Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  “It gave me hope when I reached the rail and saw them move. No sooner was I on the deck than they seemed to wake out of a trance. All three rushed at me like wild creatures. They looked terrible, so gaunt and bedraggled, with their eyes starting out of their heads. The women seized me by the clothes. One of them flung her arms around my legs. I said: ‘Keep as cool as possible, ladies.’

  “They clutched me harder than ever. ‘I implore you to be quiet,’ I said, ‘or we will all four be drowned.’ Then they began to cry and that soothed them.

  “My first business was to make fast the rope around what remained of the funnel. As I was doing this I noticed one of the ladies pointing with horror. I looked and saw about ten corpses huddled together in terrible attitudes, staring heavenwards. When I made the rope fast I flung the other end to my mate. Then I got another rope, tied it around the waist of a woman and lowered her by a slip loop down the first rope, which was taut.

  “In this way I got the three off. It was a difficult job, for each clung to me. They did not want to go. Then I had a last look around and found that there was nobody else alive. I struggled back to the piles. When we got back to the port the beach was deserted.”

  Salvagers reached the wreck of the Berlin to-day and landed twenty-two bodies from below. No more corpses are believed to be on the wreck of the vessel.

  Now I come to another stirring thing. It happened in our own country last night, a quarter of an hour before midnight, and this morning’s newspapers have furnished us the details.

  BOLT WRECKS 18 HOUR TRAIN.

  * * *

  TRACK ON STEEL TIES SPREADS UNDER PENNA. R. R. FLYER.

  * * *

  Train Rolls Down Embankment and Crashes Through Ice on Conemaugh River—Not One of the 100 Passengers Killed and Only One in Danger of Death.

  PITTSBURG, Feb. 23.—The Pennsylvania special, the famous New York-Chicago eighteen hour train of the Pennsylvania Railroad, left the tracks at Mineral Point, near Johnstown, at 11:45 o’clock last night, rolled down sixty feet of embankment and crashed through the almost solid ice of the Conemaugh River, the stream that took such a tragic part in the flood of almost two decades ago.

  The remarkable feature is that not one of the more than a hundred persons on the train was killed outright. Fifty of the injured are at the hospitals in this city, Altoona and Johnstown.

  It was the most unexpected thing that happened.

  A new piece of track had been put in at this point a short time ago. Instead of the ordinary wood crossties the track was supported on steel ties, to which the rails are bolted. One of these bolts, the railroad men say, gave way, the rails spread and the train, running around a curve at sixty miles an hour to make up lost time, was thrown to the river.

  When the heavy train went over the embankment everything went before it, including the telegraph poles. For that reason it was hours before the outside world could be communicated with and assistance sent to the injured.

  In the meantime they were huddled together, many of them devoid of any but night clothing, others with what clothing they did have soaked with the icy waters of the Conemaugh, and still others with blood from their wounds congealing over their bodies.

  It did not seem out of place that when assistance did arrive and a special train was started for Pittsburg early this morning with the unhurt and those of the injured who were able to continue on their journey the Rev. Edgar Cope, rector of St. Simeon’s Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, assembled all together in one car and there conducted one of the most solemn services of thanksgiving that has ever been held. Most of the passengers were still without clothing and were wrapped in blankets and bedclothes.

  “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God that our lives have been spared,” said the pastor as he opened the brief service. “Our presence here in the flesh at this time is nothing more than an act of Providence. So let us utter thanks to Him who has permitted us to live.”

  Then down on their knees went the survivors and the fervent “amen” of the clergyman was heartily joined in by every person in the car just as the Union Station in this city was reached.

  These eventful happenings engage our interest, and they also make us thoughtful. By the official statistics compiled by the United States Government, we find that within the brief compass of the year 1906 our railroads killed 10,000 persons outright and injured 60,000 others.

  It has been said that the ways of Providence are wonderful, and past finding out, and this is true; but in a good many cases they do not seem so wonderful as are the ways of the pulpit, nor so curious, and obscure, and interesting, as are the results of its mental feats. The language of that clergyman in the train indicates that he fully believes that Providence is so all-comprehensively powerful that He can rescue from death and mutilation any of His children that are in peril by the simple exercise of His will, and at no inconvenience to Himself; also that Providence extended this grace to him and to his ninety-nine fellow-passengers, and that this was a most praiseworthy act and entitled to admiring applause, and to the deepest and humblest gratitude. It is as if a millionaire should contribute ten cents’ worth of bread to a couple of his starving children and then sit down and admire his benevolence while the rest of his family pine supplicating around him and die of hunger. It is also as if this clergyman, being one of the rescued pair, found nothing to observe in these sorrowful circumstances except merely and solely the benefit which had accrued to him and his brother, and by that happy fortune was stricken so blessedly stone blind to the rest of the extraordinary episode that he could not even perceive its ghastliness, and stricken so dumb with gratitude for his own escape that he could not utter a word of criticism, reproach, or censure for the treatment which had been meted out to the rest of the family. Ten thousand killed and sixty thousand injured by the railroads; the Larchmont’s people allowed to go to their pitiful death unhelped by any but a poor sailor-man; the Berlin’s hundred and twenty-six allowed to go to their miserable doom without help from any but another good-hearted sailor-man and some brave and devoted life-saving crews—mere human beings, not all-powerful, but weak, and with lives to lose—and this clergyman in the train is dull enough, silly enough, indiscreet enough, to slander His Providence with grotesque compliments for doing an inexpensive kindness to one little handful of His earthly children while allowing all that multitude of others to drift into misery and death when a nod from Him could have saved them whole. I do not know what the pulpit’s mind is made of. It takes a child’s delight in theatrical exhibitions of the Creator’s physical powers; no other thing so excites its eloquence; it can find opportunity for intemperate admiration where opportunity for sarcasm holds the better chance by a thousand to one.

