Chapters from My Autobiography

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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.

Along about 1873 Sage fell a victim to an illness which reduced him to a
skeleton, and defied all the efforts of the physicians to cure it. He
went to the Adirondacks and took Harris with him. Sage had always been
an active man, and he couldn't idle any day wholly away in inanition,
but walked every day to the limit of his strength. One day, toward
nightfall, the pair came upon a humble log cabin which bore these words
painted upon a shingle: "Entertainment for Man and Beast." They were
obliged to stop there for the night, Sage's strength being exhausted.
They entered the cabin and found its owner and sole occupant there, a
rugged and sturdy and simple-hearted man of middle age. He cooked supper
and placed it before the travellers--salt junk, boiled beans, corn bread
and black coffee. Sage's stomach could abide nothing but the most
delicate food, therefore this banquet revolted him, and he sat at the
table unemployed, while Harris fed ravenously, limitlessly, gratefully;
for he had been chaplain in a fighting regiment all through the war, and
had kept in perfection the grand and uncritical appetite and splendid
physical vigor which those four years of tough fare and activity had
furnished him. Sage went supperless to bed, and tossed and writhed all
night upon a shuck mattress that was full of attentive and interested
corn-cobs. In the morning Harris was ravenous again, and devoured the
odious breakfast as contentedly and as delightedly as he had devoured
its twin the night before. Sage sat upon the porch, empty, and
contemplated the performance and meditated revenge. Presently he
beckoned to the landlord and took him aside and had a confidential talk
with him. He said,

"I am the paymaster. What is the bill?"

"Two suppers, fifty cents; two beds, thirty cents; two breakfasts, fifty
cents--total, a dollar and thirty cents."

Sage said, "Go back and make out the bill and fetch it to me here on the
porch. Make it thirteen dollars."

"Thirteen dollars! Why, it's impossible! I am no robber. I am charging
you what I charge everybody. It's a dollar and thirty cents, and that's
all it is."

"My man, I've got something to say about this as well as you. It's
thirteen dollars. You'll make out your bill for that, and you'll _take_
it, too, or you'll not get a cent."

The man was troubled, and said, "I don't understand this. I can't make
it out."

"Well, I understand it. I know what I am about. It's thirteen dollars,
and I want the bill made out for that. There's no other terms. Get it
ready and bring it out here. I will examine it and be outraged. You
understand? I will dispute the bill. You must stand to it. You must
refuse to take less. I will begin to lose my temper; you must begin to
lose yours. I will call you hard names; you must answer with harder
ones. I will raise my voice; you must raise yours. You must go into a
rage--foam at the mouth, if you can; insert some soap to help it along.
Now go along and follow your instructions."

The man played his assigned part, and played it well. He brought the
bill and stood waiting for results. Sage's face began to cloud up, his
eyes to snap, and his nostrils to inflate like a horse's; then he broke
out with--

"_Thirteen dollars!_ You mean to say that you charge thirteen dollars
for these damned inhuman hospitalities of yours? Are you a professional
buccaneer? Is it your custom to--"

The man burst in with spirit: "Now, I don't want any more out of
you--that's a plenty. The bill is thirteen dollars and you'll _pay_
it--that's all; a couple of characterless adventurers bilking their way
through this country and attempting to dictate terms to a gentleman! a
gentleman who received you supposing you were gentlemen yourselves,
whereas in my opinion hell's full of--"

Sage broke in--

"Not another word of that!--I won't have it. I regard you as the
lowest-down thief that ever--"

"Don't you use that word again! By ----, I'll take you by the neck
and--"

Harris came rushing out, and just as the two were about to grapple he
pushed himself between them and began to implore--

"Oh, Dean, don't, _don't_--now, Mr. Smith, control yourself! Oh, think
of your family, Dean!--think what a scandal--"

But they burst out with maledictions, imprecations and all the hard
names they could dig out of the rich accumulations of their educated
memories, and in the midst of it the man shouted--

"When _gentlemen_ come to this house, I treat them _as_ gentlemen. When
people come to this house with the ordinary appetites of gentlemen, I
charge them a dollar and thirty cents for what I furnished you; but when
a man brings a hell-fired Famine here that gorges a barrel of pork and
four barrels of beans at two sittings--"

Sage broke in, in a voice that was eloquent with remorse and
self-reproach, "I never thought of that, and I ask your pardon; I am
ashamed of myself and of my friend. Here's your thirteen dollars, and my
apologies along with it."

[_Dictated March 12, 1906._] I have always taken a great interest in
other people's duels. One always feels an abiding interest in any heroic
thing which has entered into his own experience.

[Sidenote: (1878.)]

In 1878, fourteen years after my unmaterialized duel, Messieurs Fortu
and Gambetta fought a duel which made heroes of both of them in France,
but made them rather ridiculous throughout the rest of the world. I was
living in Munich that fall and winter, and I was so interested in that
funny tragedy that I wrote a long account of it, and it is in one of my
books, somewhere--an account which had some inaccuracies in it, but as
an exhibition of the _spirit_ of that duel, I think it was correct and
trustworthy. And when I was living in Vienna, thirty-four years after my
ineffectual duel, my interest in that kind of incident was still strong;
and I find here among my Autobiographical manuscripts of that day a
chapter which I began concerning it, but did not finish. I wanted to
finish it, but held it open in the hope that the Italian ambassador, M.
Nigra, would find time to furnish me the _full_ history of Senor
Cavalotti's adventures in that line. But he was a busy man; there was
always an interruption before he could get well started; so my hope was
never fulfilled. The following is the unfinished chapter:

[Sidenote: (1898.)]

