Middle Ages it is, with its crooked lanes, its gray and stately piles of
ancient architecture and its meditation-breeding air of repose and
dignity and unkinship with the noise and fret and hurry and bustle of
these modern days. As a dream of the Middle Ages Oxford was not perfect
until Pageant day arrived and furnished certain details which had been
for generations lacking. These details began to appear at mid-afternoon
on the 27th. At that time singles, couples, groups and squadrons of the
three thousand five hundred costumed characters who were to take part in
the Pageant began to ooze and drip and stream through house doors, all
over the old town, and wend toward the meadows outside the walls. Soon
the lanes were thronged with costumes which Oxford had from time to time
seen and been familiar with in bygone centuries--fashions of dress which
marked off centuries as by dates, and mile-stoned them back, and back,
and back, until history faded into legend and tradition, when Arthur was
a fact and the Round Table a reality. In this rich commingling of quaint
and strange and brilliantly colored fashions in dress the dress-changes
of Oxford for twelve centuries stood livid and realized to the eye;
Oxford as a dream of the Middle Ages was complete now as it had never,
in our day, before been complete; at last there was no discord; the
mouldering old buildings, and the picturesque throngs drifting past
them, were in harmony; soon--astonishingly soon!--the only persons that
seemed out of place, and grotesquely and offensively and criminally out
of place were such persons as came intruding along clothed in the ugly
and odious fashions of the twentieth century; they were a bitterness to
the feelings, an insult to the eye.
The make-ups of illustrious historic personages seemed perfect, both as
to portraiture and costume; one had no trouble in recognizing them.
Also, I was apparently quite easily recognizable myself. The first
corner I turned brought me suddenly face to face with Henry VIII, a
person whom I had been implacably disliking for sixty years; but when he
put out his hand with royal courtliness and grace and said, "Welcome,
well-beloved stranger, to my century and to the hospitalities of my
realm," my old prejudices vanished away and I forgave him. I think now
that Henry the Eighth has been over-abused, and that most of us, if we
had been situated as he was, domestically, would not have been able to
get along with as limited a graveyard as he forced himself to put up
with. I feel now that he was one of the nicest men in history. Personal
contact with a king is more effective in removing baleful prejudices
than is any amount of argument drawn from tales and histories. If I had
a child I would name it Henry the Eighth, regardless of sex.
Do you remember Charles the First?--and his broad slouch with the plume
in it? and his slender, tall figure? and his body clothed in velvet
doublet with lace sleeves, and his legs in leather, with long rapier at
his side and his spurs on his heels? I encountered him at the next
corner, and knew him in a moment--knew him as perfectly and as vividly
as I should know the Grand Chain in the Mississippi if I should see it
from the pilot-house after all these years. He bent his body and gave
his hat a sweep that fetched its plume within an inch of the ground, and
gave me a welcome that went to my heart. This king has been much
maligned; I shall understand him better hereafter, and shall regret him
more than I have been in the habit of doing these fifty or sixty years.
He did some things in his time, which might better have been left
undone, and which cast a shadow upon his name--we all know that, we all
concede it--but our error has been in regarding them as crimes and in
calling them by that name, whereas I perceive now that they were only
indiscretions. At every few steps I met persons of deathless name whom I
had never encountered before outside of pictures and statuary and
history, and these were most thrilling and charming encounters. I had
hand-shakes with Henry the Second, who had not been seen in the Oxford
streets for nearly eight hundred years; and with the Fair Rosamond, whom
I now believe to have been chaste and blameless, although I had thought
differently about it before; and with Shakespeare, one of the
pleasantest foreigners I have ever gotten acquainted with; and with
Roger Bacon; and with Queen Elizabeth, who talked five minutes and never
swore once--a fact which gave me a new and good opinion of her and moved
me to forgive her for beheading the Scottish Mary, if she really did it,
which I now doubt; and with the quaintly and anciently clad young King
Harold Harefoot, of near nine hundred years ago, who came flying by on a
bicycle and smoking a pipe, but at once checked up and got off to shake
with me; and also I met a bishop who had lost his way because this was
the first time he had been inside the walls of Oxford for as much as
twelve hundred years or thereabouts. By this time I had grown so used to
the obliterated ages and their best-known people that if I had met Adam
I should not have been either surprised or embarrassed; and if he had
come in a racing automobile and a cloud of dust, with nothing on but his
fig-leaf, it would have seemed to me all right and harmonious.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXIV.
