Chapters from My Autobiography
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Mark Twain >> Chapters from My Autobiography
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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."
And he plunged at the congress of balls with a vindictiveness which was
infinitely contenting to me. He scored a failure--and began to undress.
I knew it would come to that, for he was in the condition now that Mr.
Dooley will be in at about that stage of the contest on Friday
afternoon. A clothes-rack will be provided for Mr. Dooley to hang his
things on as fast as he shall from time to time shed them. George raised
his voice four degrees and flung out the challenge--
"Double or quits!"
"Done," I responded, in the gentle and compassionate voice of one who is
apparently getting sorrier and sorrier.
There was an hour and a half of straight disaster after that, and if it
was a sin to enjoy it, it is no matter--I did enjoy it. It is half a
lifetime ago, but I enjoy it yet, every time I think of it George made
failure after failure. His fury increased with each failure as he
scored it. With each defeat he flung off one or another rag of his
raiment, and every time he started on a fresh inning he made it "double
or quits" once more. Twice he reached thirty and broke down; once he
reached thirty-one and broke down. These "nears" made him frantic, and I
believe I was never so happy in my life, except the time, a few years
later, when the Rev. J. H. Twichell and I walked to Boston and he had
the celebrated conversation with the hostler at the Inn at Ashford,
Connecticut.
At last, when we were notified that Patrick was at the door to drive him
to his train, George owed me five thousand cigars at twenty-five cents
apiece, and I was so sorry I could have hugged him. But he shouted,
"Give me ten minutes more!" and added stormily, "it's double or quits
again, and I'll win out free of debt or owe you ten thousand cigars, and
you'll pay the funeral expenses."
He began on his final effort, and I believe that in all my experience
among both amateurs and experts, I have never seen a cue so carefully
handled in my lifetime as George handled his upon this intensely
interesting occasion. He got safely up to twenty-five, and then ceased
to breathe. So did I. He labored along, and added a point, another
point, still another point, and finally reached thirty-one. He stopped
there, and we took a breath. By this time the balls were scattered all
down the cushions, about a foot or two apart, and there wasn't a shot in
sight anywhere that any man might hope to make. In a burst of anger and
confessed defeat, he sent his ball flying around the table at random,
and it crotched a ball that was packed against the cushion and sprang
across to a ball against the bank on the opposite side, and counted!
His luck had set him free, and he didn't owe me anything. He had used up
all his spare time, but we carried his clothes to the carriage, and he
dressed on his way to the station, greatly wondered at and admired by
the ladies, as he drove along--but he got his train.
I am very fond of Mr. Dooley, and shall await his coming with
affectionate and pecuniary interest.
_P.S. Saturday._ He has been here. Let us not talk about it.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
FOOTNOTE:
[7] Robert Richardson, deceased, of Australia.
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCXIII.
APRIL 19, 1907.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XVI.
BY MARK TWAIN.
[_Dictated January 12th, 1905._] ... But I am used to having my
statements discounted. My mother began it before I was seven years old.
Yet all through my life my facts have had a substratum of truth, and
therefore they were not without preciousness. Any person who is familiar
with me knows how to strike my average, and therefore knows how to get
at the jewel of any fact of mine and dig it out of its blue-clay matrix.
My mother knew that art. When I was seven or eight, or ten, or twelve
years old--along there--a neighbor said to her,
"Do you ever believe anything that that boy says?"
My mother said,
"He is the well-spring of truth, but you can't bring up the whole well
with one bucket"--and she added, "I know his average, therefore he never
deceives me. I discount him thirty per cent. for embroidery, and what is
left is perfect and priceless truth, without a flaw in it anywhere."
Now to make a jump of forty years, without breaking the connection: that
word "embroidery" was used again in my presence and concerning me, when
I was fifty years old, one night at Rev. Frank Goodwin's house in
Hartford, at a meeting of the Monday Evening Club. The Monday Evening
Club still exists. It was founded about forty-five years ago by that
theological giant, Rev. Dr. Bushnell, and some comrades of his, men of
large intellectual calibre and more or less distinction, local or
national. I was admitted to membership in it in the fall of 1871 and was
an active member thenceforth until I left Hartford in the summer of
1891. The membership was restricted, in those days, to eighteen--
possibly twenty. The meetings began about the 1st of October and were
held in the private houses of the members every fortnight thereafter
throughout the cold months until the 1st of May. Usually there were a
dozen members present--sometimes as many as fifteen. There was an essay
and a discussion. The essayists followed each other in alphabetical
order through the season. The essayist could choose his own subject and
talk twenty minutes on it, from MS. or orally, according to his
preference. Then the discussion followed, and each member present was
allowed ten minutes in which to express his views. The wives of these
people were always present. It was their privilege. It was also their
privilege to keep still; they were not allowed to throw any light upon
the discussion. After the discussion there was a supper, and talk, and
cigars. This supper began at ten o'clock promptly, and the company broke
up and went away at midnight. At least they did except upon one
occasion. In my recent Birthday speech I remarked upon the fact that I
have always bought cheap cigars, and that is true. I have never bought
costly ones.
Well, that night at the Club meeting--as I was saying--George, our
colored butler, came to me when the supper was nearly over, and I
noticed that he was pale. Normally his complexion was a clear black, and
very handsome, but now it had modified to old amber. He said:
"Mr. Clemens, what are we going to do? There is not a cigar in the house
but those old Wheeling long nines. Can't nobody smoke them but you. They
kill at thirty yards. It is too late to telephone--we couldn't get any
cigars out from town--what can we do? Ain't it best to say nothing, and
let on that we didn't think?"
"No," I said, "that would not be honest. Fetch out the long
nines"--which he did.
I had just come across those "long nines" a few days or a week before. I
hadn't seen a long nine for years. When I was a cub pilot on the
Mississippi in the late '50's, I had had a great affection for them,
because they were not only--to my mind--perfect, but you could get a
basketful of them for a cent--or a dime, they didn't use cents out there
in those days. So when I saw them advertised in Hartford I sent for a
thousand at once. They came out to me in badly battered and
disreputable-looking old square pasteboard boxes, two hundred in a box.
George brought a box, which was caved in on all sides, looking the worst
it could, and began to pass them around. The conversation had been
brilliantly animated up to that moment--but now a frost fell upon the
company. That is to say, not all of a sudden, but the frost fell upon
each man as he took up a cigar and held it poised in the air--and there,
in the middle, his sentence broke off. That kind of thing went on all
around the table, until when George had completed his crime the whole
place was full of a thick solemnity and silence.
Those men began to light the cigars. Rev. Dr. Parker was the first man
to light. He took three or four heroic whiffs--then gave it up. He got
up with the remark that he had to go to the bedside of a sick
parishioner. He started out. Rev. Dr. Burton was the next man. He took
only one whiff, and followed Parker. He furnished a pretext, and you
could see by the sound of his voice that he didn't think much of the
pretext, and was vexed with Parker for getting in ahead with a
fictitious ailing client. Rev. Mr. Twichell followed, and said he had to
go now because he must take the midnight train for Boston. Boston was
the first place that occurred to him, I suppose.
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