Mark Twain Biography - Audio Books

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This is my Part 58 of the Mark Twain Biography, A Dream Comes True.

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CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.–XVI.

Section 3 of 3

BY MARK TWAIN.

…I found Henry stretched upon a mattress on the floor of a great building, along with thirty or forty other scalded and wounded persons, and was promptly informed, by some indiscreet person, that he had inhaled steam; that his body was badly scalded, and that he would live but a little while; also, I was told that the physicians and nurses were giving their whole attention to persons who had a chance of being saved.

They were short-handed in the matter of physicians and nurses; and Henry and such others as were considered to be fatally hurt were receiving only such attention as could be spared, from time to time, from the more urgent cases. But Dr. Peyton, a fine and large-hearted old physician of great reputation in the community, gave me his sympathy and took vigorous hold of the case, and in about a week he had brought Henry around.

Dr. Peyton never committed himself with prognostications which might not materialize, but at eleven o’clock one night he told me that Henry was out of danger, and would get well. Then he said, “At midnight these poor fellows lying here and there all over this place will begin to mourn and mutter and lament and make outcries, and if this commotion should disturb Henry it will be bad for him; therefore ask the physician on watch to give him an eighth of a grain of morphine, but this is not to be done unless Henry shall show signs that he is being disturbed.”

Oh well, never mind the rest of it. The physicians on watch were young fellows hardly out of the medical college, and they made a mistake–they had no way of measuring the eighth of a grain of morphine, so they guessed at it and gave him a vast quantity heaped on the end of a knife-blade, and the fatal effects were soon apparent. I think he died about dawn, I don’t remember as to that. He was carried to the dead-room and I went away for a while to a citizen’s house and slept off some of my accumulated fatigue–and meantime something was happening.

The coffins provided for the dead were of unpainted white pine, but in this instance some of the ladies of Memphis had made up a fund of sixty dollars and bought a metallic case, and when I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went–and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.

I told the dream there in the Club that night just as I have told it here.

Rev. Dr. Burton swung his leonine head around, focussed me with his eye, and said:

“When was it that this happened?”

“In June, ‘58.”

“It is a good many years ago. Have you told it several times since?”

“Yes, I have, a good many times.”

“How many?”

“Why, I don’t know how many.”

“Well, strike an average. How many times a year do you think you have told it?”

“Well, I have told it as many as six times a year, possibly oftener.”

“Very well, then you’ve told it, we’ll say, seventy or eighty times since it happened?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s a conservative estimate.”

“Now then, Mark, a very extraordinary thing happened to me a great many years ago, and I used to tell it a number of times–a good many times–every year, for it was so wonderful that it always astonished the hearer, and that astonishment gave me a distinct pleasure every time. I never suspected that that tale was acquiring any auxiliary advantages through repetition until one day after I had been telling it ten or fifteen years it struck me that either I was getting old, and slow in delivery, or that the tale was longer than it was when it was born.

Mark, I diligently and prayerfully examined that tale with this result: that I found that its proportions were now, as nearly as I could make oat, one part fact, straight fact, fact pure and undiluted, golden fact, and twenty-four parts embroidery. I never told that tale afterwards–I was never able to tell it again, for I had lost confidence in it, and so the pleasure of telling it was gone, and gone permanently. How much of this tale of yours is embroidery?”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know. I don’t think any of it is embroidery. I think it is all just as I have stated it, detail by detail.”

“Very well,” he said, “then it is all right, but I wouldn’t tell it any more; because if you keep on, it will begin to collect embroidery sure. The safest thing is to stop now.”

That was a great many years ago. And to-day is the first time that I have told that dream since Dr. Burton scared me into fatal doubts about it. No, I don’t believe I can say that. I don’t believe that I ever really had any doubts whatever concerning the salient points of the dream, for those points are of such a nature that they are _pictures_, and pictures can be remembered, when they are vivid, much better than one can remember remarks and unconcreted facts.

Although it has been so many years since I have told that dream, I can see those pictures now just as clearly defined as if they were before me in this room. I have not told the entire dream. There was a good deal more of it. I mean I have not told all that happened in the dream’s fulfilment. After the incident in the death-room I may mention one detail, and that is this. When I arrived in St. Louis with the casket it was about eight o’clock in the morning, and I ran to my brother-in-law’s place of business, hoping to find him there, but I missed him, for while I was on the way to his office he was on his way from the house to the boat.

When I got back to the boat the casket was gone. He had conveyed it out to his house. I hastened thither, and when I arrived the men were just removing the casket from the vehicle to carry it up-stairs. I stopped that procedure, for I did not want my mother to see the dead face, because one side of it was drawn and distorted by the effects of the opium. When I went up-stairs, there stood the two chairs–placed to receive the coffin–just as I had seen them in my dream; and if I had arrived two or three minutes later, the casket would have been resting upon them, precisely as in my dream of several weeks before.

MARK TWAIN.

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This ends Part 58 of the “Mark Twain Biography” of Chapter XVI, Section 3 of 3.

The next article is Part 59, which is Chapter XVII.

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