BY MARK TWAIN.
_From Susy's Biography of Me_ [1885-6].
Mamma and papa have returned from Onteora and they have had a
delightful visit. Mr. Frank Stockton was down in Virginia and could
not reach Onteora in time, so they did not see him, and Mrs. Mary
Mapes Dodge was ill and couldn't go to Onteora, but Mrs. General
Custer was there, and mamma said that she was a very attractive,
sweet appearing woman.
[_Dictated October 9, 1906._] Onteora was situated high up in the
Catskill Mountains, in the centre of a far-reaching solitude. I do not
mean that the region was wholly uninhabited; there were farmhouses here
and there, at generous distances apart. Their occupants were descendants
of ancestors who had built the houses in Rip Van Winkle's time, or
earlier; and those ancestors were not more primitive than were this
posterity of theirs. The city people were as foreign and unfamiliar and
strange to them as monkeys would have been, and they would have
respected the monkeys as much as they respected these elegant
summer-resorters. The resorters were a puzzle to them, their ways were
so strange and their interests so trivial. They drove the resorters over
the mountain roads and listened in shamed surprise at their bursts of
enthusiasm over the scenery. The farmers had had that scenery on
exhibition from their mountain roosts all their lives, and had never
noticed anything remarkable about it. By way of an incident: a pair of
these primitives were overheard chatting about the resorters, one day,
and in the course of their talk this remark was dropped:
"I was a-drivin' a passel of 'em round about yisterday evenin', quiet
ones, you know, still and solemn, and all to wunst they busted out to
make your hair lift and I judged hell was to pay. Now what do you reckon
it was? It wa'n't anything but jest one of them common damned yaller
sunsets."
In those days--
[_Tuesday, October 16, 1906._] ... Warner is gone. Stockton is gone. I
attended both funerals. Warner was a near neighbor, from the autumn of
'71 until his death, nineteen years afterward. It is not the privilege
of the most of us to have many intimate friends--a dozen is our
aggregate--but I think he could count his by the score. It is seldom
that a man is so beloved by both sexes and all ages as Warner was. There
was a charm about his spirit, and his ways, and his words, that won all
that came within the sphere of its influence. Our children adopted him
while they were little creatures, and thenceforth, to the end, he was
"Cousin Charley" to them. He was "Uncle Charley" to the children of more
than one other friend. Mrs. Clemens was very fond of him, and he always
called her by her first name--shortened. Warner died, as she died, and
as I would die--without premonition, without a moment's warning.
Uncle Remus still lives, and must be over a thousand years old. Indeed,
I know that this must be so, because I have seen a new photograph of him
in the public prints within the last month or so, and in that picture
his aspects are distinctly and strikingly geological, and one can see he
is thinking about the mastodons and plesiosaurians that he used to play
with when he was young.
It is just a quarter of a century since I have seen Uncle Remus. He
visited us in our home in Hartford and was reverently devoured by the
big eyes of Susy and Clara, for I made a deep and awful impression upon
the little creatures--who knew his book by heart through my nightly
declamation of its tales to them--by revealing to them privately that he
was the real Uncle Remus whitewashed so that he could come into people's
houses the front way.
He was the bashfulest grown person I have ever met. When there were
people about he stayed silent, and seemed to suffer until they were
gone. But he was lovely, nevertheless; for the sweetness and benignity
of the immortal Remus looked out from his eyes, and the graces and
sincerities of his character shone in his face.
It may be that Jim Wolf was as bashful as Harris. It hardly seems
possible, yet as I look back fifty-six years and consider Jim Wolf, I am
almost persuaded that he was. He was our long slim apprentice in my
brother's printing-office in Hannibal. He was seventeen, and yet he was
as much as four times as bashful as I was, though I was only fourteen.
