was only fifty years old, for everybody who has ever written has been
smitten with that superstition at about that age. Not even yet have I
really written myself out. I have merely stopped writing because
dictating is pleasanter work, and because dictating has given me a
strong aversion to the pen, and because two hours of talking per day is
enough, and because--But I am only damaging my mind with this digging
around in it for pretexts where no pretext is needed, and where the
simple truth is for this one time better than any invention, in this
small emergency. I shall never finish my five or six unfinished books,
for the reason that by forty years of slavery to the pen I have earned
my freedom. I detest the pen and I wouldn't use it again to sign the
death warrant of my dearest enemy.
[_Dictated, March 8, 1906._] For thirty years, I have received an
average of a dozen letters a year from strangers who remember me, or
whose fathers remember me as boy and young man. But these letters are
almost always disappointing. I have not known these strangers nor their
fathers. I have not heard of the names they mention; the reminiscences
to which they call attention have had no part in my experience; all of
which means that these strangers have been mistaking me for somebody
else. But at last I have the refreshment, this morning, of a letter from
a man who deals in names that were familiar to me in my boyhood. The
writer encloses a newspaper clipping which has been wandering through
the press for four or five weeks, and he wants to know if Capt Tonkray,
lately deceased, was (as stated in the clipping) the original of
"Huckleberry Finn."
I have replied that "Huckleberry Finn" was Frank F. As this inquirer
evidently knew the Hannibal of the forties, he will easily recall Frank.
Frank's father was at one time Town Drunkard, an exceedingly
well-defined and unofficial office of those days. He succeeded "General"
Gaines, and for a time he was sole and only incumbent of the office; but
afterward Jimmy Finn proved competency and disputed the place with him,
so we had two town drunkards at one time--and it made as much trouble in
that village as Christendom experienced in the fourteenth century when
there were two Popes at the same time.
In "Huckleberry Finn" I have drawn Frank exactly as he was. He was
ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as
ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the
only really independent person--boy or man--in the community, and by
consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by
all the rest of us. We liked him; we enjoyed his society. And as his
society was forbidden us by our parents, the prohibition trebled and
quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his
society than of any other boy's. I heard, four years ago, that he was
Justice of the Peace in a remote village in the State of ----, and was a
good citizen and was greatly respected.
During Jimmy Finn's term he (Jimmy) was not exclusive; he was not
finical; he was not hypercritical; he was largely and handsomely
democratic--and slept in the deserted tan-yard with the hogs. My father
tried to reform him once, but did not succeed. My father was not a
professional reformer. In him the spirit of reform was spasmodic. It
only broke out now and then, with considerable intervals between. Once
he tried to reform Injun Joe. That also was a failure. It was a failure,
and we boys were glad. For Injun Joe, drunk, was interesting and a
benefaction to us, but Injun Joe, sober, was a dreary spectacle. We
watched my father's experiments upon him with a good deal of anxiety,
but it came out all right and we were satisfied. Injun Joe got drunk
oftener than before, and became intolerably interesting.
I think that in "Tom Sawyer" I starved Injun Joe to death in the cave.
But that may have been to meet the exigencies of romantic literature. I
can't remember now whether the real Injun Joe died in the cave or out of
it, but I do remember that the news of his death reached me at a most
unhappy time--that is to say, just at bedtime on a summer night when a
prodigious storm of thunder and lightning accompanied by a deluging rain
that turned the streets and lanes into rivers, caused me to repent and
resolve to lead a better life. I can remember those awful thunder-bursts
and the white glare of the lightning yet, and the wild lashing of the
rain against the window-panes. By my teachings I perfectly well knew
what all that wild riot was for--Satan had come to get Injun Joe. I had
no shadow of doubt about it. It was the proper thing when a person like
Injun Joe was required in the under world, and I should have thought it
strange and unaccountable if Satan had come for him in a less impressive
way. With every glare of lightning I shrivelled and shrunk together in
mortal terror, and in the interval of black darkness that followed I
poured out my lamentings over my lost condition, and my supplications
for just one more chance, with an energy and feeling and sincerity quite
foreign to my nature.