  In this connection I will remark that an elder sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe told me this anecdote a generation ago. One summer afternoon when Harriet was a little creature, she was playing about the room where her mother sat at work, when a storm came up, and presently a thunderbolt struck an apple-tree close by, accompanying the act with a prodigious burst of sound and scattering the abolished tree in fragments all over an acre of ground. The astonished child said,

  “Mamma, who did that?”

  “God,” answered mamma, reverently.

  “What did He do it for?”

  “To show His power, my child.”

  Later the child reported the matter to the elder sister, who was surprised at one detail, and thought that perhaps she had misheard, so she said,

  “What did mamma say He did it for?”

  “To show off,” answered Harriet.

  The mother had not intended to utter a sarcasm; neither had the child, but both had done it.

  Tuesday, February 26, 1907

  Mr. Clemens describes the new club which he has started, called The Human Race—Another newspaper clipping concerning the wreck of the Berlin.

  Last week I started a club. The membership is limited to four men; its name is The Human Race. It will lunc
h at my house twice a month, and its business will be to discuss the rest of the race. It is privileged to examine, criticise, and discuss any matter that concerns the race, and do it freely. In the matter of subjects and manner of treatment, there are no limitations. The reason that certain tender subjects are avoided and forbidden in all other clubs is because those clubs consist of more than four members. Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech. It is the self-admiring boast of England and America that in those countries a man is free to talk out his opinions, let them be of what complexion they may, but this is one of the human race’s hypocrisies; there has never been any such thing as free speech in any country, and there is no such thing as free speech in England or America when more than four persons are present; and not then, except the four are all of one political and religious creed. Whenever our club meets, its first duty will be to synopsize the performances of mankind as reported in the newspapers for the previous fortnight, and then discuss such of these performances as shall require our most urgent attention. After this stern duty shall have been accomplished the talk may wander whither it shall choose. Of a necessity, man will come in for more censures than compliments, more reproach than praise; but he will also have done some things during the fortnight of a sort to earn our commendation, and we shall confer it upon him in full and hearty measure. When we come to discuss the Larchmont and Berlin disasters we shall not forget the sailor-man and his wife, and their new acquaintance—great and fine characters, all three! neither shall we forget the Dutch sailor-man and his three gallant satellites; nor the Dutch life-saving crew; nor the three heroic women on the wreck; nor the soldierly little servant maid. However, the little servant maid has not appeared prominently in the world’s fifty thousand newspapers until this morning, therefore we will insert her prominently here, in order that future generations may still be reading about her, and caressing her name, and saying affectionate things of her, long after she shall have finished her pilgrimage and gone to her rest. On the shore, as will be noted, another sort of representatives of the human race were present and diligently exposing their kind; but Minna Ripler offsets them, and makes them show pallid and sallow in the white light that streams from her generous little soul. With the following cabled narrative of this morning we will close the fearful incident of the wrecked steamer.

  HORRORS OF BERLIN WRECK.

  * * *

  WAVES BEAT MEN AND WOMEN TO DEATH ON THE DECK.

  * * *

  Last Survivors Nearly Crazed by Cold and Terror—Brave Servant, Who Stood by Her Mistress, Shows Best Progress—Heartless Throng of Gay Sightseers.

  Special Cable Despatch to THE SUN.

  LONDON, Feb. 24.—With the rescue, already described in the despatches to THE SUN, of the three women who after exactly forty-seven hours of indescribable suffering were the last to be taken alive from the wrecked steamer Berlin, the story of this terrible wreck comes to an end. Seldom has a sea tragedy, even when the loss of life has been greater, been so full of stories of poignant anguish.

  Rescue or death as a rule comes with more merciful swiftness. The heroism of the rescued and the rescuers alike shows brighter in every descriptive line that comes from the Hook of Holland. Of the three women who were left until the last two remained rather than abandon the third, Mrs. Wenneberg, who was distraught from having seen her husband swept to death before her eyes and having her baby die in her arms, and who was also physically disabled by a dislocated arm.

