Carroll,
author of the immortal "Alice"--but he was only interesting to look at,
for he was the stillest and shyest full-grown man I have ever met except
"Uncle Remus." Dr. Macdonald and several other lively talkers were
present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but Carroll
sat still all the while except that now and then he answered a question.
His answers were brief. I do not remember that he elaborated any of
them.
At a dinner at Smalley's we met Herbert Spencer. At a large luncheon
party at Lord Houghton's we met Sir Arthur Helps, who was a celebrity of
world-wide fame at the time, but is quite forgotten now. Lord Elcho, a
large vigorous man, sat at some distance down the table. He was talking
earnestly about Godalming. It was a deep and flowing and unarticulated
rumble, but I got the Godalming pretty clearly every time it broke free
of the rumble, and as all the strength was on the first end of the word
it startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the
middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on her
right and on her left in a matter-of-fact way, "Excuse me, I have an
engagement," and without further ceremony she went off to meet it. This
would have been doubtful etiquette in America. Lord Houghton told a
number of delightful stories. He told them in French, and I lost nothing
of them but the nubs.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
FOOTNOTE:
[5] I was his publisher. I was putting his "Personal Memoirs" to press
at the time.--S. L. C.
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCIV.
DECEMBER 7, 1906.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--VII.
BY MARK TWAIN.
I was always heedless. I was born heedless; and therefore I was
constantly, and quite unconsciously, committing breaches of the minor
proprieties, which brought upon me humiliations which ought to have
humiliated me but didn't, because I didn't know anything had happened.
But Livy knew; and so the humiliations fell to her share, poor child,
who had not earned them and did not deserve them. She always said I was
the most difficult child she had. She was very sensitive about me. It
distressed her to see me do heedless things which could bring me under
criticism, and so she was always watchful and alert to protect me from
the kind of transgressions which I have been speaking of.
When I was leaving Hartford for Washington, upon the occasion referred
to, she said: "I have written a small warning and put it in a pocket of
your dress-vest. When you are dressing to go to the Authors' Reception
at the White House you will naturally put your fingers in your vest
pockets, according to your custom, and you will find that little note
there. Read it carefully, and do as it tells you. I cannot be with you,
and so I delegate my sentry duties to this little note. If I should give
you the warning by word of mouth, now, it would pass from your head and
be forgotten in a few minutes."
It was President Cleveland's first term. I had never seen his wife--the
young, the beautiful, the good-hearted, the sympathetic, the
fascinating. Sure enough, just as I had finished dressing to go to the
White House I found that little note, which I had long ago forgotten. It
was a grave little note, a serious little note, like its writer, but it
made me laugh. Livy's gentle gravities often produced that effect upon
me, where the expert humorist's best joke would have failed, for I do
not laugh easily.
When we reached the White House and I was shaking hands with the
President, he started to say something, but I interrupted him and said:
"If your Excellency will excuse me, I will come back in a moment; but
now I have a very important matter to attend to, and it must be attended
to at once."
I turned to Mrs. Cleveland, the young, the beautiful, the fascinating,
and gave her my card, on the back of which I had written "_He
didn't_"--and I asked her to sign her name below those words.
She said: "He didn't? He didn't what?"
"Oh," I said, "never mind. We cannot stop to discuss that now. This is
urgent. Won't you please sign your name?" (I handed her a fountain-pen.)
"Why," she said, "I cannot commit myself in that way. Who is it that
didn't?--and what is it that he didn't?"
"Oh," I said, "time is flying, flying, flying. Won't you take me out of
my distress and sign your name to it? It's all right. I give you my word
it's all right."
She looked nonplussed; but hesitatingly and mechanically she took the
pen and said:
"I will sign it. I will take the risk. But you must tell me all about
it, right afterward, so that you can be arrested before you get out of
the house in case there should be anything criminal about this."
Then she signed; and I handed her Mrs. Clements's note, which was very
brief, very simple, and to the point. It said: "_Don't wear your arctics
in the White House._" It made her shout; and at my request she summoned
a messenger and we sent that card at once to the mail on its way to Mrs.
Clemens in Hartford.
