candles and played at night. As the alley was fifty or sixty feet long,
we couldn't see the pins, but the candles indicated their locality. We
continued this game until we were able to knock down the invisible pins
with thirty-six shots. Having now reached the limit of the candle game,
we changed and played it left-handed. We continued the left-handed game
until we conquered its limit, which was fifty-four shots. Sometimes we
sent down a succession of fifteen balls without getting anything at all.
We easily got out of that old alley five times the fun that anybody
could have gotten out of the best alley in New York.
One blazing hot day, a modest and courteous officer of the regular army
appeared in our den and introduced himself. He was about thirty-five
years old, well built and militarily erect and straight, and he was
hermetically sealed up in the uniform of that ignorant old day--a
uniform made of heavy material, and much properer for January than July.
When he saw the venerable alley, and glanced from that to the long
procession of shining balls in the trough, his eye lit with desire, and
we judged that he was our meat. We politely invited him to take a hand,
and he could not conceal his gratitude; though his breeding, and the
etiquette of his profession, made him try. We explained the game to him,
and said that there were forty-one balls, and that the player was
privileged to extend his inning and keep on playing until he had used
them all up--repeatedly--and that for every ten-strike he got a prize.
We didn't name the prize--it wasn't necessary, as no prize would ever be
needed or called for. He started a sarcastic smile, but quenched it,
according to the etiquette of his profession. He merely remarked that he
would like to select a couple of medium balls and one small one, adding
that he didn't think he would need the rest.
Then he began, and he was an astonished man. He couldn't get a ball to
stay on the alley. When he had fired about fifteen balls and hadn't yet
reached the cluster of pins, his annoyance began to show out through his
clothes. He wouldn't let it show in his face; but after another fifteen
balls he was not able to control his face; he didn't utter a word, but
he exuded mute blasphemy from every pore. He asked permission to take
off his coat, which was granted; then he turned himself loose, with
bitter determination, and although he was only an infantry officer he
could have been mistaken for a battery, he got up such a volleying
thunder with those balls. Presently he removed his cravat; after a
little he took off his vest; and still he went bravely on. Higgins was
suffocating. My condition was the same, but it would not be courteous to
laugh; it would be better to burst, and we came near it. That officer
was good pluck. He stood to his work without uttering a word, and kept
the balls going until he had expended the outfit four times, making four
times forty-one shots; then he had to give it up, and he did; for he was
no longer able to stand without wobbling. He put on his clothes, bade us
a courteous good-by, invited us to call at the Fort, and started away.
Then he came back, and said,
"What is the prize for the ten-strike?"
We had to confess that we had not selected it yet.
He said, gravely, that he thought there was no occasion for hurry about
it.
I believe Bateman's alley was a better one than any other in America, in
the matter of the essentials of the game. It compelled skill; it
provided opportunity for bets; and if you could get a stranger to do the
bowling for you, there was more and wholesomer and delightfuler
entertainment to be gotten out of his industries than out of the finest
game by the best expert, and played upon the best alley elsewhere in
existence.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCXXV.
DECEMBER, 1907.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXV.
BY MARK TWAIN.
_January 11, 1906._ Answer to a letter received this morning:
DEAR MRS. H.,--I am forever your debtor for reminding me of that
curious passage in my life. During the first year or two after it
happened, I could not bear to think of it. My pain and shame were
so intense, and my sense of having been an imbecile so settled,
established and confirmed, that I drove the episode entirely from
my mind--and so all these twenty-eight or twenty-nine years I have
lived in the conviction that my performance of that time was
coarse, vulgar and destitute of humor. But your suggestion that you
and your family found humor in it twenty-eight years ago moved me
to look into the matter. So I commissioned a Boston typewriter to
delve among the Boston papers of that bygone time and send me a
copy of it.
It came this morning, and if there is any vulgarity about it I am
not able to discover it. If it isn't innocently and ridiculously
funny, I am no judge. I will see to it that you get a copy.