He boarded and slept in the house, but he was always tongue-tied in the
presence of my sister, and when even my gentle mother spoke to him he
could not answer save in frightened monosyllables. He would not enter a
room where a girl was; nothing could persuade him to do such a thing.
Once when he was in our small parlor alone, two majestic old maids
entered and seated themselves in such a way that Jim could not escape
without passing by them. He would as soon have thought of passing by one
of Harris's plesiosaurians ninety feet long. I came in presently, was
charmed with the situation, and sat down in a corner to watch Jim
suffer, and enjoy it. My mother followed a minute later and sat down
with the visitors and began to talk. Jim sat upright in his chair, and
during a quarter of an hour he did not change his position by a
shade--neither General Grant nor a bronze image could have maintained
that immovable pose more successfully. I mean as to body and limbs; with
the face there was a difference. By fleeting revealments of the face I
saw that something was happening--something out of the common. There
would be a sudden twitch of the muscles of the face, an instant
distortion, which in the next instant had passed and left no trace.
These twitches gradually grew in frequency, but no muscle outside of the
face lost any of its rigidity, or betrayed any interest in what was
happening to Jim. I mean if something _was_ happening to him, and I knew
perfectly well that that was the case. At last a pair of tears began to
swim slowly down his cheeks amongst the twitchings, but Jim sat still
and let them run; then I saw his right hand steal along his thigh until
half-way to his knee, then take a vigorous grip upon the cloth.
That was a _wasp_ that he was grabbing! A colony of them were climbing
up his legs and prospecting around, and every time he winced they
stabbed him to the hilt--so for a quarter of an hour one group of
excursionists after another climbed up Jim's legs and resented even the
slightest wince or squirm that he indulged himself with, in his misery.
When the entertainment had become nearly unbearable, he conceived the
idea of gripping them between his fingers and putting them out of
commission. He succeeded with many of them, but at great cost, for, as
he couldn't see the wasp, he was as likely to take hold of the wrong end
of him as he was the right; then the dying wasp gave him a punch to
remember the incident by.
If those ladies had stayed all day, and if all the wasps in Missouri had
come and climbed up Jim's legs, nobody there would ever have known it
but Jim and the wasps and me. There he would have sat until the ladies
left.
When they finally went away we went up-stairs and he took his clothes
off, and his legs were a picture to look at. They looked as if they were
mailed all over with shirt buttons, each with a single red hole in the
centre. The pain was intolerable--no, would have been intolerable, but
the pain of the presence of those ladies had been so much harder to bear
that the pain of the wasps' stings was quite pleasant and enjoyable by
comparison.
Jim never could enjoy wasps. I remember once--
_From Susy's Biography of Me_ [1885-6].
Mamma has given me a very pleasant little newspaper scrap about
papa, to copy. I will put it in here.
[_Thursday, October 11, 1906._] It was a rather strong compliment; I
think I will leave it out. It was from James Redpath.
The chief ingredients of Redpath's make-up were honesty, sincerity,
kindliness, and pluck. He wasn't afraid. He was one of Ossawatomie
Brown's right-hand men in the bleeding Kansas days; he was all through
that struggle. He carried his life in his hands, and from one day to
another it wasn't worth the price of a night's lodging. He had a small
body of daring men under him, and they were constantly being hunted by
the "jayhawkers," who were proslavery Missourians, guerillas, modern
free lances.
[_Friday, October 12, 1906._] ... I can't think of the name of that
daredevil guerilla who led the jayhawkers and chased Redpath up and
down the country, and, in turn, was chased by Redpath. By grace of the
chances of war, the two men never met in the field, though they several
times came within an ace of it.
Ten or twelve years later, Redpath was earning his living in Boston as
chief of the lecture business in the United States. Fifteen or sixteen
years after his Kansas adventures I became a public lecturer, and he was
my agent. Along there somewhere was a press dinner, one November night,
at the Tremont Hotel in Boston, and I attended it. I sat near the head
of the table, with Redpath between me and the chairman; a stranger sat
on my other side. I tried several times to talk with the stranger, but
he seemed to be out of words and I presently ceased from troubling him.
