silence, he would only have suffered from the sorrows of his own
solitude. If I were not too old to travel, I would go to Berlin and
introduce the etiquette of my own table, which tallies with the
etiquette observable at other royal tables. I would say, "Invite me
again, your Majesty, and give me a chance"; then I would courteously
waive rank and do all the talking myself. I thank his Majesty for his
kind message, and am proud to have it and glad to express my sincere
reciprocation of its sentiments.
[_Dictated January 17, 1906._] ... Rev. Joseph T. Harris and I have been
visiting General Sickles. Once, twenty or twenty-five years ago, just as
Harris was coming out of his gate Sunday morning to walk to his church
and preach, a telegram was put into his hand. He read it immediately,
and then, in a manner, collapsed. It said: "General Sickles died last
night at midnight." [He had been a chaplain under Sickles through the
war.]
[Sidenote: (1880.)]
It wasn't so. But no matter--it was so to Harris at the time. He walked
along--walked to the church--but his mind was far away. All his
affection and homage and worship of his General had come to the fore.
His heart was full of these emotions. He hardly knew where he was. In
his pulpit, he stood up and began the service, but with a voice over
which he had almost no command. The congregation had never seen him thus
moved, before, in his pulpit. They sat there and gazed at him and
wondered what was the matter; because he was now reading, in this broken
voice and with occasional tears trickling down his face, what to them
seemed a quite unemotional chapter--that one about Moses begat Aaron,
and Aaron begat Deuteronomy, and Deuteronomy begat St. Peter, and St.
Peter begat Cain, and Cain begat Abel--and he was going along with this,
and half crying--his voice continually breaking. The congregation left
the church that morning without being able to account for this most
extraordinary thing--as it seemed to them. That a man who had been a
soldier for more than four years, and who had preached in that pulpit so
many, many times on really moving subjects, without even the quiver of a
lip, should break all down over the Begats, they couldn't understand.
But there it is--any one can see how such a mystery as that would arouse
the curiosity of those people to the boiling-point.
Harris has had many adventures. He has more adventures in a year than
anybody else has in five. One Saturday night he noticed a bottle on his
uncle's dressing-bureau. He thought the label said "Hair Restorer," and
he took it in his room and gave his head a good drenching and sousing
with it and carried it back and thought no more about it. Next morning
when he got up his head was a bright green! He sent around everywhere
and couldn't get a substitute preacher, so he had to go to his church
himself and preach--and he did it. He hadn't a sermon in his barrel--as
it happened--of any lightsome character, so he had to preach a very
grave one--a very serious one--and it made the matter worse. The gravity
of the sermon did not harmonize with the gayety of his head, and the
people sat all through it with handkerchiefs stuffed in their mouths to
try to keep down their joy. And Harris told me that he was sure he never
had seen his congregation--the whole body of his congregation--the
_entire_ body of his congregation--absorbed in interest in his sermon,
from beginning to end, before. Always there had been an aspect of
indifference, here and there, or wandering, somewhere; but this time
there was nothing of the kind. Those people sat there as if they
thought, "Good for this day and train only: we must have all there is of
this show, not waste any of it." And he said that when he came down out
of the pulpit more people waited to shake him by the hand and tell him
what a good sermon it was, than ever before. And it seemed a pity that
these people should do these fictions in such a place--right in the
church--when it was quite plain they were not interested in the sermon
at all; they only wanted to get a near view of his head.
Well, Harris said--no, Harris didn't say, _I_ say, that as the days went
on and Sunday followed Sunday, the interest in Harris's hair grew and
grew; because it didn't stay merely and monotonously green, it took on
deeper and deeper shades of green; and then it would change and become
reddish, and would go from that to some other color--purplish,
yellowish, bluish, and so on--but it was never a solid color. It was
always mottled. And each Sunday it was a little more interesting than it
was the Sunday before--and Harris's head became famous, and people came
from New York, and Boston, and South Carolina, and Japan, and so on, to
look. There wasn't seating-capacity for all the people that came while
his head was undergoing these various and fascinating mottlings. And it
was a good thing in several ways, because the business had been
languishing a little, and now a lot of people joined the church so that
they could have the show, and it was the beginning of a prosperity for
that church which has never diminished in all these years.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCXII.