Address of Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain")
From a report of the dinner given by the Publishers
of the Atlantic Monthly in honor of the
Seventieth Anniversary of the
Birth of John Greenleaf Whittier, at the Hotel Brunswick,
Boston, December 17, 1877,
as published in the
BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT,
December 18, 1877
Mr. Chairman--This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging
up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk; therefore I
will drop lightly into history myself. Standing here on the shore
of the Atlantic and contemplating certain of its largest literary
billows, I am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen
years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little
Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning
to blow thinly Californiawards. I started an inspection tramp
through the southern mines of California. I was callow and
conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my _nom de guerre._
I very soon had an opportunity. I knocked at a miner's lonely log
cabin in the foothills of the Sierras just at nightfall. It was
snowing at the time. A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted,
opened the door to me. When he heard my _nom de guerre_ he looked
more dejected than before. He let me in--pretty reluctantly, I
thought--and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and
hot whiskey, I took a pipe. This sorrowful man had not said three
words up to this time. Now he spoke up and said, in the voice of
one who is secretly suffering, "You're the fourth--I'm going to
move." "The fourth what!" said I. "The fourth littery man that has
been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going to move." "You don't tell
me!" said I; "who were the others!" "Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson
and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the lot!"
You can easily believe I was interested. I supplicated--three hot
whiskeys did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. Said
he--
"They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in
of course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough
lot, but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot.
Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr.
Holmes as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundred,
and double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow
built like a prize-fighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like
as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down
his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. They had been
drinking, I could see that. And what queer talk they used! Mr.
Holmes inspected this cabin, then he took me by the buttonhole, and
says he--
"'Through the deep cares of thought
I hear a voice that sings,
Build thee more stately mansions,
O my soul!'
"Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want
to.' Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a
stranger, that way. However, I started to get out my bacon and
beans, when Mr. Emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he
takes me aside by the buttonhole and says--
"'Give me agates for my meat;
Give me cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes.'
"Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.'
You see it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of littery
swells. But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr.
Longfellow and buttonholes me, and interrupts me. Says he,
"'Honor be to Mudjekeewis!
You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--'
"But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if
you'll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and
let me get this grub ready, you'll do me proud.' Well, sir, after
they'd filled up I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it and then
he fires up all of a sudden and yells--
"'Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!
For I would drink to other days.'
"By George, I was getting kind of worked up. I don't deny it, I was
getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I,
'Looky here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the
court knows herself, you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go
dry.' Them's the very words I said to him. Now I don't want to sass
such famous littery people, but you see they kind of forced me.
There ain't nothing onreasonable 'bout me; I don't mind a passel of
guests a-treadin' on my tail three or four times, but when it comes
to _standing_ on it it's different, 'and if the court knows
herself,' I says, 'you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry.'
Well, between drinks they'd swell around the cabin and strike
attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a greasy old deck
and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on trust. I began
to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr. Emerson dealt, looked
at his hand, shook his head, says--
"'I am the doubter and the doubt--'
and ca'mly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new
layout. Says he--
"'They reckon ill who leave me out;
They know not well the subtle ways I keep.
I pass and deal _again_!'
Hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! O, he was a cool one!
Well, in about a minute, things were running pretty tight, but all
of a sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. He had
already corralled two tricks and each of the others one. So now he
kind of lifts a little in his chair and says--
"'I tire of globes and aces!--
Too long the game is played!'
--and down he fetched a right bower. Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet
as pie and says--
"'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught,'
--and blamed if he didn't down with _another_ right bower! Emerson
claps his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver,
and I went under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that
monstrous Holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he,
'Order, gentlemen; the first man that draws, I'll lay down on him
and smother him!' All quiet on the Potomac, you bet!
"They were pretty how-come-you-so, by now, and they begun to blow.
Emerson says, 'The nobbiest thing I ever wrote was Barbara
Frietchie.' Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my Biglow
Papers.' Says Holmes, 'My Thanatopsis lays over 'em both.' They
mighty near ended in a fight. Then they wished they had some more
company--and Mr. Emerson pointed to me and says--
"'Is yonder squalid peasant all
That this proud nursery could breed?'
He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass. Well,
sir, next they took it into their heads that they would like some
music; so they made me stand up and sing 'When Johnny Comes
Marching Home' till I dropped--at thirteen minutes past four this
morning. That's what I've been through, my friend. When I woke at
seven, they were leaving, thank goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my
only boots on, and his'n under his arm. Says I, 'Hold on, there,
Evangeline, what are you going to do with _them_! He says, 'Going
to make tracks with 'em; because--
"'Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime;
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.'
As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours--and
I'm going to move; I ain't suited to a littery atmosphere."
I said to the miner, "Why, my dear sir, _these_ were not the
gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and
homage; these were impostors."
The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said
he, "Ah! impostors, were they? Are _you_?
I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not travelled
on my _nom de guerre_ enough to hurt. Such was the reminiscence I
was moved to contribute, Mr. Chairman. In my enthusiasm I may have
exaggerated the details a little, but you will easily forgive me
that fault, since I believe it is the first time I have ever
deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this.
