Mark Twain’s Memoirs - Part VIIc
This is the continuation from Part VIIb.
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Now to continue reading this new chapter is Part VIIc.
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CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.–IV.
…_From Susy’s Biography._
Papa’s favorite game is billiards, and when he is tired and wishes
to rest himself he stays up all night and plays billiards, it seems
to rest his head. He smokes a great deal almost incessantly. He has
the mind of an author exactly, some of the simplest things he cant
understand. Our burglar-alarm is often out of order, and papa had
been obliged to take the mahogany-room off from the alarm
altogether for a time, because the burglar-alarm had been in the
habit of ringing even when the mahogany-room was closed. At length
he thought that perhaps the burglar-alarm might be in order, and he
decided to try and see; accordingly he put it on and then went down
and opened the window; consequently the alarm bell rang, it would
even if the alarm had been in order. Papa went despairingly
upstairs and said to mamma, “Livy the mahogany-room won’t go on. I
have just opened the window to see.”
“Why, Youth,” mamma replied “if you’ve opened the window, why of
coarse the alarm will ring!”
“That’s what I’ve opened it for, why I just went down to see if it
would ring!”
Mamma tried to explain to papa that when he wanted to go and see
whether the alarm would ring while the window was closed he
_mustn’t_ go and open the window–but in vain, papa couldn’t
understand, and got very impatient with mamma for trying to make
him believe an impossible thing true.
This is a frank biographer, and an honest one; she uses no sand-paper on me. I have, to this day, the same dull head in the matter of conundrums and perplexities which Susy had discovered in those long-gone days. Complexities annoy me; they irritate me; then this progressive feeling presently warms into anger. I cannot get far in the reading of the commonest and simplest contract–with its “parties of the first part,”
and “parties of the second part,” and “parties of the third part,”–before my temper is all gone.
Ashcroft comes up here every day and pathetically tries to make me understand the points of the lawsuit
which we are conducting against Henry Butters, Harold Wheeler, and the rest of those Plasmon buccaneers, but daily he has to give it up. It is pitiful to see, when he bends his earnest and appealing eyes upon me and says, after one of his efforts, “Now you _do_ understand _that_, don’t you?”
I am always obliged to say, “I _don’t_, Ashcroft. I wish I could understand it, but I don’t. Send for the cat.”
In the days which Susy is talking about, a perplexity fell to my lot one day. F. G. Whitmore was my business agent, and he brought me out from town in his buggy. We drove by the _porte-cochere_ and toward the stable. Now this was a _single_ road, and was like a spoon whose handle stretched from the gate to a great round flower-bed in the neighborhood of the stable.
At the approach to the flower-bed the road divided and circumnavigated it, making a loop, which I have likened to the bowl of the spoon. As we neared the loop, I saw that Whitmore was laying his course to port, (I was sitting on the starboard side–the side the house was on), and was going to start around that spoon-bowl on that left-hand side. I said,
“Don’t do that, Whitmore; take the right-hand side. Then I shall be next to the house when we get to the door.”
He said, “_That_ will not happen in _any case_, it doesn’t make any difference which way I go around this flower-bed.”
I explained to him that he was an ass, but he stuck to his proposition, and I said,
“Go on and try it, and see.”
He went on and tried it, and sure enough he fetched me up at the door on the very side that he had said I would be. I was not able to believe it then, and I don’t believe it yet.
I said, “Whitmore, that is merely an accident. You can’t do it again.”
He said he could–and he drove down into the street, fetched around, came back, and actually did it again. I was stupefied, paralyzed, petrified, with these strange results, but they did not convince me. I didn’t believe he could do it another time, but he did. He said he could do it all day, and fetch up the same way every time. By that time my temper was gone, and I asked him to go home and apply to the Asylum and I would pay the expenses; I didn’t want to see him any more for a week.
I went up-stairs in a rage and started to tell Livy about it, expecting to get her sympathy for me and to breed aversion in her for Whitmore; but she merely burst into peal after peal of laughter, as the tale of my
adventure went on, for her head was like Susy’s: riddles and complexities had no terrors for it. Her mind and Susy’s were analytical; I have tried to make it appear that mine was different.
Many and many a time I have told that buggy experiment, hoping against hope that I would some time or other find somebody who would be on my side, but it has never happened. And I am never able to go glibly forward and state the circumstances of that buggy’s progress without having to halt and consider, and call up in my mind the spoon-handle, the bowl of the spoon, the buggy and the horse, and my position in the buggy: and the minute I have got that far and try to turn it to the left it goes to ruin; I can’t see how it is ever going to fetch me out right when we get to the door. Susy is right in her estimate. I can’t understand things.
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This concludes Part VIIc.
The next part is PartVIId.
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