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

aware of a stir of some kind away back in the deeps of my memory somewhere. It set me to musing⁠—thinking⁠—searching. Dried herrings? Dried herrings? The peculiarity of dri⁠ ⁠… I glanced up. Her face was grave, but there was a dim and shadowy twinkle in her eye which⁠—All of a sudden I knew and far away down in the hoary past I heard a remembered voice murmur. “Dey eats ’em innards and all!”

“At⁠—last! I’ve found one of you, anyway! Who was the other girl?”

But she drew the line there. She wouldn’t tell me.

But a boy’s life is not all comedy; much of the tragic enters into it. The drunken tramp⁠—mentioned elsewhere⁠—who was burned up in the village jail lay upon my conscience a hundred nights afterward and filled them with hideous dreams⁠—dreams in which I saw his appealing face as I had seen it in the pathetic reality, pressed against the window bars, with the red hell glowing behind him⁠—a face which seemed to say to me, “If you had not given me the matches, this would not have happened; you are responsible for my death.” I was not responsible for it, for I had meant him no harm, but only good, when I let him have the matches; but no matter, mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty⁠—to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it. The tramp⁠—who was to blame⁠—suffered ten minutes; I, who was not to blame, suffered three months.

The shooting down of poor old Smarr in the main street at noonday supplied me with some more dreams; and in them I always saw again the grotesque closing picture⁠—the great family Bible spread open on the profane old man’s breast by some thoughtful idiot, and rising and sinking to the labored breathings, and adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying struggles. We are curiously made. In all the throng of gaping and sympathetic onlookers there was not one with common sense enough to perceive that an anvil would have been in better taste there than the Bible, less open to sarcastic criticism, and swifter in its atrocious work. In my nightmares I gasped and struggled for breath under the crush of that vast book for many a night.

All within the space of a couple of years we had two or three other tragedies, and I had the ill luck to be too near by, on each occasion. There was the slave man who was struck down with a chunk of slag for some small offense; I saw him die. And the young Californian emigrant who was stabbed with a bowie knife by a drunken comrade; I saw the red life gush from his breast. And the case of the rowdy young brothers and their harmless old uncle: one of them held the old man down with his knees on his breast while the other one tried repeatedly to kill him with an Allen revolver which wouldn’t go off, I happened along just then, of course.

Then there was the case of the young Californian emigrant who got drunk and proposed to raid the “Welshman’s house” all alone one dark and threatening night. This house stood halfway up Holliday’s Hill and its sole occupants were a poor but quite respectable widow and her blameless daughter. The invading ruffian woke the whole village with his ribald yells and coarse challenges and obscenities. I went up there with a comrade⁠—John Briggs, I think⁠—to look and listen. The figure of the man was dimly visible; the women were on their porch, nor visible in the deep shadow of its roof, but we heard the elder woman’s voice. She had loaded an old musket with slugs, and she warned the man that if he stayed where he was while she counted ten it would cost him his life. She began to count, slowly; he began to laugh. He stopped laughing at “six”; then through the deep stillness, in a steady voice, followed the rest of the tale: “Seven⁠ ⁠… eight⁠ ⁠… nine”⁠—a long pause, we holding our breaths⁠—“ten!” A red spout of flame gushed out into the night, and the man dropped with his breast riddled to rags. Then the rain and the thunder burst loose and the waiting town swarmed up the hill in the glare of the lightning like an invasion of ants. Those people saw the rest; I had had my share and was satisfied. I went home to dream, and was not disappointed.

My teaching and training enabled me to see deeper into these tragedies than an ignorant person could have done. I knew what they were for. I tried to disguise it from myself, but down in the secret deeps of my troubled heart I knew⁠—and I knew I knew. They were inventions of Providence to beguile me to a better life. It sounds curiously innocent and conceited, now, but to me there was nothing strange about it; it was quite in accordance with the thoughtful and judicious ways of Providence as I understood them. It would not have surprised me, nor even overflattered me, if Providence had killed off that whole community in trying to save an asset like me. Educated as I had been, it would have seemed just the thing, and well worth the expense. Why Providence should take such an anxious interest in such a property, that idea never entered my head, and there was no one in that simple hamlet who would have dreamed of putting it there. For one thing, no one was equipped with it.

It is quite true, I took all the tragedies to myself, and tallied them off in turn as they happened, saying to myself in each case, with a sigh, “Another one gone⁠—and on my account; this ought to bring me to repentance; the patience of God will not always endure.” And yet privately I believed it would. That