What I have said to Mrs. H. is true. I did suffer during a year or two
from the deep humiliations of that episode. But at last, in 1888, in
Venice, my wife and I came across Mr. and Mrs. A. P. C., of Concord,
Massachusetts, and a friendship began then of the sort which nothing but
death terminates. The C.'s were very bright people and in every way
charming and companionable. We were together a month or two in Venice
and several months in Rome, afterwards, and one day that lamented break
of mine was mentioned. And when I was on the point of lathering those
people for bringing it to my mind when I had gotten the memory of it
almost squelched, I perceived with joy that the C.'s were indignant
about the way that my performance had been received in Boston. They
poured out their opinions most freely and frankly about the frosty
attitude of the people who were present at that performance, and about
the Boston newspapers for the position they had taken in regard to the
matter. That position was that I had been irreverent beyond belief,
beyond imagination. Very well, I had accepted that as a fact for a year
or two, and had been thoroughly miserable about it whenever I thought of
it--which was not frequently, if I could help it. Whenever I thought of
it I wondered how I ever could have been inspired to do so unholy a
thing. Well, the C.'s comforted me, but they did not persuade me to
continue to think about the unhappy episode. I resisted that. I tried to
get it out of my mind, and let it die, and I succeeded. Until Mrs. H.'s
letter came, it had been a good twenty-five years since I had thought of
that matter; and when she said that the thing was funny I wondered if
possibly she might be right. At any rate, my curiosity was aroused, and
I wrote to Boston and got the whole thing copied, as above set forth.
I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering--dimly I can
see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures sitting at
tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forever more. I don't
know who they were, but I can very distinctly see, seated at the grand
table and facing the rest of us, Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave,
unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out
of his face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken white hair and his
benignant face; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection
and all good-fellowship everywhere like a rose-diamond whose facets are
being turned toward the light first one way and then another--a charming
man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was
sitting still (what _he_ would call still, but what would be more or
lees motion to other people). I can see those figures with entire
distinctness across this abyss of time.
One other feature is clear--Willie Winter (for these past thousand years
dramatic editor of the "New York Tribune," and still occupying that high
post in his old age) was there. He was much younger then than he is now,
and he showed it. It was always a pleasure to me to see Willie Winter at
a banquet. During a matter of twenty years I was seldom at a banquet
where Willie Winter was not also present, and where he did not read a
charming poem written for the occasion. He did it this time, and it was
up to standard: dainty, happy, choicely phrased, and as good to listen
to as music, and sounding exactly as if it was pouring unprepared out of
heart and brain.
Now at that point ends all that was pleasurable about that notable
celebration of Mr. Whittier's seventieth birthday--because I got up at
that point and followed Winter, with what I have no doubt I supposed
would be the gem of the evening--the gay oration above quoted from the
Boston paper. I had written it all out the day before and had perfectly
memorized it, and I stood up there at my genial and happy and
self-satisfied ease, and began to deliver it. Those majestic guests,
that row of venerable and still active volcanoes, listened, as did
everybody else in the house, with attentive interest. Well, I delivered
myself of--we'll say the first two hundred words of my speech. I was
expecting no returns from that part of the speech, but this was not the
case as regarded the rest of it. I arrived now at the dialogue: 'The old
miner said, "You are the fourth, I'm going to move." "The fourth what?"
said I. He answered, "The fourth littery man that has been here in
twenty-four hours. I am going to move." "Why, you don't tell me," said
I. "Who were the others?" "Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, consound the lot--"'
Now then the house's _attention_ continued, but the expression of
interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered what
the trouble was. I didn't know. I went on, but with difficulty--I
struggled along, and entered upon that miner's fearful description of
the bogus Emerson, the bogus Holmes, the bogus Longfellow, always
hoping--but with a gradually perishing hope--that somebody would laugh,
or that somebody would at least smile, but nobody did. I didn't know
enough to give it up and sit down, I was too new to public speaking, and
so I went on with this awful performance, and carried it clear through
to the end, in front of a body of people who seemed turned to stone with
horror. It was the sort of expression their faces would have worn if I
had been making these remarks about the Deity and the rest of the
Trinity; there is no milder way in which to describe the petrified
condition and the ghastly expression of those people.
