Chapters from My Autobiography Part 30

Nothing but a quite extraordinary skill could score a carom on that table--a skill that required the nicest estimate of force, distance, and how much to allow for the various slants of the table and the other formidable peculiarities and idiosyncrasies furnished by the contradictions of the outfit. Last winter, here in New York, I saw Hoppe and Schaefer and Sutton and the three or four other billiard champions of world-wide fame contend against each other, and certainly the art and science displayed were a wonder to see; yet I saw nothing there in the way of science and art that was more wonderful than shots which I had seen Texas Tom make on the wavy surface of that poor old wreck in the perishing saloon at Jacka.s.s Gulch forty years before. Once I saw Texas Tom make a string of seven points on a single inning!--all calculated shots, and not a fluke or a scratch among them. I often saw him make runs of four, but when he made his great string of seven, the boys went wild with enthusiasm and admiration. The joy and the noise exceeded that which the great gathering at Madison Square produced when Sutton scored five hundred points at the eighteen-inch game, on a world-famous night last winter. With practice, that champion could score nineteen or twenty on the Jacka.s.s Gulch table; but to start with, Texas Tom would show him miracles that would astonish him; also it might have another handsome result: it might persuade the great experts to discard their own trifling game and bring the Jacka.s.s Gulch outfit here and exhibit their skill in a game worth a hundred of the discarded one, for profound and breathless interest, and for displays of almost superhuman skill.

In my experience, games played with a fiendish outfit furnish ecstasies of delight which games played with the other kind cannot match.

Twenty-seven years ago my budding little family spent the summer at Bateman's Point, near Newport, Rhode Island. It was a comfortable boarding-place, well stocked with sweet mothers and little children, but the male s.e.x was scarce; however, there was another young fellow besides myself, and he and I had good times--Higgins was his name, but that was not his fault. He was a very pleasant and companionable person. On the premises there was what had once been a bowling-alley. It was a single alley, and it was estimated that it had been out of repair for sixty years--but not the b.a.l.l.s, the b.a.l.l.s were in good condition; there were forty-one of them, and they ranged in size from a grapefruit up to a lignum-vitae sphere that you could hardly lift. Higgins and I played on that alley day after day. At first, one of us located himself at the bottom end to set up the pins in case anything should happen to them, but nothing happened. The surface of that alley consisted of a rolling stretch of elevations and depressions, and neither of us could, by any art known to us, persuade a ball to stay on the alley until it should accomplish something. Little b.a.l.l.s and big, the same thing always happened--the ball left the alley before it was half-way home and went thundering down alongside of it the rest of the way and made the gamekeeper climb out and take care of himself. No matter, we persevered, and were rewarded. We examined the alley, noted and located a lot of its peculiarities, and little by little we learned how to deliver a ball in such a way that it would travel home and knock down a pin or two. By and by we succeeded in improving our game to a point where we were able to get all of the pins with thirty-five b.a.l.l.s--so we made it a thirty-five-ball game. If the player did not succeed with thirty-five, he had lost the game. I suppose that all the b.a.l.l.s, taken together, weighed five hundred pounds, or maybe a ton--or along there somewhere--but anyway it was hot weather, and by the time that a player had sent thirty-five of them home he was in a drench of perspiration, and physically exhausted.

Next, we started c.o.c.ked hat--that is to say, a triangle of three pins, the other seven being discarded. In this game we used the three smallest b.a.l.l.s and kept on delivering them until we got the three pins down.

After a day or two of practice we were able to get the chief pin with an output of four b.a.l.l.s, but it cost us a great many deliveries to get the other two; but by and by we succeeded in perfecting our art--at least we perfected it to our limit. We reached a scientific excellence where we could get the three pins down with twelve deliveries of the three small b.a.l.l.s, making thirty-six shots to conquer the c.o.c.ked hat.

Having reached our limit for daylight work, we set up a couple of candles and played at night. As the alley was fifty or sixty feet long, we couldn't see the pins, but the candles indicated their locality. We continued this game until we were able to knock down the invisible pins with thirty-six shots. Having now reached the limit of the candle game, we changed and played it left-handed. We continued the left-handed game until we conquered its limit, which was fifty-four shots. Sometimes we sent down a succession of fifteen b.a.l.l.s without getting anything at all.

We easily got out of that old alley five times the fun that anybody could have gotten out of the best alley in New York.

One blazing hot day, a modest and courteous officer of the regular army appeared in our den and introduced himself. He was about thirty-five years old, well built and militarily erect and straight, and he was hermetically sealed up in the uniform of that ignorant old day--a uniform made of heavy material, and much properer for January than July.

When he saw the venerable alley, and glanced from that to the long procession of shining b.a.l.l.s in the trough, his eye lit with desire, and we judged that he was our meat. We politely invited him to take a hand, and he could not conceal his grat.i.tude; though his breeding, and the etiquette of his profession, made him try. We explained the game to him, and said that there were forty-one b.a.l.l.s, and that the player was privileged to extend his inning and keep on playing until he had used them all up--repeatedly--and that for every ten-strike he got a prize.

