Chapters from My Autobiography

M >> Mark Twain >> Chapters from My Autobiography

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24

"That you may know how really remarkable this is, and how wonderfully
developed a subject we have in this boy, I assure you that without a
single spoken word to guide him he has carried out what I mentally
commanded him to do, to the minutest detail. I could have stopped him at
a moment in his vengeful career by a mere exertion of my will, therefore
the poor fellow who has escaped was at no time in danger."

So I was not in disgrace. I returned to the platform a hero, and happier
than I have ever been in this world since. As regards mental suggestion,
my fears of it were gone. I judged that in case I failed to guess what
the professor might be willing me to do, I could count on putting up
something that would answer just as well. I was right, and exhibitions
of unspoken suggestion became a favorite with the public. Whenever I
perceived that I was being willed to do something I got up and did
something--anything that occurred to me--and the magician, not being a
fool, always ratified it. When people asked me, "How _can_ you tell what
he is willing you to do?" I said, "It's just as easy," and they always
said, admiringly, "Well it beats _me_ how you can do it."

Hicks was weak in another detail. When the professor made passes over
him and said "his whole body is without sensation now--come forward and
test him, ladies and gentlemen," the ladies and gentlemen always
complied eagerly, and stuck pins into Hicks, and if they went deep Hicks
was sure to wince, then that poor professor would have to explain that
Hicks "wasn't sufficiently under the influence." But I didn't wince; I
only suffered, and shed tears on the inside. The miseries that a
conceited boy will endure to keep up his "reputation"! And so will a
conceited man; I know it in my own person, and have seen it in a hundred
thousand others. That professor ought to have protected me, and I often
hoped he would, when the tests were unusually severe, but he didn't. It
may be that he was deceived as well as the others, though I did not
believe it nor think it possible. Those were dear good people, but they
must have carried simplicity and credulity to the limit. They would
stick a pin in my arm and bear on it until they drove it a third of its
length in, and then be lost in wonder that by a mere exercise of
will-power the professor could turn my arm to iron and make it
insensible to pain. Whereas it was not insensible at all; I was
suffering agonies of pain.

After that fourth night, that proud night, that triumphant night, I was
the only subject. Simmons invited no more candidates to the platform. I
performed alone, every night, the rest of the fortnight. In the
beginning of the second week I conquered the last doubters. Up to that
time a dozen wise old heads, the intellectual aristocracy of the town,
had held out, as implacable unbelievers. I was as hurt by this as if I
were engaged in some honest occupation. There is nothing surprising
about this. Human beings feel dishonor the most, sometimes, when they
most deserve it. That handful of overwise old gentlemen kept on shaking
their heads all the first week, and saying they had seen no marvels
there that could not have been produced by collusion; and they were
pretty vain of their unbelief, too, and liked to show it and air it, and
be superior to the ignorant and the gullible. Particularly old Dr.
Peake, who was the ringleader of the irreconcilables, and very
formidable; for he was an F.F.V., he was learned, white-haired and
venerable, nobly and richly clad in the fashions of an earlier and a
courtlier day, he was large and stately, and he not only seemed wise,
but was what he seemed, in that regard. He had great influence, and his
opinion upon any matter was worth much more than that of any other
person in the community. When I conquered him, at last, I knew I was
undisputed master of the field; and now, after more than fifty years, I
acknowledge, with a few dry old tears, that I rejoiced without shame.

[Sidenote: (1847.)]

[_Dictated December 2, 1906._] In 1847 we were living in a large white
house on the corner of Hill and Main Streets--a house that still stands,
but isn't large now, although it hasn't lost a plank; I saw it a year
ago and noticed that shrinkage. My father died in it in March of the
year mentioned, but our family did not move out of it until some months
afterward. Ours was not the only family in the house, there was
another--Dr. Grant's. One day Dr. Grant and Dr. Reyburn argued a matter
on the street with sword-canes, and Grant was brought home
multifariously punctured. Old Dr. Peake calked the leaks, and came every
day for a while, to look after him. The Grants were Virginians, like
Peake, and one day when Grant was getting well enough to be on his feet
and sit around in the parlor and talk, the conversation fell upon
Virginia and old times. I was present, but the group were probably quite
unconscious of me, I being only a lad and a negligible quantity. Two of
the group--Dr. Peake and Mrs. Crawford, Mrs. Grant's mother--had been of
the audience when the Richmond theatre burned down, thirty-six years
before, and they talked over the frightful details of that memorable
tragedy. These were eye-witnesses, and with their eyes I saw it all with
an intolerable vividness: I saw the black smoke rolling and tumbling
toward the sky, I saw the flames burst through it and turn red, I heard
the shrieks of the despairing, I glimpsed their faces at the windows,
caught fitfully through the veiling smoke, I saw them jump to their
death, or to mutilation worse than death. The picture is before me yet,
and can never fade.