  She begged Miss Thiele and her sixteen-year-old maid, Minna Ripler, not to leave her, so Miss Thiele and the girl remained to give what comfort they could to their friend and mistress. The maidservant showed fine courage.

  “Take the other two first; I am better off than they are and I don’t mind if I am not saved if they are,” said the girl, who alone of the three women was able to speak sensibly to the brave Dutchman Sperling when he reached them.

  All three, however, were saved. Their lips were cut and bleeding, their faces frostbitten and bruised and their clothes almost torn from their bodies. There seemed but little life in them. Even now Mrs. Wenneberg, realizing the loss of her husband and child, seems not to care whether she lives or dies. Miss Thiele has relapsed into delirium, reiterating:

  “The sea is coming over us.”

  The little maidservant, however, is recovering. She has seen some of her relatives for a few minutes, and given a short account of her last hours on the wreck. She said: “At the end we did not want to live; only to die. Hope had gone completely.”

  From the words of other survivors, who are now able to give some account of what they saw and felt, it is possible to picture the horror of those awful hours. They describe how men and women were dashed up and down the deck like pieces of cork. Some were caught in the tackle and hammered to a pulp. The women, some of whom were subsequently saved, were knocked all over the deck by the big seas, sometimes being carried forward, and again pitched with a thud against the woodwork. Within a few minutes several were stripped of their clothes and their naked forms were lashed by the waves.

  One passenger, a Liverpool man of the name of Young, had a quarrel with a Frenchman in the face of death. He got to a part of the deck where the best shelter was afforded, and the Frenchman called out, asking him to give place for a lady. Young moved and the Frenchman took his place. Violent words followed, ending with Young slapping the Frenchman’s face and threatening to throw him overboard.

  A woman describes her hunger as being so intense that she was obliged to have something in her mouth. So she ate some paper and for drink tried to catch the sleet, snow and raindrops.

  One of the stewards tells how the German ladies kept together in a little knot, taking quarter hour turns in sitting in each other’s laps for warmth. He saw one old man washed overboard. Then a great wave dashed him back on deck, head first, and the top of his skull was literally sliced off. Some of the people were killed by wreckage that was carried back by the waves, striking like great spears.

  Turning from the tale of suffering and heroism, which has not yet and never will be adequately told, it is somewhat of a shock to realize how throughout the day its scenes were converted into what might have been expected if a national holiday were being celebrated at the Hook of Holland. Every five minutes excursions trains arrived at the station discharging hundreds of sightseers.

  The happy, laughing crowd for the most part were bent on enjoyment. All kinds of people arrived at the spot, which, as a rule, is a mere stage of arrival or departure. Even beggars arrived, the first for many years, who thought it a profitable adventure. The demand for refreshments was enormous and prices were doubled.

  The office of the Great Eastern Railway Company was as thickly besieged as if lottery tickets were being sold. It was here that permits were given for admission to the temporary morgue. Nearly all the arrivals were armed with telescopes or racing glasses. Ladies brought opera glasses.

  Helter skelter they made for the breakwater, which all day was a black ribbon of humanity. They ventured as far as possible along the slippery surface. Beyond was the storm swept area, with the dismembered wreck standing out in eloquent barrenness. Others, having secured permits, made a mad rush to the morgue, outside of which there was a queue like that at a theatre.

  To-day the morgue was beautiful with flowers, including a large wreath from Queen Wilhelmina and her husband, Prince Henry. The walls were hung with black drapery. The strictest precautions were taken to prevent the incursion of the curious to the hotel, where the survivors are being cared for, and the crowds, despairing of any gratification of their curiosity there, proceeded to the jetty, where a steamboat left every half hour for the scene of the wreck.

  Then, everything having been “done,” there were mad rushes back for the trains.

  Wednesday, February 27, 1907

  Chapter dictated in Florence three years ago, about the first typewriter which Mr. Clemens saw and bought; Mr. Clemens t
he first person to apply the type-machine to literature—The introduction of the telharmonium music into Mr. Clemens’s house on New Year’s Eve, its first appearance in a private house—Newspaper clippings concerning the shooting of William Whiteley, in London; Mr. Clemens had had dealings with Whiteley, and inserts here a chapter of this Autobiography written in London seven years ago, which mentions Whiteley.

  I am not a history maker, but I have been present two or three times when history was being made, and upon those occasions I furnished such help as I could. I have never been present at a great history-making battle on land or sea, but I have been present at civilizing and humanitarian victories achieved by the human mind which were of larger value and importance than have been ninety-nine out of every hundred of the immortal achievements of the sword. I wish to go back and bring forward to this place in my Autobiography a chapter which I dictated in Italy a trifle over three years ago.