When I sat down it was with a heart which had long ceased to beat. I
shall never be as dead again as I was then. I shall never be as
miserable again as I was then. I speak now as one who doesn't know what
the condition of things may be in the next world, but in this one I
shall never be as wretched again as I was then. Howells, who was near
me, tried to say a comforting word, but couldn't get beyond a gasp.
There was no use--he understood the whole size of the disaster. He had
good intentions, but the words froze before they could get out. It was
an atmosphere that would freeze anything. If Benvenuto Cellini's
salamander had been in that place he would not have survived to be put
into Cellini's autobiography. There was a frightful pause. There was an
awful silence, a desolating silence. Then the next man on the list had
to get up--there was no help for it. That was Bishop--Bishop had just
burst handsomely upon the world with a most acceptable novel, which had
appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly," a place which would make any novel
respectable and any author noteworthy. In this case the novel itself was
recognized as being, without extraneous help, respectable. Bishop was
away up in the public favor, and he was an object of high interest,
consequently there was a sort of national expectancy in the air; we may
say our American millions were standing, from Maine to Texas and from
Alaska to Florida, holding their breath, their lips parted, their hands
ready to applaud when Bishop should get up on that occasion, and for the
first time in his life speak in public. It was under these damaging
conditions that he got up to "make good," as the vulgar say. I had
spoken several times before, and that in the reason why I was able to go
on without dying in my tracks, as I ought to have done--but Bishop had
had no experience. He was up facing those awful deities--facing those
other people, those strangers--facing human beings for the first time in
his life, with a speech to utter. No doubt it was well packed away in
his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable, until I had been heard
from. I suppose that after that, and under the smothering pall of that
dreary silence, it began to waste away and disappear out of his head
like the rags breaking from the edge of a fog, and presently there
wasn't any fog left. He didn't go on--he didn't last long. It was not
many sentences after his first before he began to hesitate, and break,
and lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down
in a limp and mushy pile.
Well, the programme for the occasion was probably not more than
one-third finished, but it ended there. Nobody rose. The next man hadn't
strength enough to get up, and everybody looked so dazed, so stupefied,
paralyzed, it was impossible for anybody to do anything, or even try.
Nothing could go on in that strange atmosphere. Howells mournfully, and
without words, hitched himself to Bishop and me and supported us out of
the room. It was very kind--he was most generous. He towed us tottering
away into some room in that building, and we sat down there. I don't
know what my remark was now, but I know the nature of it. It was the
kind of remark you make when you know that nothing in the world can help
your case. But Howells was honest--he had to say the heart-breaking
things he did say: that there was no help for this calamity, this
shipwreck, this cataclysm; that this was the most disastrous thing that
had ever happened in anybody's history--and then he added, "That is, for
_you_--and consider what you have done for Bishop. It is bad enough in
your case, you deserve to suffer. You have committed this crime, and you
deserve to have all you are going to get. But here is an innocent man.
Bishop had never done you any harm, and see what you have done to him.
He can never hold his head up again. The world can never look upon
Bishop as being a live person. He is a corpse."
That is the history of that episode of twenty-eight years ago, which
pretty nearly killed me with shame during that first year or two
whenever it forced its way into my mind.
Now, then, I take that speech up and examine it. As I said, it arrived
this morning, from Boston. I have read it twice, and unless I am an
idiot, it hasn't a single defect in it from the first word to the last.
It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with
humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it
anywhere. What could have been the matter with that house? It is
amazing, it is incredible, that they didn't shout with laughter, and
those deities the loudest of them all. Could the fault have been with
me? Did I lose courage when I saw those great men up there whom I was
going to describe in such a strange fashion? If that happened, if I
showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can't be successfully
funny if you show that you are afraid of it. Well, I can't account for
it, but if I had those beloved and revered old literary immortals back
here now on the platform at Carnegie Hall I would take that same old
speech, deliver it, word for word, and melt them till they'd run all
over that stage. Oh, the fault must have been with _me_, it is not in
the speech at all.
[_Dictated October 3, 1907._] In some ways, I was always honest; even
from my earliest years I could never bring myself to use money which I
had acquired in questionable ways; many a time I tried, but principle
was always stronger than desire. Six or eight months ago,
Lieutenant-General Nelson A. Miles was given a great dinner-party in New
York, and when he and I were chatting together in the drawing-room
before going out to dinner he said,
"I've known you as much as thirty years, isn't it?"
I said, "Yes, that's about it, I think."
He mused a moment or two and then said,
"I wonder we didn't meet in Washington in 1867; you were there at that
time, weren't you?"