APRIL 5, 1907.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XV.
BY MARK TWAIN.
[_Dictated October 8, 1906._]
_From Susy's Biography of Me._
Papa says that if the collera comes here he will take Sour Mash to
the mountains.
[Sidenote: (1885.)]
This remark about the cat is followed by various entries, covering a
month, in which Jean, General Grant, the sculptor Gerhardt, Mrs. Candace
Wheeler, Miss Dora Wheeler, Mr. Frank Stockton, Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge,
and the widow of General Custer appear and drift in procession across
the page, then vanish forever from the Biography; then Susy drops this
remark in the wake of the vanished procession:
Sour Mash is a constant source of anxiety, care, and pleasure to
papa.
I did, in truth, think a great deal of that old tortoise-shell harlot;
but I haven't a doubt that in order to impress Susy I was pretending
agonies of solicitude which I didn't honestly feel. Sour Mash never gave
me any real anxiety; she was always able to take care of herself, and
she was ostentatiously vain of the fact; vain of it to a degree which
often made me ashamed of her, much as I esteemed her.
Many persons would like to have the society of cats during the summer
vacation in the country, but they deny themselves this pleasure because
they think they must either take the cats along when they return to the
city, where they would be a trouble and an encumbrance, or leave them in
the country, houseless and homeless. These people have no ingenuity, no
invention, no wisdom; or it would occur to them to do as I do: rent cats
by the month for the summer and return them to their good homes at the
end of it. Early last May I rented a kitten of a farmer's wife, by the
month; then I got a discount by taking three. They have been good
company for about five months now, and are still kittens--at least they
have not grown much, and to all intents and purposes are still kittens,
and as full of romping energy and enthusiasm as they were in the
beginning. This is remarkable. I am an expert in cats, but I have not
seen a kitten keep its kittenhood nearly so long before.
These are beautiful creatures--these triplets. Two of them wear the
blackest and shiniest and thickest of sealskin vestments all over their
bodies except the lower half of their faces and the terminations of
their paws. The black masks reach down below the eyes, therefore when
the eyes are closed they are not visible; the rest of the face, and the
gloves and stockings, are snow white. These markings are just the same
on both cats--so exactly the same that when you call one the other is
likely to answer, because they cannot tell each other apart. Since the
cats are precisely alike, and can't be told apart by any of us, they do
not need two names, so they have but one between them. We call both of
them Sackcloth, and we call the gray one Ashes. I believe I have never
seen such intelligent cats as these before. They are full of the nicest
discriminations. When I read German aloud they weep; you can see the
tears run down. It shows what pathos there is in the German tongue. I
had not noticed before that all German is pathetic, no matter what the
subject is nor how it is treated. It was these humble observers that
brought the knowledge to me. I have tried all kinds of German on these
cats; romance, poetry, philosophy, theology, market reports; and the
result has always been the same--the cats sob, and let the tears run
down, which shows that all German is pathetic. French is not a familiar
tongue to me, and the pronunciation is difficult, and comes out of me
encumbered with a Missouri accent; but the cats like it, and when I make
impassioned speeches in that language they sit in a row and put up their
paws, palm to palm, and frantically give thanks. Hardly any cats are
affected by music, but these are; when I sing they go reverently away,
showing how deeply they feel it. Sour Mash never cared for these things.
She had many noble qualities, but at bottom she was not refined, and
cared little or nothing for theology and the arts.
It is a pity to say it, but these cats are not above the grade of human
beings, for I know by certain signs that they are not sincere in their
exhibitions of emotion, but exhibit them merely to show off and attract
attention--conduct which is distinctly human, yet with a difference:
they do not know enough to conceal their desire to show off, but the
grown human being does. What is ambition? It is only the desire to be
conspicuous. The desire for fame is only the desire to be continuously
conspicuous and attract attention and be talked about.