In due course they talked of the colonial mansion of the Peakes, with
its stately columns and its spacious grounds, and by odds and ends I
picked up a clearly defined idea of the place. I was strongly
interested, for I had not before heard of such palatial things from the
lips of people who had seen them with their own eyes. One detail,
casually dropped, hit my imagination hard. In the wall, by the great
front door, there was a round hole as big as a saucer--a British
cannon-ball had made it, in the war of the Revolution. It was
breath-taking; it made history real; history had never been real to me
before.

Very well, three or four years later, as already mentioned, I was
king-bee and sole "subject" in the mesmeric show; it was the beginning
of the second week; the performance was half over; just then the
majestic Dr. Peake, with his ruffled bosom and wristbands and his
gold-headed cane, entered, and a deferential citizen vacated his seat
beside the Grants and made the great chief take it. This happened while
I was trying to invent something fresh in the way of a vision, in
response to the professor's remark--

"Concentrate your powers. Look--look attentively. There--don't you see
something? Concentrate--concentrate. Now then--describe it."

Without suspecting it, Dr. Peake, by entering the place, had reminded me
of the talk of three years before. He had also furnished me capital and
was become my confederate, an accomplice in my frauds. I began on a
vision, a vague and dim one (that was part of the game at the beginning
of a vision; it isn't best to see it too clearly at first, it might look
as if you had come loaded with it). The vision developed, by degrees,
and gathered swing, momentum, energy. It was the Richmond fire. Dr.
Peake was cold, at first, and his fine face had a trace of polite scorn
in it; but when he began to recognize that fire, that expression
changed, and his eyes began to light up. As soon as I saw that, I threw
the valves wide open and turned on all the steam, and gave those people
a supper of fire and horrors that was calculated to last them one while!
They couldn't gasp, when I got through--they were petrified. Dr. Peake
had risen, and was standing,--and breathing hard. He said, in a great
voice--

"My doubts are ended. No collusion could produce that miracle. It was
totally impossible for him to know those details, yet he has described
them with the clarity of an eye-witness--and with what unassailable
truthfulness God knows I know!"

I saved the colonial mansion for the last night, and solidified and
perpetuated Dr. Peake's conversion with the cannon-ball hole. He
explained to the house that I could never have heard of that small
detail, which differentiated this mansion from all other Virginian
mansions and perfectly identified it, therefore the fact stood proven
that I had _seen_ it in my vision. Lawks!

It is curious. When the magician's engagement closed there was but one
person in the village who did not believe in mesmerism, and I was the
one. All the others were converted, but I was to remain an implacable
and unpersuadable disbeliever in mesmerism and hypnotism for close upon
fifty years. This was because I never would examine them, in after life.
I couldn't. The subject revolted me. Perhaps because it brought back to
me a passage in my life which for pride's sake I wished to forget;
though I thought--or persuaded myself I thought--I should never come
across a "proof" which wasn't thin and cheap, and probably had a fraud
like me behind it.

The truth is, I did not have to wait long to get tired of my triumphs.
Not thirty days, I think. The glory which is built upon a lie soon
becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. No doubt for a while I enjoyed
having my exploits told and retold and told again in my presence and
wondered over and exclaimed about, but I quite distinctly remember that
there presently came a time when the subject was wearisome and odious to
me and I could not endure the disgusting discomfort of it. I am well
aware that the world-glorified doer of a deed of great and real splendor
has just my experience; I know that he deliciously enjoys hearing about
it for three or four weeks, and that pretty soon after that he begins to
dread the mention of it, and by and by wishes he had been with the
damned before he ever thought of doing that deed; I remember how General
Sherman used to rage and swear over "When we were Marching through
Georgia," which was played at him and sung at him everywhere he went;
still, I think I suffered a shade more than the legitimate hero does, he
being privileged to soften his misery with the reflection that his glory
was at any rate golden and reproachless in its origin, whereas I had no
such privilege, there being no possible way to make mine respectable.