When the little Ruth was about a year or a year and a half old, Mason,
an old and valued friend of mine, was consul-general at
Frankfort-on-the-Main. I had known him well in 1867, '68 and '69, in
America, and I and mine had spent a good deal of time with him and his
family in Frankfort in '78. He was a thoroughly competent, diligent, and
conscientious official. Indeed he possessed these qualities in so large
a degree that among American consuls he might fairly be said to be
monumental, for at that time our consular service was largely--and I
think I may say mainly--in the hands of ignorant, vulgar, and incapable
men who had been political heelers in America, and had been taken care
of by transference to consulates where they could be supported at the
Government's expense instead of being transferred to the poor house,
which would have been cheaper and more patriotic. Mason, in '78, had
been consul-general in Frankfort several years--four, I think. He had
come from Marseilles with a great record. He had been consul there
during thirteen years, and one part of his record was heroic. There had
been a desolating cholera epidemic, and Mason was the only
representative of any foreign country who stayed at his post and saw it
through. And during that time he not only represented his own country,
but he represented all the other countries in Christendom and did their
work, and did it well and was praised for it by them in words of no
uncertain sound. This great record of Mason's had saved him from
official decapitation straight along while Republican Presidents
occupied the chair, but now it was occupied by a Democrat. Mr. Cleveland
was not seated in it--he was not yet inaugurated--before he was deluged
with applications from Democratic politicians desiring the appointment
of a thousand or so politically useful Democrats to Mason's place. A
year or two later Mason wrote me and asked me if I couldn't do something
to save him from destruction.
I was very anxious to keep him in his place, but at first I could not
think of any way to help him, for I was a mugwump. We, the mugwumps, a
little company made up of the unenslaved of both parties, the very best
men to be found in the two great parties--that was our idea of it--voted
sixty thousand strong for Mr. Cleveland in New York and elected him. Our
principles were high, and very definite. We were not a party; we had no
candidates; we had no axes to grind. Our vote laid upon the man we cast
it for no obligation of any kind. By our rule we could not ask for
office; we could not accept office. When voting, it was our duty to vote
for the best man, regardless of his party name. We had no other creed.
Vote for the best man--that was creed enough.
Such being my situation, I was puzzled to know how to try to help Mason,
and, at the same time, save my mugwump purity undefiled. It was a
delicate place. But presently, out of the ruck of confusions in my mind,
rose a sane thought, clear and bright--to wit: since it was a mugwump's
duty to do his best to put the beet man in office, necessarily it must
be a mugwump's duty to try to _keep_ the best man in when he was already
there. My course was easy now. It might not be quite delicate for a
mugwump to approach the President directly, but I could approach him
indirectly, with all delicacy, since in that case not even courtesy
would require him to take notice of an application which no one could
prove had ever reached him.
Yes, it was easy and simple sailing now. I could lay the matter before
Ruth, in her cradle, and wait for results. I wrote the little child, and
said to her all that I have just been saying about mugwump principles
and the limitations which they put upon me. I explained that it would
not be proper for me to apply to her father in Mr. Mason's behalf, but I
detailed to her Mr. Mason's high and honorable record and suggested that
she take the matter in her own hands and do a patriotic work which I
felt some delicacy about venturing upon myself. I asked her to forget
that her father was only President of the United States, and her subject
and servant; I asked her not to put her application in the form of a
command, but to modify it, and give it the fictitious and pleasanter
form of a mere request--that it would be no harm to let him gratify
himself with the superstition that he was independent and could do as he
pleased in the matter. I begged her to put stress, and plenty of it,
upon the proposition that to keep Mason in his place would be a
benefaction to the nation; to enlarge upon that, and keep still about
all other considerations.
In due time I received a letter from the President, written with his own
hand, signed by his own hand, acknowledging Ruth's intervention and
thanking me for enabling him to save to the country the services of so
good and well-tried a servant as Mason, and thanking me, also, for the
detailed fulness of Mason's record, which could leave no doubt in any
one's mind that Mason was in his right place and ought to be kept there.
Mason has remained in the service ever since, and is now consul-general
at Paris.
During the time that we were living in Buffalo in '70-'71, Mr. Cleveland
was sheriff, but I never happened to make his acquaintance, or even see
him. In fact, I suppose I was not even aware of his existence. Fourteen
years later, he was become the greatest man in the State. I was not
living in the State at the time. He was Governor, and was about to step
into the post of President of the United States. At that time I was on
the public highway in company with another bandit, George W. Cable. We
were robbing the public with readings from our works during four
months--and in the course of time we went to Albany to levy tribute, and
I said, "We ought to go and pay our respects to the Governor."
