Mark Twain Biography - Part 35
************************
Please remember to BOOKMARK “Mark Twain’s Biography” web site so that it will be easy to find.
Also, if you are unsure how to Bookmark, go to the top right and click on “How To Bookmark”.
Also, if you would like to know more about Mark Twain and how I came to be using this wonderful manuscript, please look at the link above right called “Mark Twain’s audios” for more info. Thanks.
*************************
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.–IX.
Section 3 of 3
BY MARK TWAIN.
…In 1847 we were living in a large white house on the corner of Hill and Main Streets–a house that still stands, but isn’t large now, although it hasn’t lost a plank; I saw it a year ago and noticed that shrinkage. My father died in it in March of the year mentioned, but our family did not move out of it until some months afterward. Ours was not the only family in the house, there was another–Dr. Grant’s.
One day Dr. Grant and Dr. Reyburn argued a matter on the street with sword-canes, and Grant was brought home multifariously punctured. Old Dr. Peake calked the leaks, and came every day for a while, to look after him. The Grants were Virginians, like Peake, and one day when Grant was getting well enough to be on his feet and sit around in the parlor and talk, the conversation fell upon Virginia and old times.
I was present, but the group were probably quite unconscious of me, I being only a lad and a negligible quantity. Two of the group–Dr. Peake and Mrs. Crawford, Mrs. Grant’s mother–had been of the audience when the Richmond theatre burned down, thirty-six years before, and they talked over the frightful details of that memorable tragedy. These were eye-witnesses, and with their eyes I saw it all with an intolerable vividness: I saw the black smoke rolling and tumbling toward the sky, I saw the flames burst through it and turn red, I heard the shrieks of the despairing, I glimpsed their faces at the windows, caught fitfully through the veiling smoke, I saw them jump to their death, or to mutilation worse than death. The picture is before me yet, and can never fade.
In due course they talked of the colonial mansion of the Peakes, with its stately columns and its spacious grounds, and by odds and ends I picked up a clearly defined idea of the place. I was strongly interested, for I had not before heard of such palatial things from the lips of people who had seen them with their own eyes.
One detail, casually dropped, hit my imagination hard. In the wall, by the great front door, there was a round hole as big as a saucer–a British cannon-ball had made it, in the war of the Revolution. It was breath-taking; it made history real; history had never been real to me before.
Very well, three or four years later, as already mentioned, I was king-bee and sole “subject” in the mesmeric show; it was the beginning of the second week; the performance was half over; just then the majestic Dr. Peake, with his ruffled bosom and wristbands and his gold-headed cane, entered, and a deferential citizen vacated his seat beside the Grants and made the great chief take it. This happened while I was trying to invent something fresh in the way of a vision, in response to the professor’s remark–
“Concentrate your powers. Look–look attentively. There–don’t you see something? Concentrate- -concentrate. Now then–describe it.”
Without suspecting it, Dr. Peake, by entering the place, had reminded me of the talk of three years before. He had also furnished me capital and was become my confederate, an accomplice in my frauds. I began on a vision, a vague and dim one (that was part of the game at the beginning of a vision; it isn’t best to see it too clearly at first, it might look as if you had come loaded with it). The vision developed, by degrees, and gathered swing, momentum, energy. It was the Richmond fire.
Dr. Peake was cold, at first, and his fine face had a trace of polite scorn in it; but when he began to recognize that fire, that expression changed, and his eyes began to light up. As soon as I saw that, I threw the valves wide open and turned on all the steam, and gave those people a supper of fire and horrors that was calculated to last them one while! They couldn’t gasp, when I got through–they were petrified. Dr. Peake had risen, and was standing,–and breathing hard. He said, in a great voice–
“My doubts are ended. No collusion could produce that miracle. It was totally impossible for him to know those details, yet he has described them with the clarity of an eye-witness–and with what unassailable truthfulness God knows I know!”
I saved the colonial mansion for the last night, and solidified and perpetuated Dr. Peake’s conversion with the cannon-ball hole. He explained to the house that I could never have heard of that small detail, which differentiated this mansion from all other Virginian mansions and perfectly identified it, therefore the fact stood proven that I had _seen_ it in my vision. Lawks!
It is curious. When the magician’s engagement closed there was but one person in the village who did not believe in mesmerism, and I was the one. All the others were converted, but I was to remain an implacable and unpersuadable disbeliever in mesmerism and hypnotism for close upon fifty years. This was because I never would examine them, in after life. I couldn’t. The subject revolted me. Perhaps because it brought back to me a passage in my life which for pride’s sake I wished to forget; though I thought–or persuaded myself I thought–I should never come across a “proof” which wasn’t thin and cheap, and probably had a fraud like me behind it.