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo
that work again! Thirty-five years after those evil exploits of mine I
visited my old mother, whom I had not seen for ten years; and being
moved by what seemed to me a rather noble and perhaps heroic impulse, I
thought I would humble myself and confess my ancient fault. It cost me a
great effort to make up my mind; I dreaded the sorrow that would rise in
her face, and the shame that would look out of her eyes; but after long
and troubled reflection, the sacrifice seemed due and right, and I
gathered my resolution together and made the confession.

To my astonishment there were no sentimentalities, no dramatics, no
George Washington effects; she was not moved in the least degree; she
simply did not believe me, and said so! I was not merely disappointed, I
was nettled, to have my costly truthfulness flung out of the market in
this placid and confident way when I was expecting to get a profit out
of it. I asserted, and reasserted, with rising heat, my statement that
every single thing I had done on those long-vanished nights was a lie
and a swindle; and when she shook her head tranquilly and said she knew
better, I put up my hand and _swore_ to it--adding a triumphant "_Now_
what do you say?"

It did not affect her at all; it did not budge her the fraction of an
inch from her position. If this was hard for me to endure, it did not
begin with the blister she put upon the raw when she began to put my
sworn oath out of court with _arguments_ to prove that I was under a
delusion and did not know what I was talking about. Arguments! Arguments
to show that a person on a man's outside can know better what is on his
inside than he does himself! I had cherished some contempt for arguments
before, I have not enlarged my respect for them since. She refused to
believe that I had invented my visions myself; she said it was folly:
that I was only a child at the time and could not have done it. She
cited the Richmond fire and the colonial mansion and said they were
quite beyond my capacities. Then I saw my chance! I said she was
right--I didn't invent those, I got them from Dr. Peake. Even this great
shot did no damage. She said Dr. Peake's evidence was better than mine,
and he had said in plain words that it was impossible for me to have
heard about those things. Dear, dear, what a grotesque and unthinkable
situation: a confessed swindler convicted of honesty and condemned to
acquittal by circumstantial evidence furnished by the swindled!

I realised, with shame and with impotent vexation, that I was defeated
all along the line. I had but one card left, but it was a formidable
one. I played it--and stood from under. It seemed ignoble to demolish
her fortress, after she had defended it so valiantly; but the defeated
know not mercy. I played that matter card. It was the pin-sticking. I
said, solemnly--

"I give you my honor, a pin was never stuck into me without causing me
cruel pain."

She only said--

"It is thirty-five years. I believe you do think that, _now_, but I was
there, and I know better. You never winced."

She was so calm! and I was so far from it, so nearly frantic.

"Oh, my goodness!" I said, "let me _show_ you that I am speaking the
truth. Here is my arm; drive a pin into it--drive it to the head--I
shall not wince."

She only shook her gray head and said, with simplicity and conviction--

"You are a man, now, and could dissemble the hurt; but you were only a
child then, and could not have done it."

And so the lie which I played upon her in my youth remained with her as
an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death. Carlyle said "a lie
cannot live." It shows that he did not know how to tell them. If I had
taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted
me ages ago.

MARK TWAIN.

(_To be Continued._)

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

No. DCVII.

JANUARY 18, 1907.

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--X.

BY MARK TWAIN.

[Sidenote: (1825.)]

[Sidenote: (1837.)]

[_Dictated March 28, 1906._] Orion Clemens was born in Jamestown,
Fentress County, Tennessee, in 1825. He was the family's first-born, and
antedated me ten years. Between him and me came a sister, Margaret, who
died, aged ten, in 1837, in that village of Florida, Missouri, where I
was born; and Pamela, mother of Samuel E. Moffett, who was an invalid
all her life and died in the neighborhood of New York a year ago, aged
about seventy-five. Her character was without blemish, and she was of a
most kindly and gentle disposition. Also there was a brother, Benjamin,
who died in 1848 aged ten or twelve.

[Sidenote: (1843.)]