So Cable and I went to that majestic Capitol building and stated our
errand. We were shown into the Governor's private office, and I saw Mr.
Cleveland for the first time. We three stood chatting together. I was
born lazy, and I comforted myself by turning the corner of a table into
a sort of seat. Presently the Governor said:
"Mr. Clemens, I was a fellow citizen of yours in Buffalo a good many
months, a good while ago, and during those months you burst suddenly
into a mighty fame, out of a previous long-continued and no doubt proper
obscurity--but I was a nobody, and you wouldn't notice me nor have
anything to do with me. But now that I have become somebody, you have
changed your style, and you come here to shake hands with me and be
sociable. How do you explain this kind of conduct?"
"Oh," I said, "it is very simple, your Excellency. In Buffalo you were
nothing but a sheriff. I was in society. I couldn't afford to associate
with sheriffs. But you are a Governor now, and you are on your way to
the Presidency. It is a great difference, and it makes you worth while."
There appeared to be about sixteen doors to that spacious room. From
each door a young man now emerged, and the sixteen lined up and moved
forward and stood in front of the Governor with an aspect of respectful
expectancy in their attitude. No one spoke for a moment. Then the
Governor said:
"You are dismissed, gentlemen. Your services are not required. Mr.
Clemens is sitting on the bells."
There was a cluster of sixteen bell buttons on the corner of the table;
my proportions at that end of me were just right to enable me to cover
the whole of that nest, and that is how I came to hatch out those
sixteen clerks.
In accordance with the suggestion made in Gilder's letter recently
received I have written the following note to ex-President Cleveland
upon his sixty-ninth birthday:
HONORED SIR:--
Your patriotic virtues have won for you the homage of half the
nation and the enmity of the other half. This places your character
as a citizen upon a summit as high as Washington's. The verdict is
unanimous and unassailable. The votes of both sides are necessary
in cases like these, and the votes of the one side are quite as
valuable as are the votes of the other. Where the votes are all in
a man's favor the verdict is against him. It is sand, and history
will wash it away. But the verdict for you is rock, and will stand.
S. L. CLEMENS.
As of date March 18, 1906....
In a diary which Mrs. Clemens kept for a little while, a great many
years ago, I find various mentions of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who
was a near neighbor of ours in Hartford, with no fences between. And in
those days she made as much use of our grounds as of her own, in
pleasant weather. Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure.
She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular
Irishwoman. Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always
stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free
will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of
animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do
it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and
musings and fetch a war-whoop that would jump that person out of his
clothes. And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music
in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing
ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect.
Her husband, old Professor Stowe, was a picturesque figure. He wore a
broad slouch hat. He was a large man, and solemn. His beard was white
and thick and hung far down on his breast. The first time our little
Susy ever saw him she encountered him on the street near our house and
came flying wide-eyed to her mother and said, "Santa Claus has got
loose!"
Which reminds me of Rev. Charley Stowe's little boy--a little boy of
seven years. I met Rev. Charley crossing his mother's grounds one
morning and he told me this little tale. He had been out to Chicago to
attend a Convention of Congregational clergymen, and had taken his
little boy with him. During the trip he reminded the little chap, every
now and then, that he must be on his very best behavior there in
Chicago. He said: "We shall be the guests of a clergyman, there will be
other guests--clergymen and their wives--and you must be careful to let
those people see by your walk and conversation that you are of a godly
household. Be very careful about this." The admonition bore fruit. At
the first breakfast which they ate in the Chicago clergyman's house he
heard his little son say in the meekest and most reverent way to the
lady opposite him,
"Please, won't you, for Christ's sake, pass the butter?"
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCV.
DECEMBER 21, 1906.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--VIII.
BY MARK TWAIN.
[Sidenote: (1864.)]
[_Dictated in 1906._] In those early days duelling suddenly became a
fashion in the new Territory of Nevada, and by 1864 everybody was
anxious to have a chance in the new sport, mainly for the reason that he
was not able to thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed
or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled in one
himself.