But in the morning I saw that it was a false alarm and concluded to
resume business at the old stand and wait for another reminder.
The axiom says "History repeats itself." A week or two ago Mr.
Blank-Blank dined with us. At dinner he mentioned a circumstance which
flashed me back over about sixty years and landed me in that little
bedroom on that tempestuous night, and brought to my mind how creditable
to me was my conduct through the whole night, and how barren it was of
moral spot or fleck during that entire period: he said Mr. X was sexton,
or something, of the Episcopal church in his town, and had been for many
years the competent superintendent of all the church's worldly affairs,
and was regarded by the whole congregation as a stay, a blessing, a
priceless treasure. But he had a couple of defects--not large defects,
but they seemed large when flung against the background of his
profoundly religious character: he drank a good deal, and he could
outswear a brakeman. A movement arose to persuade him to lay aside these
vices, and after consulting with his pal, who occupied the same position
as himself in the other Episcopal church, and whose defects were
duplicates of his own and had inspired regret in the congregation he was
serving, they concluded to try for reform--not wholesale, but half at a
time. They took the liquor pledge and waited for results. During nine
days the results were entirely satisfactory, and they were recipients of
many compliments and much congratulation. Then on New-year's eve they
had business a mile and a half out of town, just beyond the State line.
Everything went well with them that evening in the barroom of the
inn--but at last the celebration of the occasion by those villagers
came to be of a burdensome nature. It was a bitter cold night and the
multitudinous hot toddies that were circulating began by and by to exert
a powerful influence upon the new prohibitionists. At last X's friend
remarked,
"X, does it occur to you that we are _outside the diocese_?"
That ended reform No. 1. Then they took a chance in reform No. 2. For a
while that one prospered, and they got much applause. I now reach the
incident which sent me back a matter of sixty years, as I have remarked
a while ago.
One morning Mr. Blank-Blank met X on the street and said,
"You have made a gallant struggle against those defects of yours. I am
aware that you failed on No. 1, but I am also aware that you are having
better luck with No. 2."
"Yes," X said; "No. 2 is all right and sound up to date, and we are full
of hope."
Blank-Blank said, "X, of course you have your troubles like other
people, but they never show on the outside. I have never seen you when
you were not cheerful. Are you always cheerful? Really always cheerful?"
"Well, no," he said, "no, I can't say that I am always cheerful,
but--well, you know that kind of a night that comes: _say_--you wake up
'way in the night and the whole world is sunk in gloom and there are
storms and earthquakes and all sorts of disasters in the air
threatening, and you get cold and clammy; and when that happens to me I
recognize how sinful I am and it all goes clear to my heart and wrings
it and I have such terrors and terrors!--oh, they are indescribable,
those terrors that assail me, and I slip out of bed and get on my knees
and pray and pray and promise that I will be good, if I can only have
another chance. And then, you know, in the morning the sun shines out so
lovely, and the birds sing and the whole world is so beautiful, and--_b'
God, I rally!_"
Now I will quote a brief paragraph from this letter which I have a
minute ago spoken of. The writer says:
You no doubt are at a loss to know who I am. I will tell you. In my
younger days I was a resident of Hannibal, Mo., and you and I were
schoolmates attending Mr. Dawson's school along with Sam and Will
Bowen and Andy Fuqua and others whose names I have forgotten. I was
then about the smallest boy in school, for my age, and they called
me little Aleck for short.
