Mark Twain's Speeches Part 12

A saloon-keeper's boy pa.s.sed by with a steaming pitcher of hot punch, and Boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully.

He gazed fondly after the boy, and saw him start up the Enterprise stairs.

I said: "I wish you could help me get that school business, but since you can't, I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get a proof of it after it's set up, though I don't begin to suppose I can. Good night."

"Hold on a minute. I don't mind getting the report and sitting around with the boys a little while you copy it, if you're willing to drop down to the princ.i.p.al's with me."

"Now you talk like a human being. Come along."

We ploughed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report-a short doc.u.ment-and soon copied it in our office.

Meantime, Boggs helped himself to the punch.

I gave the ma.n.u.script back to him, and we started back to get an inquest.

At four o'clock in the morning, when we had gone to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual (for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion), the proprietor of the Union strode in and asked if anybody had heard anything of Boggs or the school report.

We stated the case, and all turned out to help hunt for the delinquent.

We found him standing on a table in a saloon, with an old tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the other, haranguing a gang of "corned" miners on, the iniquity of squandering the public money on education "when hundreds and hundreds of honest, hard-working men were literally starving for whiskey."

He had been a.s.sisting in a regal spree with those parties for hours.

We dragged him away, and put him into bed.

Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs held me accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or desire to compa.s.s its absence from that paper, and was as sorry as any one that the misfortune had occurred. But we were perfectly friendly.

The day the next school report was due the proprietor of the Tennessee Mine furnished us a buggy, and asked us to go down and write something about the property-a very common request, and one always gladly acceded to when people furnished buggies, for we were as fond of pleasure excursions as other people.

The "mine" was a hole in the ground ninety feet deep, and no way of getting down into it but by holding on to a rope and being lowered with a windla.s.s.

The workmen had just gone off somewhere to dinner.

I was not strong enough to lower Boggs's bulk, so I took an unlighted candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot in the end of the rope, implored Boggs not to go to sleep or let the windla.s.s get the start of him, and then swung out over the shaft.

I reached the bottom muddy and bruised about the elbows, but safe.

I lit the candle, made an examination of the rock, selected some specimens, and shouted to Boggs to hoist away.

No answer.

Presently a head appeared in the circle of daylight away aloft, and a voice came down: "Are you all set?"

"All set-hoist away!"

"Are you comfortable?"

"Perfectly."

"Could you wait a little?"

"Oh, certainly-no particular hurry."

"Well-good-bye."

"Why, where are you going?"

"After the school report!"

And he did.

I stayed down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock.

I walked home, too-five miles-up-hill.

We had no school report next morning-but the Union had.

AN IDEAL FRENCH ADDRESS

EXTRACT FROM "PARIS NOTES," IN "TOM SAWYER ABROAD," ETC.

I am told that a French sermon is like a French speech-it never names an historical event, but only the date of it; if you are not up in dates, you get left. A French speech is something like this: "Comrades, citizens, brothers, n.o.ble parts of the only sublime and perfect nation, let us not forget that the 21st January cast off our chains; that the 10th August relieved us of the shameful presence of foreign spies; that the 5th September was its own justification before Heaven and humanity; that the 18th Brumaire contained the seeds of its own punishment; that the 14th July was the mighty voice of liberty proclaiming the resurrection, the new day, and inviting the oppressed peoples of the earth to look upon the divine face of France and live; and let us here record our everlasting curse against the man of the 2d December, and declare in thunder tones, the native tones of France, that but for him there had been no 17th Mardi in history, no 12th October, nor 9th January, no 22d April, no 16th November, no 30th September, no 2d July, no 14th February, no 29th June, no 15th August, no 31st May-that but for him, France, the pure, the grand, the peerless, had had a serene and vacant almanac to-day."

I have heard of one French sermon which closed in this odd yet eloquent way: "My hearers, we have sad cause to remember the man of the 13th January. The results of the vast crime of the 13th January have been in just proportion to the magnitude of the act itself. But for it there had been no 30th November-sorrowful spectacle! The grisly deed of the 16th June had not been done but for it, nor had the man of the 16th June known existence; to it alone the 3d September was due, also the fatal 12th October. Shall we, then, be grateful for the 13th January, with its freight of death for you and me and all that breathe? Yes, my friends, for it gave us also that which had never come but for it, and it alone-the blessed 25th December."

It may be well enough to explain. The man of the 13th January is Adam; the crime of that date was the eating of the apple; the sorrowful spectacle of the 30th November was the expulsion from Eden; the grisly deed of the 16th June was the murder of Abel; the act of the 3d September was the beginning of the journey to the land of Nod; the 12th day of October, the last mountaintops disappeared under the flood. When you go to church in France, you want to take your almanac with you-annotated.

STATISTICS

EXTRACT FROM "THE HISTORY OF THE SAVAGE CLUB"

During that period of gloom when domestic bereavement had forced Mr. Clemens and his dear ones to secure the privacy they craved until their wounds should heal, his address was known to only a very few of his closest friends. One old friend in New York, after vain efforts to get his address, wrote him a letter addressed as follows

MARK TWAIN, G.o.d Knows Where, Try London.

The letter found him, and Mr. Clemens replied to the letter expressing himself surprised and complimented that the person who was credited with knowing his whereabouts should take so much interest in him, adding: "Had the letter been addressed to the care of the 'other party,' I would naturally have expected to receive it without delay."

His correspondent tried again, and addressed the second letter:

MARK TWAIN, The Devil Knows Where, Try London.

This found him also no less promptly.

