Chapters from My Autobiography
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Mark Twain >> Chapters from My Autobiography
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For a little while Reuel Gridley attended that school of ours. He was an
elderly pupil; he was perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Then
came the Mexican War and he volunteered. A company of infantry was
raised in our town and Mr. Hickman, a tall, straight, handsome athlete
of twenty-five, was made captain of it and had a sword by his side and a
broad yellow stripe down the leg of his gray pants. And when that
company marched back and forth through the streets in its smart
uniform--which it did several times a day for drill--its evolutions were
attended by all the boys whenever the school hours permitted. I can see
that marching company yet, and I can almost feel again the consuming
desire that I had to join it. But they had no use for boys of twelve and
thirteen, and before I had a chance in another war the desire to kill
people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.
I saw the splendid Hickman in his old age. He seemed about the oldest
man I had ever seen--an amazing and melancholy contrast with the showy
young captain I had seen preparing his warriors for carnage so many,
many years before. Hickman is dead--it is the old story. As Susy said,
"What is it all for?"
Reuel Gridley went away to the wars and we heard of him no more for
fifteen or sixteen years. Then one day in Carson City while I was having
a difficulty with an editor on the sidewalk--an editor better built for
war than I was--I heard a voice say, "Give him the best you've got, Sam,
I'm at your back." It was Reuel Gridley. He said he had not recognized
me by my face but by my drawling style of speech.
He went down to the Reese River mines about that time and presently he
lost an election bet in his mining camp, and by the terms of it he was
obliged to buy a fifty-pound sack of self-raising flour and carry it
through the town, preceded by music, and deliver it to the winner of the
bet. Of course the whole camp was present and full of fluid and
enthusiasm. The winner of the bet put up the sack at auction for the
benefit of the United States Sanitary Fund, and sold it. The excitement
grew and grew. The sack was sold over and over again for the benefit of
the Fund. The news of it came to Virginia City by telegraph. It produced
great enthusiasm, and Reuel Gridley was begged by telegraph to bring the
sack and have an auction in Virginia City. He brought it. An open
barouche was provided, also a brass band. The sack was sold over and
over again at Gold Hill, then was brought up to Virginia City toward
night and sold--and sold again, and again, and still again, netting
twenty or thirty thousand dollars for the Sanitary Fund. Gridley carried
it across California and sold it at various towns. He sold it for large
sums in Sacramento and in San Francisco. He brought it East, sold it in
New York and in various other cities, then carried it out to a great
Fair at St. Louis, and went on selling it; and finally made it up into
small cakes and sold those at a dollar apiece. First and last, the sack
of flour which had originally cost ten dollars, perhaps, netted more
than two hundred thousand dollars for the Sanitary Fund. Reuel Gridley
has been dead these many, many years--it is the old story.
In that school were the first Jews I had ever seen. It took me a good
while to get over the awe of it. To my fancy they were clothed invisibly
in the damp and cobwebby mould of antiquity. They carried me back to
Egypt, and in imagination I moved among the Pharaohs and all the shadowy
celebrities of that remote age. The name of the boys was Levin. We had a
collective name for them which was the only really large and handsome
witticism that was ever born in that Congressional district. We called
them "Twenty-two"--and even when the joke was old and had been worn
threadbare we always followed it with the explanation, to make sure that
it would be understood, "Twice Levin--twenty-two."
There were other boys whose names remain with me. Irving Ayres--but no
matter, he is dead. Then there was George Butler, whom I remember as a
child of seven wearing a blue leather belt with a brass buckle, and
hated and envied by all the boys on account of it. He was a nephew of
General Ben Butler and fought gallantly at Ball's Bluff and in several
other actions of the Civil War. He is dead, long and long ago.
Will Bowen (dead long ago), Ed Stevens (dead long ago) and John Briggs
were special mates of mine. John is still living.
[Sidenote: (1845.)]
In 1845, when I was ten years old, there was an epidemic of measles in
the town and it made a most alarming slaughter among the little people.
There was a funeral almost daily, and the mothers of the town were
nearly demented with fright. My mother was greatly troubled. She worried
over Pamela and Henry and me, and took constant and extraordinary pains
to keep us from coming into contact with the contagion. But upon
reflection I believed that her judgment was at fault. It seemed to me
that I could improve upon it if left to my own devices. I cannot
remember now whether I was frightened about the measles or not, but I
clearly remember that I grew very tired of the suspense I suffered on
account of being continually under the threat of death. I remember that
I got so weary of it and so anxious to have the matter settled one way
or the other, and promptly, that this anxiety spoiled my days and my
nights. I had no pleasure in them. I made up my mind to end this
suspense and be done with it. Will Bowen was dangerously ill with the
measles and I thought I would go down there and catch them. I entered
the house by the front way and slipped along through rooms and halls,
keeping sharp watch against discovery, and at last I reached Will's
bed-chamber in the rear of the house on the second floor and got into it
uncaptured. But that was as far as my victory reached. His mother caught
me there a moment later and snatched me out of the house and gave me a
most competent scolding and drove me away. She was so scared that she
could hardly get her words out, and her face was white. I saw that I
must manage better next time, and I did. I hung about the lane at the
rear of the house and watched through cracks in the fence until I was
convinced that the conditions were favorable; then I slipped through the
back yard and up the back way and got into the room and into the bed
with Will Bowen without being observed. I don't know how long I was in
the bed. I only remember that Will Bowen, as society, had no value for
me, for he was too sick to even notice that I was there. When I heard
his mother coming I covered up my head, but that device was a failure.