I only dimly remember him, but I knew those other people as well as I
knew the town drunkards. I remember Dawson's schoolhouse perfectly. If I
wanted to describe it I could save myself the trouble by conveying the
description of it to these pages from "Tom Sawyer." I can remember the
drowsy and inviting summer sounds that used to float in through the open
windows from that distant boy-Paradise, Cardiff Hill (Holliday's Hill),
and mingle with the murmurs of the studying pupils and make them the
more dreary by the contrast. I remember Andy Fuqua, the oldest pupil--a
man of twenty-five. I remember the youngest pupil, Nannie Owsley, a
child of seven. I remember George Robards, eighteen or twenty years old,
the only pupil who studied Latin. I remember--in some cases vividly, in
others vaguely--the rest of the twenty-five boys and girls. I remember
Mr. Dawson very well. I remember his boy, Theodore, who was as good as
he could be. In fact, he was inordinately good, extravagantly good,
offensively good, detestably good--and he had pop-eyes--and I would have
drowned him if I had had a chance. In that school we were all about on
an equality, and, so far as I remember, the passion of envy had no place
in our hearts, except in the case of Arch Fuqua--the other one's
brother. Of course we all went barefoot in the summer-time. Arch Fuqua
was about my own age--ten or eleven. In the winter we could stand him,
because he wore shoes then, and his great gift was hidden from our sight
and we were enabled to forget it. But in the summer-time he was a
bitterness to us. He was our envy, for he could double back his big toe
and let it fly and you could hear it snap thirty yards. There was not
another boy in the school that could approach this feat. He had not a
rival as regards a physical distinction--except in Theodore Eddy, who
could work his ears like a horse. But he was no real rival, because you
couldn't hear him work his ears; so all the advantage lay with Arch
Fuqua.
I am not done with Dawson's school; I will return to it in a later
chapter.
[_Dictated at Hamilton, Bermuda, January 6, 1907._] "That reminds me."
In conversation we are always using that phrase, and seldom or never
noticing how large a significance it bears. It stands for a curious and
interesting fact, to wit: that sleeping or waking, dreaming or talking,
the thoughts which swarm through our heads are almost constantly,
almost continuously, accompanied by a like swarm of reminders of
incidents and episodes of our past. A man can never know what a large
traffic this commerce of association carries on in our minds until he
sets out to write his autobiography; he then finds that a thought is
seldom born to him that does not immediately remind him of some event,
large or small, in his past experience. Quite naturally these remarks
remind me of various things, among others this: that sometimes a
thought, by the power of association, will bring back to your mind a
lost word or a lost name which you have not been able to recover by any
other process known to your mental equipment. Yesterday we had an
instance of this. Rev. Joseph H. Twichell is with me on this flying trip
to Bermuda. He was with me on my last visit to Bermuda, and to-day we
were trying to remember when it was. We thought it was somewhere in the
neighborhood of thirty years ago, but that was as near as we could get
at the date. Twichell said that the landlady in whose boarding-house we
sojourned in that ancient time could doubtless furnish us the date, and
we must look her up. We wanted to see her, anyway, because she and her
blooming daughter of eighteen were the only persons whose acquaintance
we had made at that time, for we were travelling under fictitious names,
and people who wear aliases are not given to seeking society and
bringing themselves under suspicion. But at this point in our talk we
encountered an obstruction: we could not recall the landlady's name. We
hunted all around through our minds for that name, using all the
customary methods of research, but without success; the name was gone
from us, apparently permanently. We finally gave the matter up, and fell
to talking about something else. The talk wandered from one subject to
another, and finally arrived at Twichell's school-days in Hartford--the
Hartford of something more than half a century ago--and he mentioned
several of his schoolmasters, dwelling with special interest upon the
peculiarities of an aged one named Olney. He remarked that Olney, humble
village schoolmaster as he was, was yet a man of superior parts, and had
published text-books which had enjoyed a wide currency in America in
their day. I said I remembered those books, and had studied Olney's
Geography in school when I was a boy. Then Twichell said,
"That reminds me--our landlady's name was a name that was associated
with school-books of some kind or other fifty or sixty years ago. I
wonder what it was. I believe it began with K."
Association did the rest, and did it instantly. I said,
"Kirkham's Grammar!"