On June 9, 1899, he consented to visit the Savage Club, London, on condition that there was to be no publicity and no speech was to be expected from him. The toastmaster, in proposing the health of their guest, said that as a Scotchman, and therefore as a born expert, he thought Mark Twain had little or no claim to the t.i.tle of humorist. Mr. Clemens had tried to be funny but had failed, and his true role in life was statistics; that he was a master of statistics, and loved them for their own sake, and it would be the easiest task he ever undertook if he would try to count all the real jokes he had ever made. While the toastmaster was speaking, the members saw Mr. Clemens's eyes begin to sparkle and his cheeks to flush. He jumped up, and made a characteristic speech.

Perhaps I am not a humorist, but I am a first-cla.s.s fool-a simpleton; for up to this moment I have believed Chairman MacAlister to be a decent person whom I could allow to mix up with my friends and relatives. The exhibition he has just made of himself reveals him to be a scoundrel and a knave of the deepest dye. I have been cruelly deceived, and it serves me right for trusting a Scotchman. Yes, I do understand figures, and I can count. I have counted the words in MacAlister's drivel (I certainly cannot call it a speech), and there were exactly three thousand four hundred and thirty-nine. I also carefully counted the lies-there were exactly three thousand four hundred and thirty-nine. Therefore, I leave MacAlister to his fate.

I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I am not feeling very well myself.

GALVESTON ORPHAN BAZAAR

ADDRESS AT A FAIR HELD AT THE WALDORF-ASTORIA, NEW YORK, IN OCTOBER, 1900, IN AID OF THE ORPHANS AT GALVESTON I expected that the Governor of Texas would occupy this place first and would speak to you, and in the course of his remarks would drop a text for me to talk from; but with the proverbial obstinacy that is proverbial with governors, they go back on their duties, and he has not come here, and has not furnished me with a text, and I am here without a text. I have no text except what you furnish me with your handsome faces, and-but I won't continue that, for I could go on forever about attractive faces, beautiful dresses, and other things. But, after all, compliments should be in order in a place like this.

I have been in New York two or three days, and have been in a condition of strict diligence night and day, the object of this diligence being to regulate the moral and political situation on this planet-put it on a sound basis-and when you are regulating the conditions of a planet it requires a great deal of talk in a great many kinds of ways, and when you have talked a lot the emptier you get, and get also in a position of corking. When I am situated like that, with nothing to say, I feel as though I were a sort of fraud; I seem to be playing a part, and please consider I am playing a part for want of something better, and this, is not unfamiliar to me; I have often done this before.

When I was here about eight years ago I was coming up in a car of the elevated road. Very few people were in that car, and on one end of it there was no one, except on the opposite seat, where sat a man about fifty years old, with a most winning face and an elegant eye-a beautiful eye; and I took him from his dress to be a master mechanic, a man who had a vocation. He had with him a very fine little child of about four or five years. I was watching the affection which existed between those two. I judged he was the grandfather, perhaps. It was really a pretty child, and I was admiring her, and as soon as he saw I was admiring her he began to notice me.

I could see his admiration of me in his eye, and I did what everybody else would do-admired the child four times as much, knowing I would get four times as much of his admiration. Things went on very pleasantly. I was making my way into his heart.

By-and-by, when he almost reached the station where he was to get off, he got up, crossed over, and he said: "Now I am going to say something to you which I hope you will regard as a compliment." And then he went on to say: "I have never seen Mark Twain, but I have seen a portrait of him, and any friend of mine will tell you that when I have once seen a portrait of a man I place it in my eye and store it away in my memory, and I can tell you now that you look enough like Mark Twain to be his brother. Now," he said, "I hope you take this as a compliment. Yes, you are a very good imitation; but when I come to look closer, you are probably not that man."

I said: "I will be frank with you. In my desire to look like that excellent character I have dressed for the character; I have been playing a part."

He said: "That is all right, that is all right; you look very well on the outside, but when it comes to the inside you are not in it with the original."

So when I come to a place like this with nothing valuable to say I always play a part. But I will say before I sit down that when it comes to saying anything here I will express myself in this way: I am heartily in sympathy with you in your efforts to help those who were sufferers in this calamity, and in your desire to heap those who were rendered homeless, and in saying this I wish to impress on you the fact that I am not playing a part.

SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE

After the address at the Robert Fulton Fund meeting, June 19, 1906, Mr. Clemens talked to the a.s.sembled reporters about the San Francisco earthquake.

I haven't been there since 1868, and that great city of San Francisco has grown up since my day. When I was there she had one hundred and eighteen thousand people, and of this number eighteen thousand were Chinese. I was a reporter on the Virginia City Enterprise in Nevada in 1862, and stayed there, I think, about two years, when I went to San Francisco and got a job as a reporter on The Call. I was there three or four years.

I remember one day I was walking down Third Street in San Francisco. It was a sleepy, dull Sunday afternoon, and no one was stirring. Suddenly as I looked up the street about three hundred yards the whole side of a house fell out. The street was full of bricks and mortar. At the same time I was knocked against the side of a house, and stood there stunned for a moment.

I thought it was an earthquake. n.o.body else had heard anything about it and no one said earthquake to me afterward, but I saw it and I wrote it. n.o.body else wrote it, and the house I saw go into the street was the only house in the city that felt it. I've always wondered if it wasn't a little performance gotten up for my especial entertainment by the nether regions.

CHARITY AND ACTORS

ADDRESS AT THE ACTORS' FUND FAIR IN THE METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE, NEW YORK, MAY 6, 1907

Mr. Clemens, in his white suit, formally declared the fair open. Mr. Daniel Frohman, in introducing Mr. Clemens, said: