Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1

by Mark Twain

  Twichell has had many adventures. He has more adventures in a year than anybody else has in five. One Saturday night he noticed a bottle on his wife’s dressing-bureau. He thought the label said “Hair Restorer,” and he took it in his room and gave his head a good drenching and sousing with it and carried it back and thought no more about it. Next morning when he got up his head was a bright green! He sent around everywhere and couldn’t get a substitute-preacher, so he had to go to his church himself and preach—and he did it. He hadn’t a sermon in his barrel—as it happened—of any lightsome character, so he had to preach a very grave one—a very serious one—and it made the matter worse. The gravity of the sermon did not harmonize with the gaiety of his head, and the people sat all through it with handkerchiefs stuffed in their mouths to try to keep down their joy. And Twichell told me that he was sure he never had seen his congregation—the whole body of his congregation—the entire body of his congregation—absorbed in interest in his sermon, from beginning to end, before. Always there had been an aspect of indifference, here and there, or wandering, somewhere; but this time there was nothing of the kind. Those people sat there as if they thought, “Good for this day and train only: we must have all there is of this show, not waste any of it.” And he said that when he came down out of the pulpit more people waited to shake him by the hand and tell him what a good sermon it was, than ever before. And it seemed a pity that these people should do these fictions in such a place—right in the church—when it was quite plain they were not interested in the sermon at all; they only wanted to get a near view of his head.

  Well, Twichell said—no, Twichell didn’t say, I say, that as the days went on and Sunday followed Sunday, the interest in Twichell’s hair grew and grew; because it didn’t stay merely and monotonously green, it took on deeper and deeper shades of green; and then it would change and become reddish, and would go from that to some other color—purplish, yellowish, bluish, and so on—but it was never a solid color. It was always mottled. And each Sunday it was a little more interesting than it was the Sunday before—and Twichell’s head became famous, and people came from New York and Boston, and South Carolina, and Japan, and so on, to look. There wasn’t seating capacity for all the people that came while his head was undergoing these various and fascinating mottlings. And it was a good thing in several ways, because the business had been languishing a little, and now a lot of people joined the church so that they could have the show, and it was the beginning of a prosperity for that church which has never diminished in all these years. Nothing so fortunate ever happened to Joe as that.

  Well, he was telling—oh no, it was years ago, that he was telling about the sutler. In the Sickles brigade was a sutler, a Yankee, who was a wonderful person in the way of competency. All other sutlers got out of things on the eve of battle, during battle, after battle; not so with this sutler. He never got out of anything, and so he was very greatly respected and admired. There were times when he would get drunk. These were periodical drunks. You couldn’t tell when he was going to have an experience of that kind, therefore you did not know how to provide for it. It was very necessary to provide for it, because when he was drunk he had no respect for anybody’s feelings or desires. If he wanted to do so and so he would do it; nothing could coax him to do some other way. If he didn’t want to do a thing nobody could persuade him to do it. On one of these occasions of sutlerian eclipse General Sickles had invited some other Generals to dine with him in his headquarters-tent; his cook or his orderly, or somebody—the proper person—came to him aghast, and said “The sutler is drunk. We can’t have any dinner. There isn’t anything to cook and the sutler won’t sell us anything.”

  “Did you tell him it was General Sickles who wanted these things?”

  “Yes, sir. It didn’t make any difference with the sutler.”

  “Well, can’t you get him to—”

  “No, sir, we can’t get him to do anything. We have got some beans, and that is all we have got. We have tried to get him to sell us just a pound of pork for the General, and he says he won’t.”

  General Sickles said “Send for the chaplain. Let Chaplain Twichell go there. He is popular with that sutler; that sutler has great respect and reverence for Chaplain Twichell. Let him go there and see if he can’t prevail on the sutler to sell him a pound of salt pork for General Sickles.”

  Twichell went on the errand—stated his errand.

  The sutler propped himself unsteadily against some kind of a support, collected his thoughts, and the suitable words, and said,

  “Sell you a pound of pork for General Sickles? Naw. Go back and tell him I wouldn’t sell you a pound of pork for God.”

  That was Twichell’s story of the episode.

  But I have wandered from that tree where General Sickles lay bleeding, and arranging his last words. It was three-quarters of an hour before a surgeon could be found, for that was a tremendous battle and surgeons were needed everywhere. When the surgeon arrived it was after nightfall. It was a still and windless July night, and there was a candle burning—I think somebody sat near the General’s head and held this candle in his hand. It threw just light enough to make the General’s face distinct, and there were several dim figures waiting around about. Into this group, out of the darkness, bursts an aide; springs lightly from his horse, approaches this white-faced expiring General, straightens himself up soldier-fashion, salutes, and reports in the most soldierly and matter-of-fact way that he has carried out an order given him by the General, and that the movement of the regiments to the supporting point designated has been accomplished.

  The General thanked him courteously. I am sure Sickles must have been always polite. It takes training to enable a person to be properly courteous when he is dying. Many have tried it. I suppose very few have succeeded.

  Thursday, January 18, 1906

  Senator Tillman speaks of Morris case—Funeral of John Malone

  contrasted with funeral of Empress of Austria—Leads up to dueling.

  Senator Tillman, of South Carolina, has been making a speech—day before yesterday—of frank and intimate criticism of the President,—the President of the United States, as he calls him; whereas so far as my knowledge goes, there has been no such functionary as President of the United States for forty years, perhaps, if we except Cleveland. I do not call to mind any other President of the United States—there may have been one or two—perhaps one or two, who were not always and persistently presidents of the Republican party, but were now and then for a brief interval really Presidents of the United States. Tillman introduces into this speech the matter of the expulsion of Mrs. Morris from the White House, and I think his arraignment of the President was a good and capable piece of work. At any rate, his handling of it suited me very well, and tasted very good in my mouth. I was glad that there was somebody to take this matter up, whether from a generous motive or from an ungenerous one, and give it an airing. It was needed. The whole nation, and the entire press, have been sitting by in meek and slavish silence, everybody privately wishing—just as was my own case—that some person with some sense of the proprieties would rise up and denounce this outrage as it ought to be denounced. Tillman makes a point which charms me. I wanted to use it myself, days ago, but I was already arranging a scheme in another matter of public concern which may invite a brick or two in my direction, and one entertainment of this sort at a time is plenty for me. That point was this: that the President is always prodigal of letters and telegrams to Tom, Dick and Harry, about everything and nothing. He seems never to lack time from his real duties to attend to duties that do not exist. So, at the very time when he should have been throwing off one or two little lines to say to Mrs. Morris and her friends that, being a gentleman, he was hastening to say he was sorry that his idiot assistant secretary had been turning the nation’s official mansion into a sailor boarding-house, and that he would admonish Mr. Barnes, and the rest of the reception-room garrison to deal more gently with the erri
ng in future, and to abstain from any conduct in the White House which would rank as disgraceful in any other respectable dwelling in the land,—

  I don’t like Tillman. His second cousin killed an editor, three years ago, without giving that editor a chance to defend himself. I recognize that it is almost always wise, and is often in a manner necessary, to kill an editor, but I think that when a man is a United States Senator he ought to require his second cousin to refrain as long as he can, and then do it in a handsome way, running some personal risk himself. I have not known Tillman to do many things that were greatly to his credit during his political life, but I am glad of the position which he has taken this time. The President has persistently refused to listen to such friends of his as are not insane—men who have tried to persuade him to disavow Mr. Barnes’s conduct and express regret for that occurrence. And now Mr. Tillman uses that point which I spoke of a minute ago, and uses it with telling effect. He reminds the Senate that at the very time that the President’s dignity would not allow him to send to Mrs. Morris or her friends a kindly and regretful line, he had time enough to send a note of compliment and admiration to a prize-fighter in the Far West. If the President had been an unpopular person, that point would have been seized upon early, and much and disastrous notice taken of it. But, as I have suggested before, the nation and the newspapers have maintained a loyal and humiliated silence about it, and have waited prayerfully and hopefully for some reckless person to say the things which were in their hearts, and which they could not bear to utter. Mrs. Morris embarrasses the situation, and extends and keeps alive the discomfort of eighty millions of people, by lingering along near to death, yet neither rallying nor dying; to do either would relieve the tension. For the present, the discomfort must continue. Mr. Tillman certainly has not chloroformed it.

  (That Birthday speech of mine was the text which I meant to use along here. I don’t want to get too far away from it at any one time and I ought to get back to that.)

  We buried good old John Malone the actor, this morning. His old friends of the Players Club attended in a body. It was the second time in my life that I had been present at a Catholic funeral. And as I sat in the church, my mind went back, by natural process, to that other one, and the contrast strongly interested me. That first one was the funeral of the Empress of Austria, who was assassinated six or eight years ago. There was a great concourse of the ancient nobility of the Austrian Empire; and as that patchwork of old kingdoms and principalities consists of nineteen states and eleven nationalities, and as these nobles came clothed in the costumes which their ancestors were accustomed to wear on state occasions three or four or five centuries ago, the variety and magnificence of the costumes made a picture which cast far into the shade all the notions of splendor and magnificence which in the course of my life I had accumulated from the opera, the theatre, the picture-galleries, and from books. Gold, silver, jewels, silks, satins, velvets; they were all there in brilliant and beautiful confusion, and in that sort of perfect harmony which Nature herself observes and is master of, when she paints and groups her flowers and her forests and floods them with sunshine. The military and civic milliners of the Middle Ages knew their trade. Infinite as was the variety of the costumes displayed, there was not an ugly one, nor one that was a discordant note in the harmony, or an offence to the eye. When those massed costumes were still, they were softly, richly, sensuously beautiful; when the mass stirred, the slightest movement set the jewels and metals and bright colors afire, and swept it with flashing lights which sent a sort of ecstasy of delight through me.

