Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  “No, give yourself no concern, it isn’t anything that’s happened here—it dates back, away back. I can’t be mistaken, that’s an Englishman and his name is B. Isn’t it so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ve seen him only once before, and it’s twenty-seven years ago, but I know him, I would recognize him in Siberia, in Sahara, in hell! How fortunate that I couldn’t reach him—I don’t wish to be a murderer!”

  “Why, what was the trouble? What did he do?”

  “Do? Oh, oh, oh, it’s too horrible to think of! Out of my way—don’t detain me; do you want me to kill him?”

  That was the incident, and that was all that G. knew. Enough to heat our curiosity to the sizzling point, and raise a world of excited wondering and guessing; and valuable to that degree in a smoking-klatch, but we had to wait several days before we got the tale’s sequel. Which was this.

  In 1870 B. was living in London. He was a young fellow with an alert and inquiring mind and a sharp appetite for novelties. He had taken up mesmerism—as it was then called—and was doing with it many of the strange things afterward done by Charcot under its other name of hypnotism. One evening B. was exhibiting some of these marvels in the house of an eminent man of science, and had brought with him for the purpose subjects whom he had experimented upon before. A gentleman present begged him to come to his house in Sydenham, and give a similar exhibition before friends of his. B. said—

  “I will, on this condition: that you provide a dozen persons, for experiment, whom you know, but who shall be strangers to me; this in order that collusion cannot be charged. I may not be able to affect any of them, but out of the dozen I can expect to affect one or two at least.”

  The condition was accepted, and the day appointed. But the day before the date chosen, the gentleman sent a note saying he had failed to get anybody to consent, and begging B. to bring subjects himself.

  B. took with him a young man who was an easy subject, and whom he had often mesmerized before. The two went upon a platform which had been arranged at the end of a drawing-room, and faced a company of forty men—some young, some middle-aged; some fashionable and frivolous, some of a graver stamp; some sarcastic of aspect, the others blandly unfriendly. B. noted this unpleasant atmosphere and was sorry he had not exacted the original terms. He tried to recover that lost ground by inviting the gentlemen present to provide him with subjects from their number, and said he would regard it as a great favor if his request could be complied with. He waited, but got only silence—there was no other response.

  He then mesmerized his young man, and made him mistake salt for sugar, sugar for salt, chalk for alum, alum for chalk, water for brandy, brandy for milk, and so on; made him see ships sailing on the sea, houses on fire, battles, horse-races, and all such things—and all through these performances the audience smiled contempt, and a group of young fashionables, one of whom was standing, and leaning indolently against the wall, uttered low-voiced ejaculations: “Humbug!” “charlatan!” etc. It was intended that B. should hear, and he heard. He expected his host to interfere and protect him from these insults, and glanced a hint or two at him; but evidently the host was afraid. B. recognized that if he was to have any protection he must furnish it himself. He tried to locate one of those affronts and make sure of the mouth it came from, but he was never quick enough. The dandy who leaned against the wall seemed to be the ringleader, but B. was not sure of it. He went on with his demonstrations, growing angrier and angrier all the while, and the offensive comments continued. He now said—

  “I will now make this subject’s body as rigid as iron; and will ask any that doubt, to come on the platform and examine him and test him.”

  He stretched the young man in the air, with his head upon one table and his heels upon another, and no support between, and invited the doubters to come and apply their tests. No one moved. There was an ejaculation: “Just a tuppenny juggler and his hired pal!”

  This time B. spotted the utterer; it was the young fashionable who was leaning against the wall. He limbered up his subject with a few passes, then turned to the audience and said—

  “I was invited to come here, I did not invite myself. I was invited as a gentleman, to meet gentlemen; you best know why the host’s part of the contract has not been fulfilled. You lack the courage to come on this platform and submit to tests in your own persons, yet you have the courage—being many—to insult me, who am but one, and—as you think—not able to resent it. You do not believe in mesmerism; you do not believe in the genuineness of my demonstrations; you shall have a test that will convince you. I require the person leaning against the wall to come here.”

  He bent his gaze upon the person, who gazed back—gazed and still gazed, B. beckoning—beckoning, drawing him, the audience watching.

  “Now then—come!”

  The new subject moved slowly forward, with his eyes fixed upon B.’s, and arrived upon the platform.

  “Stop!” The man stopped. “Get up and stand in this chair.” The man obeyed. “What do you see?—the ocean?” The man nodded his head dreamily. “Is it at your feet? do you see the waves washing in?” More nods. “Do you not notice how hot it is? Why do you wear such heavy clothes in such weather? Throw them off and take a plunge—it will do you good.” The man took off his coat. “Now your vest—throw it down. Now your trowsers—throw them down. Now your shirt. Now the underclothes. There—plunge! Stop!” B. turned to the house and continued:

  “Here stands one unbeliever—a Mayfair man—a society man—a swell—a smirking lady-killer—a perfumed drawing-room dandy, contemptuous of other people’s feelings and sensitive about his own, proud of his prettiness, vain of his charms—here they all are before you, stark naked! As he is, so shall you be; so help me God I will now strip every coward of you to the skin!”

  But he didn’t. There was a wild rush and scramble, and the place was vacant in a minute. The naked man was Baron F.

  Wednesday, December 5, 1906

  “A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur” written to contrast English life of the Middle Ages with modern civilization—Arraignment of King Leopold II—His character contrasted with character of lawyer who cared for John Marshall Monument Fund.

  From Susy’s Biography.

  Feb. 22 ’86.

  Yesterday evening papa read to us the beginning of his new book, in manuscript, and we enjoyed it very much, it was founded on a New Englanders visit to England in the time of King Arthur and his round table.

  That book was an attempt to imagine, and, after a fashion, set forth, the hard conditions of life for the laboring and defenceless poor in bygone times in England, and, incidentally, contrast these conditions with those under which the civil and ecclesiastical pets of privilege and high fortune lived in those times. I think I was purposing to contrast that English life—not just the English life of Arthur’s day, but the English life of the whole of the Middle Ages—with the life of modern Christendom and modern civilization—to the advantage of the latter, of course. That advantage is still claimable, and does creditably and handsomely exist everywhere in Christendom—if we leave out Russia and the royal palace of Belgium. The royal palace of Belgium is still what it has been for fourteen years—the den of a wild beast—King Leopold II—who for money’s sake mutilates, murders, and starves, half a million of friendless and helpless poor natives in the Congo State every year, and does it by the silent consent of all the Christian powers except England; none of them lifting a hand or a voice to stop these atrocities, although thirteen of them are by solemn treaty pledged to the protecting and uplifting of those wretched natives. In fourteen years, Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battle-fields of this planet for the past thousand years. In this vast statement I am well within the mark—several millions of lives within the mark. It is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon, should have the ghastly distinction of
having produced this mouldy and piety-mouthing hypocrite; this bloody monster whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere, and whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there—which will be soon, let us hope and trust.

  The conditions under which the poor lived in the Middle Ages were hard enough, but those conditions were heaven itself as compared with those which have obtained in the Congo State for these past fourteen years. I have mentioned Russia. Cruel and pitiful as was life throughout Christendom in the Middle Ages, it was not so cruel, not so pitiful, as is life in Russia to-day. In Russia, for three centuries, the vast population has been ground under the heels, and for the sole and sordid advantage of, a procession of crowned assassins and robbers who have all deserved the gallows. Russia’s hundred and thirty millions of miserable subjects are much worse off, to-day, than were the poor of the Middle Ages whom we so pity. We are accustomed, now, to speak of Russia as mediaeval, and as standing still in the Middle Ages, but that is flattery. Russia is ’way back of the Middle Ages; the Middle Ages are a long way in front of her, and she is not likely to catch up with them so long as the Czardom continues to exist.

  To-day’s news from that horrible country moves me to blush for having said hard and harsh things about the life of the poor in the Middle Ages, in the book called “A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.”

  SELLING WIVES FOR BREAD.

  * * *

  Horrors of Famine in Russian Provinces Along the Volga.

  Special Cable Despatch to THE SUN.

  ST. PETERSBURG, Dec. 4.—The newspapers are publishing terrible accounts of the famine in the Volga governments, in seven of which millions of people are said to be dying of starvation. The Tartars are said to be suffering equally with the Russians.

  In the village of Tetyusehi eight Tartar maidens have been sold to dealers in white slaves from the Caucasus at prices that ranged from $34 to $92. Russian peasants near Astrakhan are taking their wives to that city and compelling them to enter the brothels, the husbands receiving about $14 in each case.

  I must stop, now, and consult a note-book or two, and find something complimentary to the human race to take this unpleasant taste out of my mouth. John Cadwalader, a distinguished lawyer of Philadelphia, furnished me such a note, four or five years ago. I don’t know where to look for it, but I can furnish its chief details from memory.

  Seventy-one years ago, in my birth year, 1835, the illustrious John Marshall, Chief-Justice of the United States Supreme Court, died in Philadelphia. A meeting of the bar was called, and a committee was appointed to solicit subscriptions for a monument to commemorate the event. The honor of subscribing was to be restricted to the legal profession; all the lawyers in America were to be asked to subscribe, and all subscriptions were to be limited to one dollar. A young lawyer of the time—whose name I cannot now recall—was appointed to receive the subscriptions and receipt for them. The dollars began presently to flow in from all about the Union. Then the thing happened which always happens: a prodigious new event of some kind or other suddenly absorbed the interest and attention of the whole nation and drove the matter of the monument out of everybody’s mind. When this happened, the dollars stopped coming, and the stoppage came so early that only a trifling sum had by that time been accumulated—somewhere in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars.

  Fifty years afterward, the young subscription-gatherer already mentioned died in the harness, a plodding, honest, aged, and undistinguished lawyer. In his will he had named John Cadwalader as one of the executors. Cadwalader found the dead man’s papers in perfect order, and so clearly and painstakingly classified, indexed, and labeled, that they afforded an accurate and exhaustive view of the old man’s affairs. Among these papers was one which noted the investment of the Monument Fund, dating from the time that the fund had been received, fifty years before. The investment had been made in interest-bearing, gilt-edged securities; presently these had been sold and the result reinvested in the same safe kind of securities. This selling and reinvesting had gone on from year to year for fifty years; in all cases the securities were named, and the interest, and the old bank where the accumulation was deposited was also named. The footing-up showed that there now stood to the credit of the Chief-Justice Marshall Monument Fund in that bank money and securities exceeding the sum of fifty thousand dollars. Cadwalader was so astonished that he rather doubted the evidence of his eyes, and was afraid that he had been beguiling himself with a fairy-tale. He went to the bank and asked if the Monument Fund really had a credit there of above fifty thousand dollars, and was told that the sum was there, and subject at any time to the draft of the Monument Fund.

  Cadwalader hastened from the place, for his presence was due at the annual meeting of the Philadelphia bar. He arrived there excited, and full of his great news. He immediately rose to furnish it, but at the same moment Philadelphia’s most revered, beloved, and illustrious old lawyer, Daniel O’Dogherty, rose to speak. Cadwalader really had the floor, but bowed, gave precedence to O’Dogherty, and sat down. Then a curious and striking thing happened.

  O’Dogherty reminded the bar of a great event which had occurred in Philadelphia half a century before—the death of John Marshall, Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He said it was a reproach to the bar of Philadelphia that this event had not long ago been signalized in some way. Then he moved that now, and on the spot, the bar sponge out that reproach; that before any other business was entered upon, or even mentioned, measures be taken to raise fifty thousand dollars for a monument to John Marshall. He supported his motion in a moving and eloquent speech which roused great enthusiasm, and when he sat down there were cries of “Motion! motion!” from all over the house. The chairman proceeded to put the motion; it was seconded; then Cadwalader got up as if to speak to it, and began by saying,

  “To take measures, sir, to raise this fifty thousand dollars is happily not necessary—it is already raised!”

  Then he went on and told the charmed and astonished house the story which I have just narrated. It takes the bitter taste out of my mouth to recall that beautiful incident.

  The resulting Marshall monument is in the Capitol grounds at Washington.

  Thursday, December 6, 1906

  Clara’s pious remark when her wounded hand was being treated—Jean’s remark when Mr. Clemens received dinner invitation from Emperor Wilhelm II—The Emperor’s dinner—The official of the Foreign Office, and how he got a desired vacation, and retained it.

  From Susy’s Biography.

  Feb. 27, Sunday.

  Clara’s reputation as a baby was always a fine one, mine exactly the contrary. One often related story conscerning her braveness as a baby and her own opinion of this quality of hers is this. Clara and I often got slivers in our hands and when mama took them out with a much dreaded needle, Clara was always very brave, and I very cowardly. One day Clara got one of these slivers in her hand, a very bad one, and while mama was taking it out, Clara stood perfectly still without even wincing; I saw how brave she was and turning to mamma said “Mamma isn’t she a brave little thing! presently mamma had to give the little hand quite a dig with the needle and noticing how perfectly quiet Clara was about it she exclaimed, Why Clara! you are a brave little thing! Clara responded “No bodys braver but God!”—

  Clara’s pious remark is the main detail, and Susy has accurately remembered its phrasing. The three-year-older’s wound was of a formidable sort, and not one which the mother’s surgery would have been equal to. The flesh of the finger had been burst by a cruel accident. It was the doctor that sewed it up, and to all appearances it was he, and the other independent witnesses, that did the main part of the suffering; each stitch that he took made Clara wince slightly, but it shriveled the others.

  I take pride in Clara’s remark, because it shows that although she was only three years old, her fireside teachings were already making her a thinker—a thinker and also an observer of pro
portions. I am not claiming any credit for this. I furnished to the children worldly knowledge and wisdom, but was not competent to go higher, and so I left their spiritual education in the hands of the mother. A result of this modesty of mine was made manifest to me in a very striking way, some years afterward, when Jean was nine years old. We had recently arrived in Berlin, at the time, and had begun housekeeping in a furnished apartment. One morning at breakfast a vast card arrived—an invitation. To be precise, it was a command from the Emperor of Germany to come to dinner. During several months I had encountered socially, on the Continent, men bearing lofty titles; and all this while Jean was becoming more and more impressed, and awed, and subdued, by these imposing events, for she had not been abroad before, and they were new to her—wonders out of dreamland turned into realities. The imperial card was passed from hand to hand, around the table, and examined with interest; when it reached Jean she exhibited excitement and emotion, but for a time was quite speechless; then she said,

  “Why papa, if it keeps going on like this, pretty soon there won’t be anybody left for you to get acquainted with but God.”