He was manifestly a very shy man, and, moreover, he might have been
losing sleep the night before.
The first man called up was Redpath. At the mention of the name the
stranger started, and showed interest. He fixed a fascinated eye on
Redpath, and lost not a word of his speech. Redpath told some stirring
incidents of his career in Kansas, and said, among other things:
"Three times I came near capturing the gallant jayhawker chief, and once
he actually captured _me_, but didn't know me and let me go, because he
said he was hot on Redpath's trail and couldn't afford to waste time and
rope on inconsequential small fry."
My stranger was called up next, and when Redpath heard his name he, in
turn, showed a startled interest. The stranger said, bending a caressing
glance upon Redpath and speaking gently--I may even say sweetly:
"You realize that I was that jayhawker chief. I am glad to know you now
and take you to my heart and call you friend"--then he added, in a voice
that was pathetic with regret, "but if I had only known you then, what
tumultuous happiness I should have had in your society!--while it
lasted."
The last quarter of a century of my life has been pretty constantly and
faithfully devoted to the study of the human race--that is to say, the
study of myself, for, in my individual person, I am the entire human
race compacted together. I have found that then is no ingredient of the
race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way. When
it is small, as compared with the same ingredient in somebody else,
there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination. In my
contacts with the species I find no one who possesses a quality which I
do not possess. The shades of difference between other people and me
serve to make variety and prevent monotony, but that is all; broadly
speaking, we are all alike; and so by studying myself carefully and
comparing myself with other people, and noting the divergences, I have
been enabled to acquire a knowledge of the human race which I perceive
is more accurate and more comprehensive than that which has been
acquired and revealed by any other member of our species. As a result,
my private and concealed opinion of myself is not of a complimentary
sort. It follows that my estimate of the human race is the duplicate of
my estimate of myself.
I am not proposing to discuss all of the peculiarities of the human
race, at this time; I only wish to touch lightly upon one or two of
them. To begin with, I wonder why a man should prefer a good
billiard-table to a poor one; and why he should prefer straight cues to
crooked ones; and why he should prefer round balls to chipped ones; and
why he should prefer a level table to one that slants; and why he should
prefer responsive cushions to the dull and unresponsive kind. I wonder
at these things, because when we examine the matter we find that the
essentials involved in billiards are as competently and exhaustively
furnished by a bad billiard outfit as they are by the best one. One of
the essentials is amusement. Very well, if there is any more amusement
to be gotten out of the one outfit than out of the other, the facts are
in favor of the bad outfit. The bad outfit will always furnish thirty
per cent. more fun for the players and for the spectators than will the
good outfit. Another essential of the game is that the outfit shall give
the players full opportunity to exercise their best skill, and display
it in a way to compel the admiration of the spectators. Very well, the
bad outfit is nothing behind the good one in this regard. It is a
difficult matter to estimate correctly the eccentricities of chipped
balls and a slanting table, and make the right allowance for them and
secure a count; the finest kind of skill is required to accomplish the
satisfactory result. Another essential of the game is that it shall add
to the interest of the game by furnishing opportunities to bet. Very
well, in this regard no good outfit can claim any advantage over a bad
one. I know, by experience, that a bad outfit is as valuable as the
best one; that an outfit that couldn't be sold at auction for seven
dollars is just as valuable for all the essentials of the game as an
outfit that is worth a thousand.
I acquired some of this learning in Jackass Gulch, California, more than
forty years ago. Jackass Gulch had once been a rich and thriving
surface-mining camp. By and by its gold deposits were exhausted; then
the people began to go away, and the town began to decay, and rapidly;
in my time it had disappeared. Where the bank, and the city hall, and
the church, and the gambling-dens, and the newspaper office, and the
streets of brick blocks had been, was nothing now but a wide and
beautiful expanse of green grass, a peaceful and charming solitude. Half
a dozen scattered dwellings were still inhabited, and there was still
one saloon of a ruined and rickety character struggling for life, but
doomed. In its bar was a billiard outfit that was the counterpart of the
one in my father-in-law's garret. The balls were chipped, the cloth was
darned and patched, the table's surface was undulating, and the cues
were headless and had the curve of a parenthesis--but the forlorn
remnant of marooned miners played games there, and those games were more
entertaining to look at than a circus and a grand opera combined.