At that time I had been serving as city editor on Mr. Goodman's Virginia
City "Enterprise" for a matter of two years. I was twenty-nine years
old. I was ambitious in several ways, but I had entirely escaped the
seductions of that particular craze. I had had no desire to fight a
duel; I had no intention of provoking one. I did not feel respectable,
but I got a certain amount of satisfaction out of feeling safe. I was
ashamed of myself; the rest of the staff were ashamed of me--but I got
along well enough. I had always been accustomed to feeling ashamed of
myself, for one thing or another, so there was no novelty for me in the
situation. I bore it very well. Plunkett was on the staff; R. M. Daggett
was on the staff. These had tried to get into duels, but for the present
had failed, and were waiting. Goodman was the only one of us who had
done anything to shed credit upon the paper. The rival paper was the
Virginia "Union." Its editor for a little while was Tom Fitch, called
the "silver-tongued orator of Wisconsin"--that was where he came from.
He tuned up his oratory in the editorial columns of the "Union," and Mr.
Goodman invited him out and modified him with a bullet. I remember the
joy of the staff when Goodman's challenge was accepted by Fitch. We ran
late that night, and made much of Joe Goodman. He was only twenty-four
years old; he lacked the wisdom which a person has at twenty-nine, and
he was as glad of being _it_ as I was that I wasn't. He chose Major
Graves for his second (that name is not right, but it's close enough; I
don't remember the Major's name). Graves came over to instruct Joe in
the duelling art. He had been a Major under Walker, the "gray-eyed man
of destiny," and had fought all through that remarkable man's
filibustering campaign in Central America. That fact gauges the Major.
To say that a man was a Major under Walker, and came out of that
struggle ennobled by Walker's praise, is to say that the Major was not
merely a brave man but that he was brave to the very utmost limit of
that word. All of Walker's men were like that. I knew the Gillis family
intimately. The father made the campaign under Walker, and with him one
son. They were in the memorable Plaza fight, and stood it out to the
last against overwhelming odds, as did also all of the Walker men. The
son was killed at the father's side. The father received a bullet
through the eye. The old man--for he was an old man at the time--wore
spectacles, and the bullet and one of the glasses went into his skull
and remained there. There were some other sons: Steve, George, and Jim,
very young chaps--the merest lads--who wanted to be in the Walker
expedition, for they had their father's dauntless spirit. But Walker
wouldn't have them; he said it was a serious expedition, and no place
for children.
The Major was a majestic creature, with a most stately and dignified and
impressive military bearing, and he was by nature and training
courteous, polite, graceful, winning; and he had that quality which I
think I have encountered in only one other man--Bob Howland--a
mysterious quality which resides in the eye; and when that eye is turned
upon an individual or a squad, in warning, that is enough. The man that
has that eye doesn't need to go armed; he can move upon an armed
desperado and quell him and take him prisoner without saying a single
word. I saw Bob Howland do that, once--a slender, good-natured, amiable,
gentle, kindly little skeleton of a man, with a sweet blue eye that
would win your heart when it smiled upon you, or turn cold and freeze
it, according to the nature of the occasion.
The Major stood Joe up straight; stood Steve Gillis up fifteen paces
away; made Joe turn right side towards Steve, cock his navy
six-shooter--that prodigious weapon--and hold it straight down against
his leg; told him that _that_ was the correct position for the gun--that
the position ordinarily in use at Virginia City (that is to say, the gun
straight up in the air, then brought slowly down to your man) was all
wrong. At the word "_One_," you must raise the gun slowly and steadily
to the place on the other man's body that you desire to convince. Then,
after a pause, "_two, three--fire--Stop!_" At the word "stop," you may
fire--but not earlier. You may give yourself as much time as you please
_after_ that word. Then, when you fire, you may advance and go on firing
at your leisure and pleasure, if you can get any pleasure out of it.
And, in the meantime, the other man, if he has been properly instructed
and is alive to his privileges, is advancing on _you_, and firing--and
it is always likely that more or less trouble will result.
Naturally, when Joe's revolver had risen to a level it was pointing at
Steve's breast, but the Major said "No, that is not wise. Take all the
risks of getting murdered yourself, but don't run any risk of murdering
the other man. If you survive a duel you want to survive it in such a
way that the memory of it will not linger along with you through the
rest of your life and interfere with your sleep. Aim at your man's leg;
not at the knee, not above the knee; for those are dangerous spots. Aim
below the knee; cripple him, but leave the rest of him to his mother."
By grace of these truly wise and excellent instructions, Joe tumbled
Fitch down next morning with a bullet through his lower leg, which
furnished him a permanent limp. And Joe lost nothing but a lock of hair,
which he could spare better then than he could now. For when I saw him
here in New York a year ago, his crop was gone: he had nothing much left
but a fringe, with a dome rising above.