Orion's boyhood was spent in that wee little log hamlet of Jamestown up
there among the "knobs"--so called--of East Tennessee. The family
migrated to Florida, Missouri, then moved to Hannibal, Missouri, when
Orion was twelve and a half years old. When he was fifteen or sixteen he
was sent to St. Louis and there he learned the printer's trade. One of
his characteristics was eagerness. He woke with an eagerness about some
matter or other every morning; it consumed him all day; it perished in
the night and he was on fire with a fresh new interest next morning
before he could get his clothes on. He exploited in this way three
hundred and sixty-five red-hot new eagernesses every year of his life.
But I am forgetting another characteristic, a very pronounced one. That
was his deep glooms, his despondencies, his despairs; these had their
place in each and every day along with the eagernesses. Thus his day was
divided--no, not divided, mottled--from sunrise to midnight with
alternating brilliant sunshine and black cloud. Every day he was the
most joyous and hopeful man that ever was, I think, and also every day
he was the most miserable man that ever was.

While he was in his apprenticeship in St. Louis, he got well acquainted
with Edward Bates, who was afterwards in Mr. Lincoln's first cabinet.
Bates was a very fine man, an honorable and upright man, and a
distinguished lawyer. He patiently allowed Orion to bring to him each
new project; he discussed it with him and extinguished it by argument
and irresistible logic--at first. But after a few weeks he found that
this labor was not necessary; that he could leave the new project alone
and it would extinguish itself the same night. Orion thought he would
like to become a lawyer. Mr. Bates encouraged him, and he studied law
nearly a week, then of course laid it aside to try something new. He
wanted to become an orator. Mr. Bates gave him lessons. Mr. Bates walked
the floor reading from an English book aloud and rapidly turning the
English into French, and he recommended this exercise to Orion. But as
Orion knew no French, he took up that study and wrought at it like a
volcano for two or three days; then gave it up. During his
apprenticeship in St. Louis he joined a number of churches, one after
another, and taught in their Sunday-schools--changing his Sunday-school
every time he changed his religion. He was correspondingly erratic in
his politics--Whig to-day, Democrat next week, and anything fresh that
he could find in the political market the week after. I may remark here
that throughout his long life he was always trading religions and
enjoying the change of scenery. I will also remark that his sincerity
was never doubted; his truthfulness was never doubted; and in matters of
business and money his honesty was never questioned. Notwithstanding his
forever-recurring caprices and changes, his principles were high, always
high, and absolutely unshakable. He was the strangest compound that ever
got mixed in a human mould. Such a person as that is given to acting
upon impulse and without reflection; that was Orion's way. Everything he
did he did with conviction and enthusiasm and with a vainglorious pride
in the thing he was doing--and no matter what that thing was, whether
good, bad or indifferent, he repented of it every time in sackcloth and
ashes before twenty-four hours had sped. Pessimists are born, not made.
Optimists are born, not made. But I think he was the only person I have
ever known in whom pessimism and optimism were lodged in exactly equal
proportions. Except in the matter of grounded principle, he was as
unstable as water. You could dash his spirits with a single word; you
could raise them into the sky again with another one. You could break
his heart with a word of disapproval; you could make him as happy as an
angel with a word of approval. And there was no occasion to put any
sense or any vestige of mentality of any kind into these miracles;
anything you might say would answer.

He had another conspicuous characteristic, and it was the father of
those which I have just spoken of. This was an intense lust for
approval. He was so eager to be approved, so girlishly anxious to be
approved by anybody and everybody, without discrimination, that he was
commonly ready to forsake his notions, opinions and convictions at a
moment's notice in order to get the approval of any person who disagreed
with them. I wish to be understood as reserving his fundamental
principles all the time. He never forsook those to please anybody. Born
and reared among slaves and slaveholders, he was yet an abolitionist
from his boyhood to his death. He was always truthful; he was always
sincere; he was always honest and honorable. But in light
matters--matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and
such things--he never acquired a conviction that could survive a
disapproving remark from a cat.

He was always dreaming; he was a dreamer from birth, and this
characteristic got him into trouble now and then.