Nothing but a quite extraordinary skill could score a carom on that
table--a skill that required the nicest estimate of force, distance, and
how much to allow for the various slants of the table and the other
formidable peculiarities and idiosyncrasies furnished by the
contradictions of the outfit. Last winter, here in New York, I saw Hoppe
and Schaefer and Sutton and the three or four other billiard champions
of world-wide fame contend against each other, and certainly the art and
science displayed were a wonder to see; yet I saw nothing there in the
way of science and art that was more wonderful than shots which I had
seen Texas Tom make on the wavy surface of that poor old wreck in the
perishing saloon at Jackass Gulch forty years before. Once I saw Texas
Tom make a string of seven points on a single inning!--all calculated
shots, and not a fluke or a scratch among them. I often saw him make
runs of four, but when he made his great string of seven, the boys went
wild with enthusiasm and admiration. The joy and the noise exceeded that
which the great gathering at Madison Square produced when Sutton scored
five hundred points at the eighteen-inch game, on a world-famous night
last winter. With practice, that champion could score nineteen or
twenty on the Jackass Gulch table; but to start with, Texas Tom would
show him miracles that would astonish him; also it might have another
handsome result: it might persuade the great experts to discard their
own trifling game and bring the Jackass Gulch outfit here and exhibit
their skill in a game worth a hundred of the discarded one, for profound
and breathless interest, and for displays of almost superhuman skill.
In my experience, games played with a fiendish outfit furnish ecstasies
of delight which games played with the other kind cannot match.
Twenty-seven years ago my budding little family spent the summer at
Bateman's Point, near Newport, Rhode Island. It was a comfortable
boarding-place, well stocked with sweet mothers and little children, but
the male sex was scarce; however, there was another young fellow besides
myself, and he and I had good times--Higgins was his name, but that was
not his fault. He was a very pleasant and companionable person. On the
premises there was what had once been a bowling-alley. It was a single
alley, and it was estimated that it had been out of repair for sixty
years--but not the balls, the balls were in good condition; there were
forty-one of them, and they ranged in size from a grapefruit up to a
lignum-vitæ sphere that you could hardly lift. Higgins and I played on
that alley day after day. At first, one of us located himself at the
bottom end to set up the pins in case anything should happen to them,
but nothing happened. The surface of that alley consisted of a rolling
stretch of elevations and depressions, and neither of us could, by any
art known to us, persuade a ball to stay on the alley until it should
accomplish something. Little balls and big, the same thing always
happened--the ball left the alley before it was half-way home and went
thundering down alongside of it the rest of the way and made the
gamekeeper climb out and take care of himself. No matter, we persevered,
and were rewarded. We examined the alley, noted and located a lot of its
peculiarities, and little by little we learned how to deliver a ball in
such a way that it would travel home and knock down a pin or two. By and
by we succeeded in improving our game to a point where we were able to
get all of the pins with thirty-five balls--so we made it a
thirty-five-ball game. If the player did not succeed with thirty-five,
he had lost the game. I suppose that all the balls, taken together,
weighed five hundred pounds, or maybe a ton--or along there
somewhere--but anyway it was hot weather, and by the time that a player
had sent thirty-five of them home he was in a drench of perspiration,
and physically exhausted.
Next, we started cocked hat--that is to say, a triangle of three pins,
the other seven being discarded. In this game we used the three smallest
balls and kept on delivering them until we got the three pins down.
After a day or two of practice we were able to get the chief pin with an
output of four balls, but it cost us a great many deliveries to get the
other two; but by and by we succeeded in perfecting our art--at least we
perfected it to our limit. We reached a scientific excellence where we
could get the three pins down with twelve deliveries of the three small
balls, making thirty-six shots to conquer the cocked hat.