[Sidenote: (1864.)]
About a year later I got _my_ chance. But I was not hunting for it.
Goodman went off to San Francisco for a week's holiday, and left me to
be chief editor. I had supposed that that was an easy berth, there being
nothing to do but write one editorial per day; but I was disappointed in
that superstition. I couldn't find anything to write an article about,
the first day. Then it occurred to me that inasmuch as it was the 22nd
of April, 1864, the next morning would be the three-hundredth
anniversary of Shakespeare's birthday--and what better theme could I
want than that? I got the Cyclopædia and examined it, and found out who
Shakespeare was and what he had done, and I borrowed all that and laid
it before a community that couldn't have been better prepared for
instruction about Shakespeare than if they had been prepared by art.
There wasn't enough of what Shakespeare had done to make an editorial of
the necessary length, but I filled it out with what he hadn't
done--which in many respects was more important and striking and
readable than the handsomest things he had really accomplished. But next
day I was in trouble again. There were no more Shakespeares to work up.
There was nothing in past history, or in the world's future
possibilities, to make an editorial out of, suitable to that community;
so there was but one theme left. That theme was Mr. Laird, proprietor of
the Virginia "Union." _His_ editor had gone off to San Francisco too,
and Laird was trying his hand at editing. I woke up Mr. Laird with some
courtesies of the kind that were fashionable among newspaper editors in
that region, and he came back at me the next day in a most vitriolic
way. He was hurt by something I had said about him--some little thing--I
don't remember what it was now--probably called him a horse-thief, or
one of those little phrases customarily used to describe another
editor. They were no doubt just, and accurate, but Laird was a very
sensitive creature, and he didn't like it. So we expected a challenge
from Mr. Laird, because according to the rules--according to the
etiquette of duelling as reconstructed and reorganized and improved by
the duellists of that region--whenever you said a thing about another
person that he didn't like, it wasn't sufficient for him to talk back in
the same offensive spirit: etiquette required him to send a challenge;
so we waited for a challenge--waited all day. It didn't come. And as the
day wore along, hour after hour, and no challenge came, the boys grew
depressed. They lost heart. But I was cheerful; I felt better and better
all the time. They couldn't understand it, but _I_ could understand it.
It was my _make_ that enabled me to be cheerful when other people were
despondent. So then it became necessary for us to waive etiquette and
challenge Mr. Laird. When we reached that decision, they began to cheer
up, but I began to lose some of my animation. However, in enterprises of
this kind you are in the hands of your friends; there is nothing for you
to do but to abide by what they consider to be the best course. Daggett
wrote a challenge for me, for Daggett had the language--the right
language--the convincing language--and I lacked it. Daggett poured out a
stream of unsavory epithets upon Mr. Laird, charged with a vigor and
venom of a strength calculated to persuade him; and Steve Gillis, my
second, carried the challenge and came back to wait for the return. It
didn't come. The boys were exasperated, but I kept my temper. Steve
carried another challenge, hotter than the other, and we waited again.
Nothing came of it. I began to feel quite comfortable. I began to take
an interest in the challenges myself. I had not felt any before; but it
seemed to me that I was accumulating a great and valuable reputation at
no expense, and my delight in this grew and grew, as challenge after
challenge was declined, until by midnight I was beginning to think that
there was nothing in the world so much to be desired as a chance to
fight a duel. So I hurried Daggett up; made him keep on sending
challenge after challenge. Oh, well, I overdid it; Laird accepted. I
might have known that that would happen--Laird was a man you couldn't
depend on.
The boys were jubilant beyond expression. They helped me make my will,
which was another discomfort--and I already had enough. Then they took
me home. I didn't sleep any--didn't want to sleep. I had plenty of
things to think about, and less than four hours to do it in,--because
five o'clock was the hour appointed for the tragedy, and I should have
to use up one hour--beginning at four--in practising with the revolver
and finding out which end of it to level at the adversary. At four we
went down into a little gorge, about a mile from town, and borrowed a
barn door for a mark--borrowed it of a man who was over in California on
a visit--and we set the barn door up and stood a fence-rail up against
the middle of it, to represent Mr. Laird. But the rail was no proper
representative of him, for he was longer than a rail and thinner.