The truth is, I did not have to wait long to get tired of my triumphs. Not thirty days, I think. The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. No doubt for a while I enjoyed having my exploits told and retold and told again in my presence and wondered over and exclaimed about, but I quite distinctly remember that there presently came a time when the subject was wearisome and odious to me and I could not endure the disgusting discomfort of it.
I am well aware that the world-glorified doer of a deed of great and real splendor has just my experience; I know that he deliciously enjoys hearing about it for three or four weeks, and that pretty soon after that he begins to dread the mention of it, and by and by wishes he had been with the damned before he ever thought of doing that deed; I remember how General Sherman used to rage and swear over “When we were Marching through Georgia,” which was played at him and sung at him everywhere he went; still, I think I suffered a shade more than the legitimate hero does, he being privileged to soften his misery with the reflection that his glory was at any rate golden and reproachless in its origin, whereas I had no such privilege, there being no possible way to make mine respectable.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! Thirty-five years after those evil exploits of mine I visited my old mother, whom I had not seen for ten years; and being moved by what seemed to me a rather noble and perhaps heroic impulse, I thought I would humble myself and confess my ancient fault. It cost me a great effort to make up my mind; I dreaded the sorrow that would rise in her face, and the shame that would look out of her eyes; but after long and troubled reflection, the sacrifice seemed due and right, and I gathered my resolution together and made the confession.
To my astonishment there were no sentimentalities, no dramatics, no George Washington effects; she was not moved in the least degree; she simply did not believe me, and said so! I was not merely disappointed, I was nettled, to have my costly truthfulness flung out of the market in this placid and confident way when I was expecting to get a profit out of it. I asserted, and reasserted, with rising heat, my statement that every single thing I had done on those long-vanished nights was a lie and a swindle; and when she shook her head tranquilly and said she knew better, I put up my hand and _swore_ to it–adding a triumphant “_Now_ what do you say?”
It did not affect her at all; it did not budge her the fraction of an inch from her position. If this was hard for me to endure, it did not begin with the blister she put upon the raw when she began to put my sworn oath out of court with _arguments_ to prove that I was under a delusion and did not know what I was talking about. Arguments! Arguments to show that a person on a man’s outside can know better what is on his inside than he does himself! I had cherished some contempt for arguments before, I have not enlarged my respect for them since.
She refused to believe that I had invented my visions myself; she said it was folly: that I was only a child at the time and could not have done it. She cited the Richmond fire and the colonial mansion and said they were quite beyond my capacities. Then I saw my chance! I said she was right–I didn’t invent those, I got them from Dr. Peake. Even this great shot did no damage.
She said Dr. Peake’s evidence was better than mine, and he had said in plain words that it was impossible for me to have heard about those things. Dear, dear, what a grotesque and unthinkable situation: a confessed swindler convicted of honesty and condemned to acquittal by circumstantial evidence furnished by the swindled!
I realised, with shame and with impotent vexation, that I was defeated all along the line. I had but one card left, but it was a formidable one. I played it–and stood from under. It seemed ignoble to demolish her fortress, after she had defended it so valiantly; but the defeated know not mercy. I played that matter card. It was the pin-sticking. I said, solemnly–
“I give you my honor, a pin was never stuck into me without causing me cruel pain.”
She only said–
“It is thirty-five years. I believe you do think that, _now_, but I was there, and I know better. You never winced.”
She was so calm! and I was so far from it, so nearly frantic.
“Oh, my goodness!” I said, “let me _show_ you that I am speaking the truth. Here is my arm; drive a pin into it–drive it to the head–I shall not wince.”
She only shook her gray head and said, with simplicity and conviction–
“You are a man, now, and could dissemble the hurt; but you were only a child then, and could not have done it.”
And so the lie which I played upon her in my youth remained with her as an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death. Carlyle said “a lie cannot live.” It shows that he did not know how to tell them. If I had taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted me ages ago.
MARK TWAIN.
**********************************************************
This ends Part 35 of “Mark Twain’s Memoirs” of Chapter IX, Section 3 of 3.
The next part is Part 36, which is chapter X.
***********************************************************
To GET All of Mark Twain’s Collection of Audio Books,
Click on Mark Twain’s Audio Books and enjoy.
For even More Audio Books Like Mark Twain’s Classics,
goto the Great Audio Books List Store for more enjoyment.
*************************************************************