We didn't name the prize--it wasn't necessary, as no prize would ever be needed or called for. He started a sarcastic smile, but quenched it, according to the etiquette of his profession. He merely remarked that he would like to select a couple of medium b.a.l.l.s and one small one, adding that he didn't think he would need the rest.

Then he began, and he was an astonished man. He couldn't get a ball to stay on the alley. When he had fired about fifteen b.a.l.l.s and hadn't yet reached the cl.u.s.ter of pins, his annoyance began to show out through his clothes. He wouldn't let it show in his face; but after another fifteen b.a.l.l.s he was not able to control his face; he didn't utter a word, but he exuded mute blasphemy from every pore. He asked permission to take off his coat, which was granted; then he turned himself loose, with bitter determination, and although he was only an infantry officer he could have been mistaken for a battery, he got up such a volleying thunder with those b.a.l.l.s. Presently he removed his cravat; after a little he took off his vest; and still he went bravely on. Higgins was suffocating. My condition was the same, but it would not be courteous to laugh; it would be better to burst, and we came near it. That officer was good pluck. He stood to his work without uttering a word, and kept the b.a.l.l.s going until he had expended the outfit four times, making four times forty-one shots; then he had to give it up, and he did; for he was no longer able to stand without wobbling. He put on his clothes, bade us a courteous good-by, invited us to call at the Fort, and started away.

Then he came back, and said,

"What is the prize for the ten-strike?"

We had to confess that we had not selected it yet.

He said, gravely, that he thought there was no occasion for hurry about it.

I believe Bateman's alley was a better one than any other in America, in the matter of the essentials of the game. It compelled skill; it provided opportunity for bets; and if you could get a stranger to do the bowling for you, there was more and wholesomer and delightfuler entertainment to be gotten out of his industries than out of the finest game by the best expert, and played upon the best alley elsewhere in existence.

MARK TWAIN.

(_To be Continued._)

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

No. DCXXV.

DECEMBER, 1907.

CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXV.

BY MARK TWAIN.

_January 11, 1906._ Answer to a letter received this morning:

DEAR MRS. H.,--I am forever your debtor for reminding me of that curious pa.s.sage in my life. During the first year or two after it happened, I could not bear to think of it. My pain and shame were so intense, and my sense of having been an imbecile so settled, established and confirmed, that I drove the episode entirely from my mind--and so all these twenty-eight or twenty-nine years I have lived in the conviction that my performance of that time was coa.r.s.e, vulgar and dest.i.tute of humor. But your suggestion that you and your family found humor in it twenty-eight years ago moved me to look into the matter. So I commissioned a Boston typewriter to delve among the Boston papers of that bygone time and send me a copy of it.

It came this morning, and if there is any vulgarity about it I am not able to discover it. If it isn't innocently and ridiculously funny, I am no judge. I will see to it that you get a copy.

Address of Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain") From a report of the dinner given by the Publishers of the Atlantic Monthly in honor of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Birth of John Greenleaf Whittier, at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, December 17, 1877, as published in the BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT, December 18, 1877

Mr. Chairman--This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk; therefore I will drop lightly into history myself. Standing here on the sh.o.r.e of the Atlantic and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly Californiawards. I started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of California. I was callow and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my _nom de guerre._ I very soon had an opportunity. I knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin in the foothills of the Sierras just at nightfall. It was snowing at the time. A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door to me. When he heard my _nom de guerre_ he looked more dejected than before. He let me in--pretty reluctantly, I thought--and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whiskey, I took a pipe. This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. Now he spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, "You're the fourth--I'm going to move." "The fourth what!" said I. "The fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going to move." "You don't tell me!" said I; "who were the others!" "Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the lot!"

You can easily believe I was interested. I supplicated--three hot whiskeys did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. Said he--

"They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in of course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough lot, but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot.

Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr.

Holmes as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundred, and double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow built like a prize-fighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. They had been drinking, I could see that. And what queer talk they used! Mr.

Holmes inspected this cabin, then he took me by the b.u.t.tonhole, and says he--

"'Through the deep cares of thought I hear a voice that sings, Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!'

"Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want to.' Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger, that way. However, I started to get out my bacon and beans, when Mr. Emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the b.u.t.tonhole and says--

"'Give me agates for my meat; Give me cantharids to eat; From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and alt.i.tudes.'

"Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.'

You see it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of littery swells. But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr.

Longfellow and b.u.t.tonholes me, and interrupts me. Says he,

"'Honor be to Mudjekeewis!

You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--'

"But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you'll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get this grub ready, you'll do me proud.' Well, sir, after they'd filled up I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it and then he fires up all of a sudden and yells--

"'Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!

For I would drink to other days.'

"By George, I was getting kind of worked up. I don't deny it, I was getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I, 'Looky here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows herself, you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry.' Them's the very words I said to him. Now I don't want to sa.s.s such famous littery people, but you see they kind of forced me.

There ain't nothing onreasonable 'bout me; I don't mind a pa.s.sel of guests a-treadin' on my tail three or four times, but when it comes to _standing_ on it it's different, 'and if the court knows herself,' I says, 'you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry.'

Well, between drinks they'd swell around the cabin and strike att.i.tudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on trust. I began to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr. Emerson dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says--

"'I am the doubter and the doubt--'

and ca'mly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new layout. Says he--