Nothing would ever fetch him but a line shot, and then as like as not he
would split the bullet--the worst material for duelling purposes that
could be imagined. I began on the rail. I couldn't hit the rail; then I
tried the barn door; but I couldn't hit the barn door. There was nobody
in danger except stragglers around on the flanks of that mark. I was
thoroughly discouraged, and I didn't cheer up any when we presently
heard pistol-shots over in the next little ravine. I knew what that
was--that was Laird's gang out practising him. They would hear my shots,
and of course they would come up over the ridge to see what kind of a
record I was making--see what their chances were against me. Well, I
hadn't any record; and I knew that if Laird came over that ridge and saw
my barn door without a scratch on it, he would be as anxious to fight as
I was--or as I had been at midnight, before that disastrous acceptance
came.
Now just at this moment, a little bird, no bigger than a sparrow, flew
along by and lit on a sage-bush about thirty yards away. Steve whipped
out his revolver and shot its head off. Oh, he was a marksman--much
better than I was. We ran down there to pick up the bird, and just then,
sure enough, Mr. Laird and his people came over the ridge, and they
joined us. And when Laird's second saw that bird, with its head shot
off, he lost color, he faded, and you could see that he was interested.
He said:
"Who did that?"
Before I could answer, Steve spoke up and said quite calmly, and in a
matter-of-fact way,
"Clemens did it."
The second said, "Why, that is wonderful. How far off was that bird?"
Steve said, "Oh, not far--about thirty yards."
The second said, "Well, that is astonishing shooting. How often can he
do that?"
Steve said languidly, "Oh, about four times out of five."
I knew the little rascal was lying, but I didn't say anything. The
second said, "Why, that is _amazing_ shooting; I supposed he couldn't
hit a church."
He was supposing very sagaciously, but I didn't say anything. Well, they
said good morning. The second took Mr. Laird home, a little tottery on
his legs, and Laird sent back a note in his own hand declining to fight
a duel with me on any terms whatever.
Well, my life was saved--saved by that accident. I don't know what the
bird thought about that interposition of Providence, but I felt very,
very comfortable over it--satisfied and content. Now, we found out,
later, that Laird had _hit_ his mark four times out of six, right along.
If the duel had come off, he would have so filled my skin with
bullet-holes that it wouldn't have held my principles.
By breakfast-time the news was all over town that I had sent a challenge
and Steve Gillis had carried it. Now that would entitle us to two years
apiece in the penitentiary, according to the brand-new law. Judge North
sent us no message as coming from himself, but a message _came_ from a
close friend of his. He said it would be a good idea for us to leave the
territory by the first stage-coach. This would sail next morning, at
four o'clock--and in the meantime we would be searched for, but not with
avidity; and if we were in the Territory after that stage-coach left, we
would be the first victims of the new law. Judge North was anxious to
have some object-lessons for that law, and he would absolutely keep us
in the prison the full two years.
Well, it seemed to me that our society was no longer desirable in
Nevada; so we stayed in our quarters and observed proper caution all
day--except that once Steve went over to the hotel to attend to another
customer of mine. That was a Mr. Cutler. You see Laird was not the only
person whom I had tried to reform during my occupancy of the editorial
chair. I had looked around and selected several other people, and
delivered a new zest of life into them through warm criticism and
disapproval--so that when I laid down my editorial pen I had four
horse-whippings and two duels owing to me. We didn't care for the
horse-whippings; there was no glory in them; they were not worth the
trouble of collecting. But honor required that some notice should be
taken of that other duel. Mr. Cutler had come up from Carson City, and
had sent a man over with a challenge from the hotel. Steve went over to
pacify him. Steve weighed only ninety-five pounds, but it was well known
throughout the territory that with his fists he could whip anybody that
walked on two legs, let his weight and science be what they might. Steve
was a Gillis, and when a Gillis confronted a man and had a proposition
to make, the proposition always contained business. When Cutler found
that Steve was my second he cooled down; he became calm and rational,
and was ready to listen. Steve gave him fifteen minutes to get out of
the hotel, and half an hour to get out of town or there would be
results. So _that_ duel went off successfully, because Mr. Cutler
immediately left for Carson a convinced and reformed man.
I have never had anything to do with duels since. I thoroughly
disapprove of duels. I consider them unwise, and I know they are
dangerous. Also, sinful. If a man should challenge me now, I would go to
that man and take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to
a quiet retired spot, and _kill_ him.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCVI.
JANUARY 4, 1907.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--IX.
BY MARK TWAIN.
[_Dictated December 13, 1906._] As regards the coming American monarchy.
It was before the Secretary of State had been heard from that the
chairman of the banquet said:
"In this time of unrest it is of great satisfaction that such a man as
you, Mr. Root, is chief adviser of the President."
Mr. Root then got up and in the most quiet and orderly manner touched
off the successor to the San Francisco earthquake. As a result, the
several State governments were well shaken up and considerably weakened.
Mr. Root was prophesying. He was prophesying, and it seems to me that no
shrewder and surer forecasting has been done in this country for a good
many years.
He did not say, in so many words, that we are proceeding, in a steady
march, toward eventual and unavoidable replacement of the republic by
monarchy; but I suppose he was aware that that is the case. He notes the
several steps, the customary steps, which in all the ages have led to
the consolidation of loose and scattered governmental forces into
formidable centralizations of authority; but he stops there, and doesn't
add up the sum. He is not unaware that heretofore the sum has been
ultimate monarchy, and that the same figures can fairly be depended upon
to furnish the same sum whenever and wherever they can be produced, so
long as human nature shall remain as it is; but it was not needful that
he do the adding, since any one can do it; neither would it have been
gracious in him to do it.
In observing the changed conditions which in the course of time have
made certain and sure the eventual seizure by the Washington government
of a number of State duties and prerogatives which have been betrayed
and neglected by the several States, he does not attribute those changes
and the vast results which are to flow from them to any thought-out
policy of any party or of any body of dreamers or schemers, but properly
and rightly attributes them to that stupendous power--_Circumstance_--
which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and
whose decrees are final, and must be obeyed by all--and will be. The
railway is a Circumstance, the steamship is a Circumstance, the
telegraph is a Circumstance. They were mere happenings; and to the whole
world, the wise and the foolish alike, they were entirely trivial,
wholly inconsequential; indeed silly, comical, grotesque. No man, and no
party, and no thought-out policy said, "Behold, we will build railways
and steamships and telegraphs, and presently you will see the condition
and way of life of every man and woman and child in the nation totally
changed; unimaginable changes of law and custom will follow, in spite of
anything that anybody can do to prevent it."
The changed conditions have come, and Circumstance knows what is
following, and will follow. So does Mr. Root. His language is not
unclear, it is crystal:
"Our whole life has swung away from the old State centres, and is
crystallizing about national centres."
" ... The old barriers which kept the States as separate
communities are completely lost from sight."
" ... That [State] power of regulation and control is gradually
passing into the hands of the national government."
"Sometimes by an assertion of the inter-State commerce power,
sometimes by an assertion of the taxing power, the national
government is taking up the performance of duties which under the
changed conditions the separate States are no longer capable of
adequately performing."
"We are urging forward in a development of business and social life
which tends more and more to the obliteration of State lines and
the decrease of State power as compared with national power."
"It is useless for the advocates of State rights to inveigh against
... the extension of national authority in the fields of necessary
control where the States themselves fail in the performance of
their duty."
He is not announcing a policy; he is not forecasting what a party of
planners will bring about; he is merely telling what the people will
require and compel. And he could have added--which would be perfectly
true--that the people will not be moved to it by speculation and
cogitation and planning, but by _Circumstance_--that power which
arbitrarily compels all their actions, and over which they have not the
slightest control.
_"The end is not yet."_
It is a true word. We are on the march, but at present we are only just
getting started.
If the States continue to fail to do their duty as required by the
people--
" ... _constructions of the Constitution will be found_ to vest the
power where it will be exercised--in the national government."
I do not know whether that has a sinister meaning or not, and so I will
not enlarge upon it lest I should chance to be in the wrong. It sounds
like ship-money come again, but it may not be so intended.
Human nature being what it is, I suppose we must expect to drift into
monarchy by and by. It is a saddening thought, but we cannot change our
nature: we are all alike, we human beings; and in our blood and bone,
and ineradicable, we carry the seeds out of which monarchies and
aristocracies are grown: worship of gauds, titles, distinctions, power.
We have to worship these things and their possessors, we are all born
so, and we cannot help it. We have to be despised by somebody whom we
regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to
worship and envy, or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this
in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and
hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we
get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter. Sometimes we get a
good man and worth the price, but we are ready to take him anyway,
whether he be ripe or rotten, whether he be clean and decent, or merely
a basket of noble and sacred and long-descended offal. And when we get
him the whole nation publicly chaffs and scoffs--and privately envies;
and also is proud of the honor which has been conferred upon us. We run
over our list of titled purchases every now and then, in the newspapers,
and discuss them and caress them, and are thankful and happy.
Like all the other nations, we worship money and the possessors of
it--they being our aristocracy, and we have to have one. We like to read
about rich people in the papers; the papers know it, and they do their
best to keep this appetite liberally fed. They even leave out a football
bull-fight now and then to get room for all the particulars of
how--according to the display heading--"Rich Woman Fell Down Cellar--Not
Hurt." The falling down the cellar is of no interest to us when the
woman is not rich, but no rich woman can fall down cellar and we not
yearn to know all about it and wish it was us.
In a monarchy the people willingly and rejoicingly revere and take pride
in their nobilities, and are not humiliated by the reflection that this
humble and hearty homage gets no return but contempt. Contempt does not
shame them, they are used to it, and they recognize that it is their
proper due. We are all made like that. In Europe we easily and quickly
learn to take that attitude toward the sovereigns and the aristocracies;
moreover, it has been observed that when we get the attitude we go on
and exaggerate it, presently becoming more servile than the natives, and
vainer of it. The next step is to rail and scoff at republics and
democracies. All of which is natural, for we have not ceased to be human
beings by becoming Americans, and the human race was always intended to
be governed by kingship, not by popular vote.
I suppose we must expect that unavoidable and irresistible Circumstances
will gradually take away the powers of the States and concentrate them
in the central government, and that the republic will then repeat the
history of all time and become a monarchy; but I believe that if we
obstruct these encroachments and steadily resist them the monarchy can
be postponed for a good while yet.
[Sidenote: (1849-'51.)]
[_Dictated December 1, 1906._] An exciting event in our village
(Hannibal) was the arrival of the mesmerizer. I think the year was 1850.
As to that I am not sure, but I know the month--it was May; that detail
has survived the wear of fifty-five years. A pair of connected little
incidents of that month have served to keep the memory of it green for
me all this time; incidents of no consequence, and not worth embalming,
yet my memory has preserved them carefully and flung away things of real
value to give them space and make them comfortable. The truth is, a
person's memory has no more sense than his conscience, and no
appreciation whatever of values and proportions. However, never mind
those trifling incidents; my subject is the mesmerizer, now.
He advertised his show, and promised marvels. Admission as usual: 25
cents, children and negroes half price. The village had heard of
mesmerism, in a general way, but had not encountered it yet. Not many
people attended, the first night, but next day they had so many wonders
to tell that everybody's curiosity was fired, and after that for a
fortnight the magician had prosperous times. I was fourteen or fifteen
years old--the age at which a boy is willing to endure all things,
suffer all things, short of death by fire, if thereby he may be
conspicuous and show off before the public; and so, when I saw the
"subjects" perform their foolish antics on the platform and make the
people laugh and shout and admire, I had a burning desire to be a
subject myself. Every night, for three nights, I sat in the row of
candidates on the platform, and held the magic disk in the palm of my
hand, and gazed at it and tried to get sleepy, but it was a failure; I
remained wide awake, and had to retire defeated, like the majority.
Also, I had to sit there and be gnawed with envy of Hicks, our
journeyman; I had to sit there and see him scamper and jump when Simmons
the enchanter exclaimed, "See the snake! see the snake!" and hear him
say, "My, how beautiful!" in response to the suggestion that he was
observing a splendid sunset; and so on--the whole insane business. I
couldn't laugh, I couldn't applaud; it filled me with bitterness to have
others do it, and to have people make a hero of Hicks, and crowd around
him when the show was over, and ask him for more and more particulars of
the wonders he had seen in his visions, and manifest in many ways that
they were proud to be acquainted with him. Hicks--the idea! I couldn't
stand it; I was getting boiled to death in my own bile.
On the fourth night temptation came, and I was not strong enough to
resist. When I had gazed at the disk awhile I pretended to be sleepy,
and began to nod. Straightway came the professor and made passes over my
head and down my body and legs and arms, finishing each pass with a snap
of his fingers in the air, to discharge the surplus electricity; then he
began to "draw" me with the disk, holding it in his fingers and telling
me I could not take my eyes off it, try as I might; so I rose slowly,
bent and gazing, and followed that disk all over the place, just as I
had seen the others do. Then I was put through the other paces. Upon
suggestion I fled from snakes; passed buckets at a fire; became excited
over hot steamboat-races; mad
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