Once when he was twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and was become a
journeyman, he conceived the romantic idea of coming to Hannibal without
giving us notice, in order that he might furnish to the family a
pleasant surprise. If he had given notice, he would have been informed
that we had changed our residence and that that gruff old bass-voiced
sailorman, Dr. G., our family physician, was living in the house which
we had formerly occupied and that Orion's former room in that house was
now occupied by Dr. G.'s two middle-aged maiden sisters. Orion arrived
at Hannibal per steamboat in the middle of the night, and started with
his customary eagerness on his excursion, his mind all on fire with his
romantic project and building and enjoying his surprise in advance. He
was always enjoying things in advance; it was the make of him. He never
could wait for the event, but must build it out of dream-stuff and enjoy
it beforehand--consequently sometimes when the event happened he saw
that it was not as good as the one he had invented in his imagination,
and so he had lost profit by not keeping the imaginary one and letting
the reality go.

When he arrived at the house he went around to the back door and slipped
off his boots and crept up-stairs and arrived at the room of those
elderly ladies without having wakened any sleepers. He undressed in the
dark and got into bed and snuggled up against somebody. He was a little
surprised, but not much--for he thought it was our brother Ben. It was
winter, and the bed was comfortable, and the supposed Ben added to the
comfort--and so he was dropping off to sleep very well satisfied with
his progress so far and full of happy dreams of what was going to happen
in the morning. But something else was going to happen sooner than that,
and it happened now. The maid that was being crowded fumed and fretted
and struggled and presently came to a half-waking condition and
protested against the crowding. That voice paralyzed Orion. He couldn't
move a limb; he couldn't get his breath; and the crowded one discovered
his new whiskers and began to scream. This removed the paralysis, and
Orion was out of bed and clawing round in the dark for his clothes in a
fraction of a second. Both maids began to scream then, so Orion did not
wait to get his whole wardrobe. He started with such parts of it as he
could grab. He flew to the head of the stairs and started down, and was
paralyzed again at that point, because he saw the faint yellow flame of
a candle soaring up the stairs from below and he judged that Dr. G. was
behind it, and he was. He had no clothes on to speak of, but no matter,
he was well enough fixed for an occasion like this, because he had a
butcher-knife in his hand. Orion shouted to him, and this saved his
life, for the Doctor recognized his voice. Then in those deep-sea-going
bass tones of his that I used to admire so much when I was a little boy,
he explained to Orion the change that had been made, told him where to
find the Clemens family, and closed with some quite unnecessary advice
about posting himself before he undertook another adventure like
that--advice which Orion probably never needed again as long as he
lived.

One bitter December night, Orion sat up reading until three o'clock in
the morning and then, without looking at a clock, sallied forth to call
on a young lady. He hammered and hammered at the door; couldn't get any
response; didn't understand it. Anybody else would have regarded that as
an indication of some kind or other and would have drawn inferences and
gone home. But Orion didn't draw inferences, he merely hammered and
hammered, and finally the father of the girl appeared at the door in a
dressing-gown. He had a candle in his hand and the dressing-gown was all
the clothing he had on--except an expression of unwelcome which was so
thick and so large that it extended all down his front to his instep and
nearly obliterated the dressing-gown. But Orion didn't notice that this
was an unpleasant expression. He merely walked in. The old gentleman
took him into the parlor, set the candle on a table, and stood. Orion
made the usual remarks about the weather, and sat down--sat down and
talked and talked and went on talking--that old man looking at him
vindictively and waiting for his chance--waiting treacherously and
malignantly for his chance. Orion had not asked for the young lady. It
was not customary. It was understood that a young fellow came to see the
girl of the house, not the founder of it. At last Orion got up and made
some remark to the effect that probably the young lady was busy and he
would go now and call again. That was the old man's chance, and he said
with fervency "Why good land, aren't you going to stop to breakfast?"

Orion did not come to Hannibal until two or three years after my
father's death. Meantime he remained in St Louis. He was a journeyman
printer and earning wages. Out of his wage he supported my mother and my
brother Henry, who was two years younger than I. My sister Pamela helped
in this support by taking piano pupils. Thus we got along, but it was
pretty hard sledding. I was not one of the burdens, because I was taken
from school at once, upon my father's death, and placed in the office of
the Hannibal "Courier," as printer's apprentice, and Mr. S., the editor
and proprietor of the paper, allowed me the usual emolument of the
office of apprentice--that is to say board and clothes, but no money.
The clothes consisted of two suits a year, but one of the suits always
failed to materialize and the other suit was not purchased so long as
Mr. S.'s old clothes held out. I was only about half as big as Mr. S.,
consequently his shirts gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a
circus tent, and I had to turn up his pants to my ears to make them
short enough.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24