Autobiography Of Mark Twain, Volume 1

by Mark Twain

  In drawing contracts he is always able to take care of himself; and in every instance he will work into the contracts injuries to the other party and advantages to himself which were never considered or mentioned in the preceding verbal agreement. In one contract he got me to assign to him several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of property for a certain valuable consideration—said valuable consideration being the re-giving to me of another piece of property which was not his to give but already belonged to me! See assignment, Aug. 12, 1890. I quite understand that I am confessing myself a fool; but that is no matter, the reader would find it out anyway, as I go along. Hamersley was our joint lawyer, and I had every confidence in his wisdom and cleanliness.

  Once when I was lending money to Paige during a few months, I presently found that he was giving receipts to my representative instead of notes! But that man never lived who could catch Paige so nearly asleep as to palm off on him a piece of paper which apparently satisfied a debt when it ought to acknowledge a loan.

  I must throw in a parenthesis here, or I shall do Hamersley an injustice. Here and there I have seemed to cast little reflections upon him. Pay no attention to them. I have no feeling about him, I have no harsh words to say about him. He is a great fat good-natured, kind-hearted, chicken-livered slave; with no more pride than a tramp, no more sand than a rabbit, no more moral sense than a wax figure, and no more sex than a tape-worm. He sincerely thinks he is honest, he sincerely thinks he is honorable. It is my daily prayer to God that he be permitted to live and die in those superstitions. I gave him a twentieth of my American holding, at Paige’s request; I gave him a twentieth of my foreign holding at his own supplication; I advanced near $40,000 in five years to keep these interests sound and valid for him. In return, he drafted every contract which I made with Paige in all that time—clear up to September, 1890—and pronounced it good and fair; and then I signed. These unique contracts will be found in the Appendix. May they be instructive to the struggling student of law.

  Yes, it is as I have said: Paige is an extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity. Instances of his commercial insanity are simply innumerable. Here are some examples. When I took hold of the machine Feb. 6, 1886, its faults had been corrected and a setter and a justifier could turn out about 3,500 ems an hour on it; possibly 4,000. There was no machine that could pretend rivalry to it. Business sanity would have said, put it on the market as it was, secure the field, and add improvements later. Paige’s business insanity said, add the improvements first, and risk losing the field. And that is what he set out to do. To add a justifying mechanism to that machine would take a few months and cost $9,000 by his estimate, or $12,000 by Pratt & Whitney’s. I agreed to add said justifier to that machine. There could be no sense in building a new machine. Yet in total violation of the agreement, Paige went immediately to work to build a new machine, although aware, by recent experience, that the cost could not fall below $150,000, and that the time consumed would be years instead of months. Well, when four years had been spent and the new machine was able to exhibit a marvelous capacity, we appointed the 12th of January for Senator Jones of Nevada to come and make an inspection. He was not promised a perfect machine, but a machine which could be perfected. He had agreed to invest one or two hundred thousand dollars in its fortunes; and had also said that if the exhibition was particularly favorable, he might take entire charge of the elephant. At the last moment Paige concluded to add an air-blast, (afterwards found to be unnecessary); wherefore, Jones had to be turned back from New York to wait a couple of months and lose his interest in the thing. A year ago, Paige made what he regarded as a vast and magnanimous concession: Hamersley and I might sell the English patent for $10,000,000! A little later a man came along who thought he could bring some Englishmen who would buy that patent, and he was sent off to fetch them. He was gone so long that Paige’s confidence began to diminish, and with it his price. He finally got down to what he said was his very last and bottom price for that patent—$50,000! This was the only time in five years that I ever saw Paige in his right mind. I could furnish other examples of Paige’s business insanity—enough of them to fill six or eight volumes, perhaps, but I am not writing his history, I am merely sketching his portrait.

  Greatest of all mistakes that things warn’t arranged so as to have four persons in the Trinity. But even then Paige wouldn’t stir a peg unless he could have the boss-ship.