As concerns duelling. This pastime is as common in Austria to-day
as it is in France. But with this difference, that here in the
Austrian States the duel is dangerous, while in France it is not.
Here it is tragedy, in France it in comedy; here it is a solemnity,
there it is monkey-shines; here the duellist risks his life, there
he does not even risk his shirt. Here he fights with pistol or
sabre, in France with a hairpin--a blunt one. Here the desperately
wounded man tries to walk to the hospital; there they paint the
scratch so that they can find it again, lay the sufferer on a
stretcher, and conduct him off the field with a band of music.

At the end of a French duel the pair hug and kiss and cry, and
praise each other's valor; then the surgeons make an examination
and pick out the scratched one, and the other one helps him on to
the litter and pays his fare; and in return the scratched one
treats to champagne and oysters in the evening, and then "the
incident is closed," as the French say. It is all polite, and
gracious, and pretty, and impressive. At the end of an Austrian
duel the antagonist that is alive gravely offers his hand to the
other man, utters some phrases of courteous regret, then bids him
good-by and goes his way, and that incident also is closed. The
French duellist is painstakingly protected from danger, by the
rules of the game. His antagonist's weapon cannot reach so far as
his body; if he get a scratch it will not be above his elbow. But
in Austria the rules of the game do not provide against danger,
they carefully provide _for_ it, usually. Commonly the combat must
be kept up until one of the men is disabled; a non-disabling slash
or stab does not retire him.

For a matter of three months I watched the Viennese journals, and
whenever a duel was reported in their telegraphic columns I
scrap-booked it. By this record I find that duelling in Austria is
not confined to journalists and old maids, as in France, but is
indulged in by military men, journalists, students, physicians,
lawyers, members of the legislature, and even the Cabinet, the
Bench and the police. Duelling is forbidden by law; and so it seems
odd to see the makers and administrators of the laws dancing on
their work in this way. Some months ago Count Bodeni, at that time
Chief of the Government, fought a pistol-duel here in the capital
city of the Empire with representative Wolf, and both of those
distinguished Christians came near getting turned out of the
Church--for the Church as well as the State forbids duelling.

In one case, lately, in Hungary, the police interfered and stopped
a duel after the first innings. This was a sabre-duel between the
chief of police and the city attorney. Unkind things were said
about it by the newspapers. They said the police remembered their
duty uncommonly well when their own officials were the parties
concerned in duels. But I think the underlings showed good
bread-and-butter judgment. If their superiors had carved each other
well, the public would have asked, Where were the police? and their
places would have been endangered; but custom does not require them
to be around where mere unofficial citizens are explaining a thing
with sabres.

There was another duel--a double duel--going on in the immediate
neighborhood at the time, and in this case the police obeyed custom
and did not disturb it. Their bread and butter was not at stake
there. In this duel a physician fought a couple of surgeons, and
wounded both--one of them lightly, the other seriously. An
undertaker wanted to keep people from interfering, but that was
quite natural again.

Selecting at random from my record, I next find a duel at Tarnopol
between military men. An officer of the Tenth Dragoons charged an
officer of the Ninth Dragoons with an offence against the laws of
the card-table. There was a defect or a doubt somewhere in the
matter, and this had to be examined and passed upon by a Court of
Honor. So the case was sent up to Lemberg for this purpose. One
would like to know what the defect was, but the newspaper does not
say. A man here who has fought many duels and has a graveyard, says
that probably the matter in question was as to whether the
accusation was true or not; that if the charge was a very grave
one--cheating, for instance--proof of its truth would rule the
guilty officer out of the field of honor; the Court would not allow
a gentleman to fight with such a person. You see what a solemn
thing it is; you see how particular they are; any little careless
act can lose you your privilege of getting yourself shot, here. The
Court seems to have gone into the matter in a searching and careful
fashion, for several months elapsed before it reached a decision.
It then sanctioned a duel and the accused killed his accuser.

Next I find a duel between a prince and a major; first with
pistols--no result satisfactory to either party; then with sabres,
and the major badly hurt.

Next, a sabre-duel between journalists--the one a strong man, the
other feeble and in poor health. It was brief; the strong one drove
his sword through the weak one, and death was immediate.

Next, a duel between a lieutenant and a student of medicine.
According to the newspaper report these are the details. The
student was in a restaurant one evening: passing along, he halted
at a table to speak with some friends; near by sat a dozen military
men; the student conceived that one of these was "staring" at him;
he asked the officer to step outside and explain. This officer and
another one gathered up their caps and sabres and went out with the
student. Outside--this is the student's account--the student
introduced himself to the offending officer and said, "You seemed
to stare at me"; for answer, the officer struck at the student with
his fist; the student parried the blow; both officers drew their
sabres and attacked the young fellow, and one of them gave him a
wound on the left arm; then they withdrew. This was Saturday night.
The duel followed on Monday, in the military riding-school--the
customary duelling-ground all over Austria, apparently. The weapons
were pistols. The duelling terms were somewhat beyond custom in the
matter of severity, if I may gather that from the statement that
the combat was fought "_unter sehr schweren Bedingungen_"--to wit,
"Distance, 15 steps--with 3 steps advance." There was but one
exchange of shots. The student was hit. "He put his hand on his
breast, his body began to bend slowly forward, then collapsed in
death and sank to the ground."

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