It was dead summer-time--the cover was nothing more than a limp blanket
or sheet, and anybody could see that there were two of us under it. It
didn't remain two very long. Mrs. Bowen snatched me out of the bed and
conducted me home herself, with a grip on my collar which she never
loosened until she delivered me into my mother's hands along with her
opinion of that kind of a boy.
It was a good case of measles that resulted. It brought me within a
shade of death's door. It brought me to where I no longer took any
interest in anything, but, on the contrary, felt a total absence of
interest--which was most placid and enchanting. I have never enjoyed
anything in my life any more than I enjoyed dying that time. I _was_, in
effect, dying. The word had been passed and the family notified to
assemble around the bed and see me off. I knew them all. There was no
doubtfulness in my vision. They were all crying, but that did not affect
me. I took but the vaguest interest in it, and that merely because I was
the centre of all this emotional attention and was gratified by it and
vain of it.
When Dr. Cunningham had made up his mind that nothing more could be done
for me he put bags of hot ashes all over me. He put them on my breast,
on my wrists, on my ankles; and so, very much to his astonishment--and
doubtless to my regret--he dragged me back into this world and set me
going again.
[_Dictated July 26, 1907._] In an article entitled "England's Ovation to
Mark Twain," Sydney Brooks--but never mind that, now.
I was in Oxford by seven o'clock that evening (June 25, 1907), and
trying on the scarlet gown which the tailor had been constructing, and
found it right--right and surpassingly becoming. At half past ten the
next morning we assembled at All Souls College and marched thence,
gowned, mortar-boarded and in double file, down a long street to the
Sheldonian Theatre, between solid walls of the populace, very much
hurrah'd and limitlessly kodak'd. We made a procession of considerable
length and distinction and picturesqueness, with the Chancellor, Lord
Curzon, late Viceroy of India, in his rich robe of black and gold, in
the lead, followed by a pair of trim little boy train-bearers, and the
train-bearers followed by the young Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was
to be made a D.C.L. The detachment of D.C.L.'s were followed by the
Doctors of Science, and these by the Doctors of Literature, and these
in turn by the Doctors of Music. Sidney Colvin marched in front of me; I
was coupled with Sidney Lee, and Kipling followed us; General Booth, of
the Salvation Army, was in the squadron of D.C.L.'s.
Our journey ended, we were halted in a fine old hall whence we could
see, through a corridor of some length, the massed audience in the
theatre. Here for a little time we moved about and chatted and made
acquaintanceships; then the D.C.L.'s were summoned, and they marched
through that corridor and the shouting began in the theatre. It would be
some time before the Doctors of Literature and of Science would be
called for, because each of those D.C.L.'s had to have a couple of Latin
speeches made over him before his promotion would be complete--one by
the Regius Professor of Civil Law, the other by the Chancellor. After a
while I asked Sir William Ramsay if a person might smoke here and not
get shot. He said, "Yes," but that whoever did it and got caught would
be fined a guinea, and perhaps hanged later. He said he knew of a place
where we could accomplish at least as much as half of a smoke before any
informers would be likely to chance upon us, and he was ready to show
the way to any who might be willing to risk the guinea and the hanging.
By request he led the way, and Kipling, Sir Norman Lockyer and I
followed. We crossed an unpopulated quadrangle and stood under one of
its exits--an archway of massive masonry--and there we lit up and began
to take comfort. The photographers soon arrived, but they were courteous
and friendly and gave us no trouble, and we gave them none. They grouped
us in all sorts of ways and photographed us at their diligent leisure,
while we smoked and talked. We were there more than an hour; then we
returned to headquarters, happy, content, and greatly refreshed.
Presently we filed into the theatre, under a very satisfactory hurrah,
and waited in a crimson column, dividing the crowded pit through the
middle, until each of us in his turn should be called to stand before
the Chancellor and hear our merits set forth in sonorous Latin.
Meantime, Kipling and I wrote autographs until some good kind soul
interfered in our behalf and procured for us a rest.
I will now save what is left of my modesty by quoting a paragraph from
Sydney Brooks's "Ovation."
* * * * *
Let those stars take the place of it for the present. Sydney Brooks has
done it well. It makes me proud to read it; as proud as I was in that
old day, sixty-two years ago, when I lay dying, the centre of
attraction, with one eye piously closed upon the fleeting vanities of
this life--an excellent effect--and the other open a crack to observe
the tears, the sorrow, the admiration--all for me--all for me!
Ah, that was the proudest moment of my long life--until Oxford!
* * * * *
Most Americans have been to Oxford and will remember what a dream of the
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].
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