That settled it. Kirkham was the name; and we went out to seek for the
owner of it. There was no trouble about that, for Bermuda is not large,
and is like the earlier Garden of Eden, in that everybody in it knows
everybody else, just as it was in the serpent's headquarters in Adam's
time. We easily found Miss Kirkham--she that had been the blooming girl
of a generation before--and she was still keeping boarders; but her
mother had passed from this life. She settled the date for us, and did
it with certainty, by help of a couple of uncommon circumstances, events
of that ancient time. She said we had sailed from Bermuda on the 24th of
May, 1877, which was the day on which her only nephew was born--and he
is now thirty years of age. The other unusual circumstance--she called
it an unusual circumstance, and I didn't say anything--was that on that
day the Rev. Mr. Twichell (bearing the assumed name of Peters) had made
a statement to her which she regarded as a fiction. I remembered the
circumstance very well. We had bidden the young girl good-by and had
gone fifty yards, perhaps, when Twichell said he had forgotten something
(I doubted it) and must go back. When he rejoined me he was silent, and
this alarmed me, because I had not seen an example of it before. He
seemed quite uncomfortable, and I asked him what the trouble was. He
said he had been inspired to give the girl a pleasant surprise, and so
had gone back and said to her--
"That young fellow's name is not Wilkinson--that's Mark Twain."
She did not lose her mind; she did not exhibit any excitement at all,
but said quite simply, quite tranquilly,
"Tell it to the marines, Mr. Peters--if that should happen to be _your_
name."
It was very pleasant to meet her again. We were white-headed, but she
was not; in the sweet and unvexed spiritual atmosphere of the Bermudas
one does not achieve gray hairs at forty-eight.
I had a dream last night, and of course it was born of association, like
nearly everything else that drifts into a person's head, asleep or
awake. On board ship, on the passage down, Twichell was talking about
the swiftly developing possibilities of aerial navigation, and he quoted
those striking verses of Tennyson's which forecast a future when
air-borne vessels of war shall meet and fight above the clouds and
redden the earth below with a rain of blood. This picture of carnage and
blood and death reminded me of something which I had read a fortnight
ago--statistics of railway accidents compiled by the United States
Government, wherein the appalling fact was set forth that on our 200,000
miles of railway we annually kill 10,000 persons outright and injure
80,000. The war-ships in the air suggested the railway horrors, and
three nights afterward the railway horrors suggested my dream. The work
of association was going on in my head, unconsciously, all that time. It
was an admirable dream, what there was of it.
In it I saw a funeral procession; I saw it from a mountain peak; I saw
it crawling along and curving here and there, serpentlike, through a
level vast plain. I seemed to see a hundred miles of the procession, but
neither the beginning of it nor the end of it was within the limits of
my vision. The procession was in ten divisions, each division marked by
a sombre flag, and the whole represented ten years of our railway
activities in the accident line; each division was composed of 80,000
cripples, and was bearing its own year's 10,000 mutilated corpses to the
grave: in the aggregate 800,000 cripples and 100,000 dead, drenched in
blood!
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
FOOTNOTE:
[17] It isn't yet. Title of it, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to
Heaven."--S. L. C.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXII.
BY MARK TWAIN.
[Sidenote: (1890.)]
[_Dictated, October 10, 1906._] Susy has named a number of the friends
who were assembled at Onteora at the time of our visit, but there were
others--among them Laurence Hutton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Carroll
Beckwith, and their wives. It was a bright and jolly company. Some of
those choice spirits are still with us; the others have passed from this
life: Mrs. Clemens, Susy, Mr. Warner, Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence Hutton,
Dean Sage--peace to their ashes! Susy is in error in thinking Mrs. Dodge
was not there at that time; we were her guests.