  End of 1885.

  Paige arrives at my house unheralded. [I was a small stockholder in the Farnham Co., but had seen little or nothing of Paige for a year or two.] He said “What’ll you complete the machine for?”

  “What will it cost?”

  “$20,000—certainly not over $30,000.”

  “What will you give?”

  “I’ll give you half.”

  “I’ll do it—but the limit must be $30,000.”

  “Hamersley’s a good fellow and will be invaluable to us—we can’t get along without him as our lawyer. Shan’t we give him a slice?”

  “Yes. How much?”

  “Shall we say a tenth?”

  “All right—yes.”

  The contract, (signed Feb. 6, 1886) was drawn by Hamersley. It is an excruciatingly absurd piece of paper. It bound me to requirements which had not been talked about, but they looked easy and I accepted them. But it was not till months afterward that upon trying to sell a part of my interest to raise money for the machine I found I hadn’t any ownership of any kind. My 9/20 interest had become a purely conditional one. Failing the conditions, I would have nothing back but my $30,000 and 6 per cent interest.

  Hamersley was my trusted old friend, and as I thought, my lawyer also. I was spending $30,000 to build his tenth of the machine. Yet he drew that contract and was present at the signing of it, and found nothing unrighteous about it.

  II

  The $30,000 lasted about a year, I should say. My contract was fulfilled, but Paige had fallen far short of finishing the machine—though he said he could finish it for $4,000; and could finish it and give it a big exhibition in New York for $10,000. After an interval, during which I did not see him, he applied for a loan of this money and offered to pay back double some day.

  I sent word that I would furnish the $4,000, but would take nothing but 6 per cent. (Witness, F. G. Whitmore.)

  When the $4,000 was gone, he said a little more would do. I furnished a little more and a little more, taking 6 per cent notes until at last the machine was finished but not absolutely perfected. It could not have stood a lengthy test-exhibition. The notes then aggregated (with interest) about $53,000 or $55,000. I was out of pocket more than $80,000, with nothing to show for it but the original idiotic contract.

  I then struck the idea of asking for royalties to raise money on. I asked for five hundred. Paige said—

  “You can have as many as you want. I’ll give you a thousand.”

  I said no, I would take only five hundred.

  The royalty deed was made and signed. We were all feeling fine. Paige asked me to give him back his notes. I made Whitmore do it, though he strenuously objected.

  I went on finishing the machine at the rate of $4,000 and upwards a month. I had no fears or doubts. [But I found royalties not very salable, and stopped trying to sell them.]

  Hamersley was in a sweat to get a new contract out of Paige allowing a company to organize in the ordinary way and manufacture the machine. Presently Paige consented—and contract No. 2 was the result. It recognized my share. A rough one on me, but anything seemed better than the old contract—which was a mistake.

  A few months later contract No. 3 (the May contract?) was made. It recognized my share.

  These were not promising contracts for a company to take hold of.

  Then came the “June” contract—a good and rational one. All this time these various contracts merely recognized my American rights. My foreign 9/20 were conditioned upon my paying the patent-expenses as they accrued (which I
did) and the ultimate expenses of starting work in the foreign countries—a condition which has not yet arrived. Now none of the previous contracts actually gave me an ownership, but this June one gave me the machine and everything, bag and baggage.

  However, John P. Jones thought the foreign rights should be put into this contract, and I wrote to Paige to interline this addition. He sent for my copy of the June contract and Whitmore brought it and left it with him—which was a mistake.

  We couldn’t get it from him any more. He said it wasn’t a real contract, because it had a blank in it (for his salary.)

  I came down from Onteora to see what the trouble was, and Whitmore urged me to stand out for the restoration of that stolen contract; but Paige insisted that a new one which he had been drawing up was much better. I signed it, and also assigned my foreign rights back to Paige, who now owned the entire thing (Hamersley’s shares, too) if this contract failed to materialize. It had but six months to run.

  After signing it I spoke doubtfully of my chances, and Paige shed a few tears, as usual, and was deeply hurt at being doubted; asked me if he hadn’t always taken care of me? and had he ever failed of his word with me? hadn’t he always said that no matter what happened (meaning a falling-out—which I had suggested) I should have my 9/20 of every dollar he ever got out of the machine, domestic and foreign; that if he died (as I had suggested) his family would see to it that I got my 9/20. Then—

  “Here, Charley Davis, take a pen and write what I say.”

  He dictated and Davis wrote.

  “There, now,” said Paige, “are you satisfied now?”

  I went on footing the bills, and got the machine really perfected at last, at a full cost of about $150,000, instead of the original $30,000.

  Ward tells me that Paige tried his best to cheat me out of my royalties when making a contract with the Connecticut Co.

  Also that he tried to cheat out of all share Mr. North (inventor of the justifying mechanism;) but that North frightened him with a lawsuit-threat, and is to get a royalty until the aggregate is $2,000,000.

  Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.

  This manuscript—which has not been published before—was left to a degree unfinished, judging from Clemens’s penciled (tentative) revision of its title to “Travel-Scraps from Autobiog.” Now in the Mark Twain Papers, it is thought to be a draft chapter written for the autobiography on that evidence, and also because, in 1900 during a later stay in London, Clemens wrote a sequel about the city entitled “Travel-Scraps II,” which he ultimately inserted in the Autobiographical Dictation of 27 February 1907. The subtitle “London, Summer, 1896,” refers to the events in the piece, not the time of writing, which was clearly soon after the Clemenses arrived in Vienna in late September 1897. The “village” Clemens referred to was the area around Tedworth Square, where they lived from October 1896 until they moved to Weggis, Switzerland, in July 1897 (Notebook 39, TS p. 6, CU-MARK).

  Travel-Scraps I

  London, Summer, 1896

  All over the world there seems to be a prejudice against the cab driver. But that is too sweeping; it must be modified. I think I may say that there is a prejudice against him in many American cities, but not in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston; that in Europe, as a rule, there is a prejudice against him, but not in Munich and Berlin; that there is a prejudice against him in Calcutta but not in Bombay. I think I may say that the prejudice against him is strong in London, stronger in Paris, and strongest in New York. There are courteous and reasonable cabmen in Paris, but they seem to be rare. I think that in London four out of every six cabmen are pleasant and rational beings, and are satisfied with twenty-five per cent above legal fare; and that the other two are always ready and anxious for a dispute, and burning to conduct it in a loud and frantic key.* The citizen must pay from two to three prices, when he makes his bargain beforehand, and more when he doesn’t. When he makes his bargain beforehand he expects to be overcharged, and is not discontented unless the over-tax is extravagant, because he knows that the legal rate is too low, and that the hack-industry cannot live upon it. The heavy over-charge has kept the traffic down and made it meagre. The legal charge might not be too low if the traffic were as heavy as it ought to be for a city like New York, but it is not likely to expand while hackmen may continue to charge any price they please. And now that the hacks have driven all the business into the hands of the steam and electric companies, the periodical attempts to inaugurate a cheap hack-system in New York will presently begin again, I suppose. Hacks are but little needed in American cities for any but strangers who cannot find their way by tram-lines. The citizen should be thankful for the high hack-rates which have given him the trams; for by consequence he has the cheapest and swiftest city-transportation that exists in the world. London travels by omnibus—pleasant, but as deadly slow as a European “lift;” and by underground railway, which is an invention of Satan himself. It goes no direct course, but always away around. When the train arrives you must jump, rush, fly, and swarm with the crowd into the first cigar box that is handy, lest you get left. You have hardly time to mash yourself into a portion of a seat before the train is off again. It goes blustering and squttering along, puking smoke and cinders in at the window, which some one has opened in pursuance of his right to make the whole cigar box uncomfortable if his comfort requires it; the fog of black smoke smothers the lamp and dims its light, and the double row of jammed people sit there and bark at each other, and the righteous and the unrighteous pray each after his own fashion. The train stops every few minutes, and there is a new rush and scramble each time. And every quarter of an hour you change cars, and fly thirty yards to a stairway, and up the stairway and fifty yards along a corridor, and down another stairway, and plunge headlong into a train just as it moves off; and of course it is the wrong one, and you must get out at the next station and come back. But it is no matter. If you had stopped to ask the official on duty, it would have been the right train and you would have lost it by stopping to ask; and so none but idiots stop to ask. The next time that you ought to change cars you are not aware of it, and you go on. You keep on going on and on and on, wondering what has become of St. John’s Wood, and if you are ever likely to get to that brick-and-mortar forest; and by and by you pull your courage together and ask a passenger if he can tell you whereabouts you are, and he says “We are just arriving at Sloane Square.” You thank him, and look gratified, look as gratified as you can on the spur of the moment and without sufficient preparation, and step out, saying “It is my station.” And so it is. That is where you started from. It is an hour or an hour and a half ago, and is getting toward bedtime, now. You have been plowing through tunnels all that time, and have been all around under London amongst its entrails, and been in first, second and third-class cars on a third-class ticket, and associated with all sorts of company, from Dukes and Bishops down to rank and mangy tramps and blatherskites who sat with their drunken trunnions in their laps and caressed and kissed them unembarrassed. You have missed the dinner you were aimed for, but you are alive yet, and that is something; and you have learned better than to go by tunnel any more, and that is also a gain. You cannot telephone your friend to go to bed and not keep the dinner waiting. There is not a telephone within a mile of you, and there is not a telephone within a mile of him. Years ago there was a telephone system in England, but in the country parts it is about dead, now, and what is left of it in London has no value. So you send a telegram to your friend, stating that you have met with an accident, and begging him not to wait dinner for you. You are aware that all the offices in his neighborhood close at eight in the evening and it is ten now; it is also Saturday night, and England keeps Sunday; but the telegram will reach his house Monday morning, and when he gets back from business at five in the evening he will get it, and will know then t
hat you did not come Saturday evening, and why.

  One little wee bunch of houses in London, one little wee spot, is the centre of the globe, the heart of the globe, and the machinery that moves the world is located there. It is called the City, and it, with a patch of its borderland, is a city. But the rest of London is not a city. It is fifty villages massed solidly together over a vast stretch of territory. Each village has its own name and its own government. Its ways are village ways, and the great body of its inhabitants are just villagers, and have the simple, honest, untraveled, unworldly look of villagers. Its shops are village shops; little cramped places where you can buy an anvil or a paper of pins, or anything between; but you can’t buy two anvils, nor five papers of pins, nor seven white cravats, nor two hats of the same breed, because they do not keep such gross masses in stock. The shopman will not offer to get the things and send them to you, but will tell you where he thinks you may possibly find them. And he is not brusque and fussy and unpleasant, like a city person, but takes the simple and kindly interest of a villager in the matter, and will discuss it as long as you please. They have no hateful city ways, and indeed no ways that suggest that they have ever lived in a city.

  In my village there are a lot of little postoffices and one big one—in Sloane Square. One Saturday toward dusk I visited three of the little ones and asked if there was a Sunday mail for Paris; and if so, at how late an hour could I mail my letter and catch it? Nobody knew whether there was such a mail or not, but it was believed that there was. They could not refer to a table of mails, for they had none. Could they telephone the General Postoffice and find out for me? No, they had no telephone. The big office in Sloane Square might know. I went there. There were two or three girls and a woman or two on duty. Yes, there was a Paris mail, they said; they did not know at what hour it left, but they believed it did. Were my questions unusual ones in their experience? They could not remember that any one had asked them before. And those people looked so friendly, and innocent, and childlike, and ignorant, and happy, and content.