  But it was different this morning. This morning the clothes were all alike. They were simple, and devoid of color. The Players were clothed as they are always clothed, except that they wore the high silk hat of ceremony. Yet, in its way, John Malone’s funeral was as impressive as had been that of the Empress. There was no inequality between John Malone and the Empress except the artificial inequalities which have been invented and established by man’s childish vanity. The Empress and John were just equals in the essentials of goodness of heart and a blameless life. Both passed by the onlooker, in their coffins, respected, esteemed, honored; both traveled the same road from the church, bound for the same resting-place—according to Catholic doctrine, Purgatory—to be removed thence to a better land or to remain in Purgatory accordingly as the contributions of their friends, in cash or prayer, shall determine. The priest told us, in an admirably framed speech, about John’s destination, and the terms upon which he might continue his journey or must remain in Purgatory. John was poor; his friends are poor. The Empress was rich; her friends are rich. John Malone’s prospects are not good, and I lament it.

  Perhaps I am in error in saying I have been present at only two Catholic funerals. I think I was present at one in Virginia City, Nevada, in the neighborhood of forty years ago—or perhaps it was down in Esmeralda, on the borders of California—but if it happened, the memory of it can hardly be said to exist, it is so indistinct. I did attend one or two funerals—maybe a dozen—out there; funerals of desperadoes who had tried to purify society by exterminating other desperadoes—and did accomplish the purification, though not according to the program which they had laid out for this office.

  Also, I attended some funerals of persons who had fallen in duels—and maybe it was a duelist whom I helped to ship. But would a duelist be buried by the Church? In inviting his own death, wouldn’t he be committing suicide, substantially? Wouldn’t that rule him out? Well, I don’t remember how it was, now, but I think it was a duelist.

  Friday, January 19, 1906

  About Dueling.

  1864

  In those early days dueling suddenly became a fashion in the new Territory of Nevada, and by 1864 everybody was anxious to have a chance in the new sport, mainly for the reason that he was not able to thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled in one himself.

  At that time I had been serving as city editor on Mr. Goodman’s Virginia City Enterprise for a matter of two years. I was twenty-nine years old. I was ambitious in several ways, but I had entirely escaped the seductions of that particular craze. I had had no desire to fight a duel; I had no intention of provoking one. I did not feel respectable, but I got a certain amount of satisfaction out of feeling safe. I was ashamed of myself; the rest of the staff were ashamed of me—but I got along well enough. I had always been accustomed to feeling ashamed of myself, for one thing or another, so there was no novelty for me in the situation. I bore it very well. Plunkett was on the staff; R. M. Daggett was on the staff. These had tried to get into duels, but for the present had failed, and were waiting. Goodman was the only one of us who had done anything to shed credit upon the paper. The rival paper was the Virginia Union. Its editor for a little while was Tom Fitch, called the “silver-tongued orator of Wisconsin”—that was where he came from. He tuned up his oratory in the editorial columns of the Union, and Mr. Goodman invited him out and modified him with a bullet. I remember the joy of the staff when Goodman’s challenge was accepted by Fitch. We ran late that night, and made much of Joe Goodman. He was only twenty-four years old; he lacked the wisdom which a person has at twenty-nine, and he was as glad of being it as I was that I wasn’t. He chose Major Graves for his second (that name is not right, but it’s close enough, I don’t remember the Major’s name). Graves came over to instruct Joe in the dueling art. He had been a major under Walker, the “gray-eyed man of destiny,” and had fought all through that remarkable man’s filibustering campaign in Central America. That fact gauges the Major. To say that a man was a major under Walker, and came out of that struggle ennobled by Walker’s praise, is to say that the Major was not merely a brave man but that he was brave to the very utmost limit of that word. All of Walker’s men were like that. I knew the Gillis family intimately. The father made the campaign under Walker, and with him one son. They were in the memorable Plaza fight, and stood it out to the l
ast against overwhelming odds, as did also all of the Walker men. The son was killed at the father’s side. The father received a bullet through the eye. The old man—for he was an old man at the time—wore spectacles, and the bullet and one of the glasses went into his skull and remained there—but often, in after years, when I boarded in the old man’s home in San Francisco, whenever he became emotional I used to see him shed tears and glass, in a way that was infinitely moving. It is wonderful how glass breeds when it has a fair chance. This glass was all broken up and ruined, so it had no market value; but in the course of time he exuded enough to set up a spectacle shop with. There were some other sons: Steve, George, and Jim, very young chaps—the merest lads—who wanted to be in the Walker expedition, for they had their father’s dauntless spirit. But Walker wouldn’t have them; he said it was a serious expedition, and no place for children.

  The Major was a majestic creature, with a most stately and dignified and impressive military bearing, and he was by nature and training courteous, polite, graceful, winning; and he had that quality which I think I have encountered in only one other man—Bob Howland—a mysterious quality which resides in the eye; and when that eye is turned upon an individual or a squad, in warning, that is enough. The man that has that eye doesn’t need to go armed; he can move upon an armed desperado and quell him and take him prisoner without saying a single word. I saw Bob Howland do that, once—a slender, good-natured, amiable, gentle, kindly little skeleton of a man, with a sweet blue eye that would win your heart when it smiled upon you, or turn cold and freeze it, according to the nature of the occasion.