The Autobiography of Mark Twain Mark Twain (best beach reads .TXT) 📖

to build a story to it, they would cover the rest of the page with their pudgy hands to keep me from stealing an idea from it. The stories had to be absolutely original and fresh. Sometimes the children furnished me simply a character or two, or a dozen, and required me to start out at once on that slim basis and deliver those characters up to a vigorous and entertaining life of crime. If they heard of a new trade, or an unfamiliar animal, or anything like that, I was pretty sure to have to deal with those things in the next romance. Once Clara required me to build a sudden tale out of a plumber and a “bawgun stricter,” and I had to do it. She didn’t know what a boa-constrictor was until he developed in the tale⁠—then she was better satisfied with it than ever.

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 can’t 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 window 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 course 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 sandpaper 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; then 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,”⁠—my temper is all gone.

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-cochère 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. I was sitting on the starboard side. As we neared the loop, I sitting as I say, on the starboard side (and that was the side on which the house was), I saw that Whitmore was laying his course to port 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 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 side that he 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 we drove down into the street, fetched around, came back⁠—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—and 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 upstairs 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