by Mark Twain
I never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this place until a symbol of it—a compact and visible allegory of it—furnished me the lacking lift three days ago. I was standing alone on this veranda, in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness, the far-spreading, beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as bric-à-brac. Then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less money, elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away, and disappeared among the trees. It sizes up this solitude. It is so complete, so perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it. Those dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me.
There have been some large vacancies in this work of mine. Early in April came the great irruption of Vesuvius and electrified the world. After the lapse of perhaps a week, we began to get the elaborate particulars, along with photographs that made them understandable. My first thought was, “Here is a chance to show that old news is quite as interesting as fresh news, provided it shall come in the form of a narrative furnished by an eye-witness.” I thought I would get the account by the Younger Pliny of the overwhelming of Herculaneum and Pompeii in A.D. 79 and put it in this book, where it would be, and remain, interesting, as long as the book might last. But straightway the thing happened which I might have known would happen—the newspapers came out with the Younger Pliny’s narrative. It not only happened now, but it will happen again and again every time there is a great irruption of Vesuvius, so long as newspapers and magazines continue to exist, until Vesuvius shall go permanently dry—even though it be a hundred thousand years.
So there was no occasion to put the Younger Pliny into this book. He will always be heard from when the occasion comes, without need of help from me. I was dictating about other matters at the time, and trying hard to catch up to the current date. Therefore I allowed that irruption to wait until I could get a proper chance at it. But meantime I went on collecting and preserving, day after day, the daily accounts of the progress of the irruption, and, therewith, the pictures forwarded by eye-witnesses.
But before in my dictating I was able to catch up and begin on the irruption, came the mighty news of the obliteration of San Francisco by earthquake and fire, and Vesuvius vanished instantly and completely from my interest and from the interest of the world. San Francisco filled the whole world, from horizon to horizon, and there was no more Vesuvius. Never in all history, I suppose, was a world-interest so suddenly and so completely extinguished.
The first hint of the disaster which had befallen San Francisco reached me in such an extravagant form that I took it for an impudent invention, and it did not hold my attention ten minutes. It came to me by telephonic message from a friend down in the city. He simply said: “San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake at five o’clock this morning. Two thousand lives lost.” But by nightfall “extra” after “extra” began to appear and the news to take on the semblance of reality. Certain definite details were furnished. The next morning’s papers contained news of a convincing character—although there was not much of it, for the reason that the earthquake and the fire together had almost totally abolished railway and telegraphic communication with San Francisco from the outside.
I began to accumulate pictures and narratives again. I threw away all my Vesuvian accumulations to make room for the San Franciscan collections. But in a few days these had become a mountain, and the thing was hopeless. I destroyed my San Franciscan accumulations and stopped harvesting that kind of material. It occurred to me that there were certain good reasons why I could properly and wisely excuse myself from becoming a historian of that disaster. It happened to occur to me that inasmuch as this was the only instance in history of the destruction of a very great city by fire and earthquake, it would stand alone among disasters; conspicuous, awful, sublime, forever visible to men, forever unforgetable—and would so remain even if the aid of the book and the newspaper were denied it. However, this aid would not be wanting. No, it will have that help for all time to come. A thousand years from now there will still be whole libraries about the destruction of San Francisco. There will still be acres of pictures—photographic and authentic—illustrating the disaster. I recognize that I can quite safely leave San Francisco out of this book, and that is what I shall do.
Tuesday, June 12, 1906
The San Francisco earthquake—Madame Sembrich’s experience—The strange absence of fear shown by all who were shaken up by the earthquake—Mr. Clemens speaks of the great San Franciscan earthquake which occurred when he was living there—He learns through Mr. Richard Williams of the safety of Steve and Jim Gillis.
During fifty-six years, the whole great globe has been continuously contributing to the population of San Francisco, therefore its destruction was a matter of personal concern to families scattered everywhere upon the globe’s surface. Its population, of four hundred thousand, represented all the races of men, pretty nearly. There is not another city of just its size in the world whose destruction could send dread and terror to anything like so many and so widely scattered hearthstones. New York seemed now to be suddenly swarming with ex-Californians, and with relatives and intimate friends of existing Californians. Everybody I met seemed to have personal grounds for his interest in the disaster. Some had a pecuniary interest in it. One friend of mine who had been living long in New York on a liberal income furnished by San Franciscan property, had lost the most of his possessions and been obliged to remove from expensive quarters to cheap ones in a humble flat. A week before the calamity a young couple, of independent means, dined at my table, and they were full of pleasant anticipations of an excursion around the world which they were preparing to make. Their fortune was in San Francisco. Ten days after the calamity they were aware that they were paupers; they were now seeking employment, for wages. They quickly found it—the wife in New York, the husband in Montana.
It is thirty-eight years since I last saw San Francisco and was engaged in advancing its prosperity, at thirty or forty dollars a week on the Morning Call, as chief and only reporter. In my day I knew everybody in San Francisco—including the most of the dogs and cats—because of my newspaper connection; but now I could not seem to call to mind any of my friends of that early day who would be likely to have been spared thirty-eight years to enjoy the earthquake. After much thinking and recalling, I did dig up out of my memory three or four old friends whom I had reason to believe were still alive; also I established a personal connection in another way. About a week before the disaster the husband of Madame Sembrich visited me at 21 Fifth Avenue—the rented house which we call our home—and brought Madame Sembrich’s autograph album, which I was under contract to her to sign. As he was going away he said:
“It will interest you to know that my wife, with the rest of the Grand Opera Company, is arriving in San Francisco to-day.”
As it turned out, she was not only arriving, but had arrived. And not only had she arrived, but at the time of our conversation the earthquake had shaken her out of the eighth story of her hotel, in night costume, and now she was camping in a public park. The earthquake shook her out of her bed and upset all the furniture in her room. She fled down the rocking stairs nearly to the street, then climbed up to her quarters again to get her jewels, made the descent a second time, this time to the street level, where she found the hotel entrance clogged with fallen building material. Then, being unhappy in her scant apparel, she made the ascent once more to get something, I don’t know what—a hair-pin, I suppose. What I am arriving at is this: that with the globe apparently going to pieces, everything jostling and cracking and crumbling and making a muffled and thunderous clamor of unaccustomed noises, that charming and dainty and delicate and refined little creature was not frightened.
According to innumerable personal accounts of reputable witnesses, the passion of fear w
as strangely absent at the time of that cataclysm—yet we have the impression that the fright communicated by an earthquake is the most terrible of all frights, and spares nobody. I do not know how to account for this radical change. I was in what was called the “Great Earthquake” in San Francisco a long time ago, and I remember that everybody who came under my notice during the sharp half-minute joggle that it lasted was frightened—except myself. I was not frightened because I didn’t know it was an earthquake. It shook me up violently, and I fell against a house on the street corner; but I supposed, for the moment, that it was a riot inside the house. That interested me instantly and intensely, because I was a newspaper reporter, and was thankful. A moment or two later I recognized that it was an earthquake, and was arranging to get frightened, when I realized that the time for it had gone by, and that it was not now worth while. That earthquake produced two deaths—a lady died from sheer fright, and a young man was so demented with fright that he jumped out of a window and was killed.
My attention is called to this matter of the absence of fright as exhibited in this recent earthquake, by a published letter of Professor William James, the philosopher, who was visiting at Stanford University, and who noted the wide prevalence of that astonishing absence of panicky fear. To him it was an extraordinary thing, and unaccountable. It is not discoverable in the history of any preceding earthquake, in America or elsewhere. Professor James was shaken out of his quarters, but had no feeling of fright or fear. He was merely strongly and absorbingly interested in the event as being a remarkable one, a memorable one, and one worth going far to experience. He speaks of an undergraduate who was sleeping in the fourth story of a massive stone dormitory of the University, and who was plunged from his bed down through the four floors and into the basement, where he lay imprisoned in wreckage, but not frightened,—and not hurt, so far as he knew—only surprised, with a surprise tinged with regret, for it was hardly five o’clock in the morning and he hadn’t finished his sleep. He worked his way up through the crazy ruins, reached what was left of his room in the fourth story, accumulated remnants of his clothes from here, there, and yonder, covered his nakedness with them, and went off to see what had been happening to other people. He was still unaware that he was hurt, yet before noon he was in the hospital, and it took him a week or two there to get mended up so that he could get out and on his feet again.
As I say, I dug out of my memory several friends of the days of thirty-eight years ago, to get anxious about. One was Joe Goodman. He is safe—nothing happened to him. Another was “little Ward,” who was a compositor on the Morning Call in my time—and he used to go with little Steve Gillis and me to the beer saloons in Montgomery street when work was over, at two o’clock in the morning, and where I used to sit around till dawn and have a restful, pleasant time, while little Ward and Steve—weighing ninety-five pounds each—good-naturedly picked quarrels with any strangers over their size who seemed to need entertainment, and they always thrashed those strangers with their fists. I never knew them to suffer a defeat. They never assisted each other. If one had offered to assist the other against some overgrown person, it would have been an affront, and a battle would have followed between that pair of little friends—a battle which would have continued for years and could never have been decided, because those boys were absolutely equally matched in scientific fisticuffs. We three were about of an age—I twenty-nine, and they twenty-seven.
Thinking over these hallowed memories I presently remembered that little Ward sent a bullet through his head several years ago, when he had reached the age of sixty-five. My solicitude was now diminished to little Steve Gillis and his brother Jim. As I have before remarked, I had been a boarder in their parents’ house for a year or two, in those days, and was very intimate with the young sons and daughters of the family. I was presently to learn that the Gillis boys were safe. One day a card was brought up to my room, the address upon which was “Richard Williams, San Francisco.” I had the proprietor of it brought up to my den at once, for I wanted to make inquiries. He was tall, broad shouldered, muscular; with a strong jaw and a determined face, gentlemanly in his dress and manners, and apparently about forty years old. He wore no beard, and his face was a fearful spectacle to look upon. It was a riot and confusion of broad and slick scars, which overlapped each other like the scales of a fish—the sort of scars that fire makes. I said to myself, “He doesn’t need to put San Francisco on his card. Anybody will know that he is back, recently, from there, or from Perdition; for he never could have got that work of art from any but one or the other of those places; they don’t turn out that complete and perfect kind, elsewhere—in this world or anywhere else.” It was a brutal rudeness to stare at him, but I couldn’t help it. There was a fascination—a grisly fascination—about his aspect which made it impossible for me to keep my eyes off his face; and I think that wherever he goes he must find that the rest of the world are like me—they can’t resist.
He said, “Mr. Clemens, you don’t know me. You’ve never seen me. But I am the eldest son of the eldest of the Gillis sisters.”
“Oh impossible,” I said, “why they were nothing but young girls.”
“Yes,” he said, “so they were, but they didn’t stay so.”
“Well,” I said, “I see how it is. Those young girls have remained young girls in my memory all this time, but they could have grown up in the meantime; it has happened before. Well, it does seem very strange that you, a great stalwart man, should actually be the offspring of one of those young creatures. How old are you?”
He said he was thirty-seven, but was often taken to be older.
He told me that his uncles, little Steve Gillis and Jim, were both in the hospital at the time of the earthquake and the fire, and that although the hospitals had turned out to be particularly fatal places at the time of the catastrophe because the inmates were not able to aid in their own rescue, Jim and Steve had escaped. That was natural. They are the bravest of the brave. You might break their legs and their backs, too, and they would fight their way out of a danger that would be fatal to ordinary men with all their bones about them in good repair.
I am going to confess that I don’t know to this day how he got those scars. I had a delicacy about asking him how he got them. I knew there were only just the two places, hell or San Francisco, and so— Moreover, I knew that if he had any sensitiveness about it he would throw me out of the window. He looked like just that determined kind of a man. I wish I knew whether he was in that San Francisco fire and got burned up and escaped—but I never shall know.
Wednesday, June 13, 1906
The days of reporting on the Morning Call—The advent of Smiggy McGlural and the resignation of Mr. Clemens—Destruction of Morning Call building in recent earthquake—Good times with Bret Harte in Morning Call office.
How wonderful are the ways of Providence! But I will take that up later.
In those days—about forty years ago—I was a reporter on the Morning Call of San Francisco. I was more than that—I was the reporter. There was no other. There was enough work for one, and a little over, but not enough for two—according to Mr. Barnes’s idea, and he was the proprietor, and therefore better situated to know about it than other people. By nine in the morning I had to be at the police court for an hour and make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before. They were usually between Irishmen and Irishmen, and Chinamen and Chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a change. Each day’s evidence was substantially a duplicate of the evidence of the day before, therefore the daily performance was killingly monotonous and wearisome. So far as I could see, there was only one man connected with it who found anything like a compensating interest in it, and that was the court interpreter. He was an Englishman who was glibly familiar with fifty-six Chinese dialects. He had to change from one to another of them every ten minutes, and this exercise was so energizing that it kept him always awake—which was not the case with the reporters.
Next, we visited the higher courts, and made notes of the decisions which had been rendered the day before. All the courts came under the head of “regulars.” They were sources of reportorial information which never failed. During the rest of the day we raked the town from end to end, gathering such material as we might, wherewith to fill our required column—and if there were no fires to report, we started some. At night we visited the six theatres, one after the other: seven nights in the week, three hundred and sixty-five nights in the year. We remained in each of those places five minutes, got the merest passing glimpse of play and opera, and with that for a text we “wrote up” those plays and operas, as the phrase goes, torturing our souls every night, from the beginning of the year to the end of it, in the effort to find something to say about those performances which we had not said a couple of hundred times before. There has never been a time, from that day to this (forty years), that I have been able to look at even the outside of a theatre without a spasm of the dry gripes, as “Uncle Remus” calls it—and as for the inside, I know next to nothing about that, for in all this time I have seldom had a sight of it, nor ever had a desire in that regard which couldn’t have been overcome by argument.
After having been hard at work from nine or ten in the morning until eleven at night scraping material together, I took the pen and spread this muck out in words and phrases, and made it cover as much acreage as I could. It was fearful drudgery—soulless drudgery—and almost destitute of interest. It was an awful slavery for a lazy man, and I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can’t go beyond possibility.