We arrived at nightfall, dreary from a tiresome journey; but the
dreariness did not last. Mrs. Dodge had provided a home-made banquet,
and the happy company sat down to it, twenty strong, or more. Then the
thing happened which always happens at large dinners, and is always
exasperating: everybody talked to his elbow-mates and all talked at
once, and gradually raised their voices higher, and higher, and higher,
in the desperate effort to be heard. It was like a riot, an
insurrection; it was an intolerable volume of noise. Presently I said to
the lady next me--
"I will subdue this riot, I will silence this racket. There is only one
way to do it, but I know the art. You must tilt your head toward mine
and seem to be deeply interested in what I am saying; I will talk in a
low voice; then, just because our neighbors won't be able to hear me,
they will _want_ to hear me. If I mumble long enough--say two
minutes--you will see that the dialogues will one after another come to
a standstill, and there will be silence, not a sound anywhere but my
mumbling."
Then in a very low voice I began:
"When I went out to Chicago, eleven years ago, to witness the Grant
festivities, there was a great banquet on the first night, with six
hundred ex-soldiers present. The gentleman who sat next me was Mr. X. X.
He was very hard of hearing, and he had a habit common to deaf people of
shouting his remarks instead of delivering them in an ordinary voice. He
would handle his knife and fork in reflective silence for five or six
minutes at a time and then suddenly fetch out a shout that would make
you jump out of the United States."
By this time the insurrection at Mrs. Dodge's table--at least that part
of it in my immediate neighborhood--had died down, and the silence was
spreading, couple by couple, down the long table. I went on in a lower
and still lower mumble, and most impressively--
"During one of Mr. X. X.'s mute intervals, a man opposite us approached
the end of a story which he had been telling his elbow-neighbor. He was
speaking in a low voice--there was much noise--I was deeply interested,
and straining my ears to catch his words, stretching my neck, holding my
breath, to hear, unconscious of everything but the fascinating tale. I
heard him say, 'At this point he seized her by her long hair--she
shrieking and begging--bent her neck across his knee, and with one awful
sweep of the razor--'
"HOW DO YOU LIKE CHICA-A-AGO?!!!"
That was X. X.'s interruption, hearable at thirty miles. By the time I
had reached that place in my mumblings Mrs. Dodge's dining-room was so
silent, so breathlessly still, that if you had dropped a thought
anywhere in it you could have heard it smack the floor.[18] When I
delivered that yell the entire dinner company jumped as one person, and
punched their heads through the ceiling, damaging it, for it was only
lath and plaster, and it all came down on us, and much of it went into
the victuals and made them gritty, but no one was hurt. Then I explained
why it was that I had played that game, and begged them to take the
moral of it home to their hearts and be rational and merciful
thenceforth, and cease from screaming in mass, and agree to let one
person talk at a time and the rest listen in grateful and unvexed peace.
They granted my prayer, and we had a happy time all the rest of the
evening; I do not think I have ever had a better time in my life. This
was largely because the new terms enabled me to keep the floor--now that
I had it--and do all the talking myself. I do like to hear myself talk.
Susy has exposed this in her Biography of me.
Dean Sage was a delightful man, yet in one way a terror to his friends,
for he loved them so well that he could not refrain from playing
practical jokes on them. We have to be pretty deeply in love with a
person before we can do him the honor of joking familiarly with him.
Dean Sage was the best citizen I have known in America. It takes courage
to be a good citizen, and he had plenty of it. He allowed no individual
and no corporation to infringe his smallest right and escape unpunished.
He was very rich, and very generous, and benevolent, and he gave away
his money with a prodigal hand; but if an individual or corporation
infringed a right of his, to the value of ten cents, he would spend
thousands of dollars' worth of time and labor and money and persistence
on the matter, and would not lower his flag until he had won his battle
or lost it.
He and Rev. Mr. Harris had been classmates in college, and to the day of
Sage's death they were as fond of each other as an engaged pair. It
follows, without saying, that whenever Sage found an opportunity to play
a joke upon Harris, Harris was sure to suffer.