These cats are like human beings in another way: when Ashes began to
work his fictitious emotions, and show off, the other members of the
firm followed suit, in order to be in the fashion. That is the way with
human beings; they are afraid to be outside; whatever the fashion
happens to be, they conform to it, whether it be a pleasant fashion or
the reverse, they lacking the courage to ignore it and go their own way.
All human beings would like to dress in loose and comfortable and highly
colored and showy garments, and they had their desire until a century
ago, when a king, or some other influential ass, introduced sombre hues
and discomfort and ugly designs into masculine clothing. The meek public
surrendered to the outrage, and by consequence we are in that odious
captivity to-day, and are likely to remain in it for a long time to
come.
Fortunately the women were not included in the disaster, and so their
graces and their beauty still have the enhancing help of delicate
fabrics and varied and beautiful colors. Their clothing makes a great
opera audience an enchanting spectacle, a delight to the eye and the
spirit, a Garden of Eden for charm and color. The men, clothed in dismal
black, are scattered here and there and everywhere over the Garden, like
so many charred stumps, and they damage the effect, but cannot
annihilate it.
In summer we poor creatures have a respite, and may clothe ourselves in
white garments; loose, soft, and in some degree shapely; but in the
winter--the sombre winter, the depressing winter, the cheerless winter,
when white clothes and bright colors are especially needed to brighten
our spirits and lift them up--we all conform to the prevailing insanity,
and go about in dreary black, each man doing it because the others do
it, and not because he wants to. They are really no sincerer than
Sackcloth and Ashes. At bottom the Sackcloths do not care to exhibit
their emotions when I am performing before them, they only do it because
Ashes started it.
I would like to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks
and velvets, resplendent with all the stunning dyes of the rainbow, and
so would every sane man I have ever known; but none of us dares to
venture it. There is such a thing as carrying conspicuousness to the
point of discomfort; and if I should appear on Fifth Avenue on a Sunday
morning, at church-time, clothed as I would like to be clothed, the
churches would be vacant, and I should have all the congregations
tagging after me, to look, and secretly envy, and publicly scoff. It is
the way human beings are made; they are always keeping their real
feelings shut up inside, and publicly exploiting their fictitious ones.
Next after fine colors, I like plain white. One of my sorrows, when the
summer ends, is that I must put off my cheery and comfortable white
clothes and enter for the winter into the depressing captivity of the
shapeless and degrading black ones. It is mid-October now, and the
weather is growing cold up here in the New Hampshire hills, but it will
not succeed in freezing me out of these white garments, for here the
neighbors are few, and it is only of crowds that I am afraid. I made a
brave experiment, the other night, to see how it would feel to shock a
crowd with these unseasonable clothes, and also to see how long it might
take the crowd to reconcile itself to them and stop looking astonished
and outraged. On a stormy evening I made a talk before a full house, in
the village, clothed like a ghost, and looking as conspicuously, all
solitary and alone on that platform, as any ghost could have looked; and
I found, to my gratification, that it took the house less than ten
minutes to forget about the ghost and give its attention to the tidings
I had brought.
I am nearly seventy-one, and I recognize that my age has given me a good
many privileges; valuable privileges; privileges which are not granted
to younger persons. Little by little I hope to get together courage
enough to wear white clothes all through the winter, in New York. It
will be a great satisfaction to me to show off in this way; and perhaps
the largest of all the satisfactions will be the knowledge that every
scoffer, of my sex, will secretly envy me and wish he dared to follow my
lead.
That mention that I have acquired new and great privileges by grace of
my age, is not an uncalculated remark. When I passed the seventieth
mile-stone, ten months ago, I instantly realized that I had entered a
new country and a new atmosphere. To all the public I was become
recognizably old, undeniably old; and from that moment everybody assumed
a new attitude toward me--the reverent attitude granted by custom to
age--and straightway the stream of generous new privileges began to flow
in upon me and refresh my life. Since then, I have lived an ideal
existence; and I now believe what Choate said last March, and which at
the time I didn't credit: that the best of life begins at seventy; for
then your work is done; you know that you have done your best, let the
quality of the work be what it may; that you have earned your holiday--a
holiday of peace and contentment--and that thenceforth, to the setting
of your sun, nothing will break it, nothing interrupt it.
