by Mark Twain
I was feeling blithe, almost jocund. I put a match to my cigar, and
just then the morning's mail was handed in. The first superscription I
glanced at was in a handwriting that sent a thrill of pleasure through
and through me. It was Aunt Mary's; and she was the person I loved and
honored most in all the world, outside of my own household. She had been
my boyhood's idol; maturity, which is fatal to so many enchantments,
had not been able to dislodge her from her pedestal; no, it had only
justified her right to be there, and placed her dethronement permanently
among the impossibilities. To show how strong her influence over me was,
I will observe that long after everybody else's “do-stop-smoking” had
ceased to affect me in the slightest degree, Aunt Mary could still stir
my torpid conscience into faint signs of life when she touched upon the
matter. But all things have their limit in this world. A happy day came
at last, when even Aunt Mary's words could no longer move me. I was
not merely glad to see that day arrive; I was more than glad--I was
grateful; for when its sun had set, the one alloy that was able to mar
my enjoyment of my aunt's society was gone. The remainder of her stay
with us that winter was in every way a delight. Of course she pleaded
with me just as earnestly as ever, after that blessed day, to quit my
pernicious habit, but to no purpose whatever; the moment she opened
the subject I at once became calmly, peacefully, contentedly
indifferent--absolutely, adamantinely indifferent. Consequently the
closing weeks of that memorable visit melted away as pleasantly as a
dream, they were so freighted for me with tranquil satisfaction. I could
not have enjoyed my pet vice more if my gentle tormentor had been a
smoker herself, and an advocate of the practice. Well, the sight of her
handwriting reminded me that I way getting very hungry to see her again.
I easily guessed what I should find in her letter. I opened it. Good!
just as I expected; she was coming! Coming this very day, too, and by
the morning train; I might expect her any moment.
I said to myself, “I am thoroughly happy and content now. If my most
pitiless enemy could appear before me at this moment, I would freely
right any wrong I may have done him.”
Straightway the door opened, and a shriveled, shabby dwarf entered. He
was not more than two feet high. He seemed to be about forty years old.
Every feature and every inch of him was a trifle out of shape; and so,
while one could not put his finger upon any particular part and say,
“This is a conspicuous deformity,” the spectator perceived that this
little person was a deformity as a whole--a vague, general, evenly
blended, nicely adjusted deformity. There was a fox-like cunning in the
face and the sharp little eyes, and also alertness and malice. And
yet, this vile bit of human rubbish seemed to bear a sort of remote
and ill-defined resemblance to me! It was dully perceptible in the
mean form, the countenance, and even the clothes, gestures, manner,
and attitudes of the creature. He was a farfetched, dim suggestion of
a burlesque upon me, a caricature of me in little. One thing about him
struck me forcibly and most unpleasantly: he was covered all over with
a fuzzy, greenish mold, such as one sometimes sees upon mildewed bread.
The sight of it was nauseating.
He stepped along with a chipper air, and flung himself into a doll's
chair in a very free-and-easy way, without waiting to be asked. He
tossed his hat into the waste-basket. He picked up my old chalk pipe
from the floor, gave the stem a wipe or two on his knee, filled the
bowl from the tobacco-box at his side, and said to me in a tone of pert
command:
“Gimme a match!”
I blushed to the roots of my hair; partly with indignation, but mainly
because it somehow seemed to me that this whole performance was very
like an exaggeration of conduct which I myself had sometimes been
guilty of in my intercourse with familiar friends--but never, never with
strangers, I observed to myself. I wanted to kick the pygmy into the
fire, but some incomprehensible sense of being legally and legitimately
under his authority forced me to obey his order. He applied the match
to the pipe, took a contemplative whiff or two, and remarked, in an
irritatingly familiar way:
“Seems to me it's devilish odd weather for this time of year.”
I flushed again, and in anger and humiliation as before; for the
language was hardly an exaggeration of some that I have uttered in
my day, and moreover was delivered in a tone of voice and with an
exasperating drawl that had the seeming of a deliberate travesty of my
style. Now there is nothing I am quite so sensitive about as a mocking
imitation of my drawling infirmity of speech. I spoke up sharply and
said:
“Look here, you miserable ash-cat! you will have to give a little more
attention to your manners, or I will throw you out of the window!”
The manikin smiled a smile of malicious content and security, puffed
a whiff of smoke contemptuously toward me, and said, with a still more
elaborate drawl:
“Come--go gently now; don't put on too many airs with your betters.”
This cool snub rasped me all over, but it seemed to subjugate me, too,
for a moment. The pygmy contemplated me awhile with his weasel eyes, and
then said, in a peculiarly sneering way:
“You turned a tramp away from your door this morning.”