[_Dictated January 22, 1907._] In an earlier chapter I inserted some
verses beginning "Love Came at Dawn" which had been found among Susy's
papers after her death. I was not able to say that they were hers, but I
judged that they might be, for the reason that she had not enclosed them
in quotation marks according to her habit when storing up treasures
gathered from other people. Stedman was not able to determine the
authorship for me, as the verses were new to him, but the authorship has
now been traced. The verses were written by William Wilfred Campbell, a
Canadian poet, and they form a part of the contents of his book called
"Beyond the Hills of Dream."
The authorship of the beautiful lines which my wife and I inscribed upon
Susy's gravestone was untraceable for a time. We had found them in a
book in India, but had lost the book and with it the author's name. But
in time an application to the editor of "Notes and Queries" furnished me
the author's name,[7] and it has been added to the verses upon the
gravestone.
Last night, at a dinner-party where I was present, Mr. Peter Dunne
Dooley handed to the host several dollars, in satisfaction of a lost
bet. I seemed to see an opportunity to better my condition, and I
invited Dooley, apparently disinterestedly, to come to my house Friday
and play billiards. He accepted, and I judge that there is going to be a
deficit in the Dooley treasury as a result. In great qualities of the
heart and brain, Dooley is gifted beyond all propriety. He is brilliant;
he is an expert with his pen, and he easily stands at the head of all
the satirists of this generation--but he is going to walk in darkness
Friday afternoon. It will be a fraternal kindness to teach him that with
all his light and culture, he does not know all the valuable things; and
it will also be a fraternal kindness to him to complete his education
for him--and I shall do this on Friday, and send him home in that
perfected condition.
I possess a billiard secret which can be valuable to the Dooley sept,
after I shall have conferred it upon Dooley--for a consideration. It is
a discovery which I made by accident, thirty-eight years ago, in my
father-in-law's house in Elmira. There was a scarred and battered and
ancient billiard-table in the garret, and along with it a peck of
checked and chipped balls, and a rackful of crooked and headless cues. I
played solitaire up there every day with that difficult outfit. The
table was not level, but slanted sharply to the southeast; there wasn't
a ball that was round, or would complete the journey you started it on,
but would always get tired and stop half-way and settle, with a jolty
wabble, to a standstill on its chipped side. I tried making counts with
four balls, but found it difficult and discouraging, so I added a fifth
ball, then a sixth, then a seventh, and kept on adding until at last I
had twelve balls on the table and a thirteenth to play with. My game was
caroms--caroms solely--caroms plain, or caroms with cushion to
help--anything that could furnish a count. In the course of time I found
to my astonishment that I was never able to run fifteen, under any
circumstances. By huddling the balls advantageously in the beginning, I
could now and then coax fourteen out of them, but I couldn't reach
fifteen by either luck or skill. Sometimes the balls would get scattered
into difficult positions and defeat me in that way; sometimes if I
managed to keep them together, I would freeze; and always when I froze,
and had to play away from the contact, there was sure to be nothing to
play at but a wide and uninhabited vacancy.
One day Mr. Dalton called on my brother-in-law, on a matter of business,
and I was asked if I could entertain him awhile, until my brother-in-law
should finish an engagement with another gentleman. I said I could, and
took him up to the billiard-table. I had played with him many times at
the club, and knew that he could play billiards tolerably well--only
tolerably well--but not any better than I could. He and I were just a
match. He didn't know our table; he didn't know those balls; he didn't
know those warped and headless cues; he didn't know the southeastern
slant of the table, and how to allow for it. I judged it would be safe
and profitable to offer him a bet on my scheme. I emptied the avalanche
of thirteen balls on the table and said:
"Take a ball and begin, Mr. Dalton. How many can you run with an outlay
like that?"
He said, with the half-affronted air of a mathematician who has been
asked how much of the multiplication table he can recite without a
break:
"I suppose a million--eight hundred thousand, anyway."
I said "You shall hove the privilege of placing the balls to suit
yourself, and I want to bet you a dollar that you can't run fifteen."
I will not dwell upon the sequel. At the end of an hour his face was
red, and wet with perspiration; his outer garments lay scattered here
and there over the place; he was the angriest man in the State, and
there wasn't a rag or remnant of an injurious adjective left in him
anywhere--and I had all his small change.
When the summer was over, we went home to Hartford, and one day Mr.
George Robertson arrived from Boston with two or three hours to spare
between then and the return train, and as he was a young gentleman to
whom we were in debt for much social pleasure, it was my duty, and a
welcome duty, to make his two or three hours interesting for him. So I
took him up-stairs and set up my billiard scheme for his comfort. Mine
was a good table, in perfect repair; the cues were in perfect condition;
the balls were ivory, and flawless--but I knew that Mr. Robertson was my
prey, just the same, for by exhaustive tests with this outfit I had
found that my limit was thirty-one. I had proved to my satisfaction that
whereas I could not fairly expect to get more than six or eight or a
dozen caroms out of a run, I could now and then reach twenty and
twenty-five, and after a long procession of failures finally achieve a
run of thirty-one; but in no case had I ever got beyond thirty-one.
Robertson's game, as I knew, was a little better than mine, so I
resolved to require him to make thirty-two. I believed it would
entertain him. He was one of these brisk and hearty and cheery and
self-satisfied young fellows who are brimful of confidence, and who
plunge with grateful eagerness into any enterprise that offers a showy
test of their abilities. I emptied the balls on the table and said,
"Take a cue and a ball, George, and begin. How many caroms do you think
you can make out of that layout?"
He laughed the laugh of the gay and the care-free, as became his youth
and inexperience, and said,
"I can punch caroms out of that bunch a week without a break."
I said "Place the balls to suit yourself, and begin."
Confidence is a necessary thing in billiards, but overconfidence is bad.
George went at his task with much too much lightsomeness of spirit and
disrespect for the situation. On his first shot he scored three caroms;
on his second shot he scored four caroms; and on his third shot he
missed as simple a carom as could be devised. He was very much
astonished, and said he would not have supposed that careful play could
be needed with an acre of bunched balls in front of a person.
He began again, and played more carefully, but still with too much
lightsomeness; he couldn't seem to learn to take the situation
seriously. He made about a dozen caroms and broke down. He was irritated
with himself now, and he thought he caught me laughing. He didn't. I do
not laugh publicly at my client when this game is going on; I only do it
inside--or save it for after the exhibition is over. But he thought he
had caught me laughing, and it increased his irritation. Of course I
knew he thought I was laughing privately--for I was experienced; they
all think that, and it has a good effect; it sharpens their annoyance
and debilitates their play.
He made another trial and failed. Once more he was astonished; once more
he was humiliated--and as for his anger, it rose to summer-heat. He
arranged the balls again, grouping them carefully, and said he would win
this time, or die. When a client reaches this condition, it is a good
time to damage his nerve further, and this can always be done by saying
some little mocking thing or other that has the outside appearance of a
friendly remark--so I employed this art. I suggested that a bet might
tauten his nerves, and that I would offer one, but that as I did not
want it to be an expense to him, but only a help, I would make it
small--a cigar, if he were willing--a cigar that he would fail again;
not an expensive one, but a cheap native one, of the Crown Jewel breed,
such as is manufactured in Hartford for the clergy. It set him afire all
over! I could see the blue flame issue from his eyes. He said,
"Make it a hundred!--and no Connecticut cabbage-leaf product, but
Havana, $25 the box!"
I took him up, but said I was sorry to see him do this, because it did
not seem to me right or fair for me to rob him under our own roof, when
he had been so kind to us. He said, with energy and acrimony:
"You take care of your own pocket, if you'll be so good, and leave me to
take care of mine."