mansion from all other Virginian mansions and perfectly identified it, therefore the fact stood proven that I had seen it in my vision. Lawks!
It is curious. When the magician’s engagement closed there was but one person in the village who did not believe in mesmerism, and I was the one. All the others were converted, but I was to remain an implacable and unpersuadable disbeliever in mesmerism and hypnotism for close upon fifty years. This was because I never would examine them, in after life. I couldn’t. The subject revolted me. Perhaps because it brought back to me a passage in my life which for pride’s sake I wished to forget; though I thought — or persuaded myself I thought — I should never come across a “proof” which wasn’t thin and cheap, and probably had a fraud like me behind it.
The truth is, I did not have to wait long to get tired of my triumphs. Not thirty days, I think. The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. No doubt for a while I enjoyed having my exploits told and retold and told again in my presence and wondered over and exclaimed about, but I quite distinctly remember that there presently came a time when the subject was wearisome and odious to me and I could not endure the disgusting discomfort of it. I am well aware that the world-glorified doer of a deed of great and real splendor has just my experience; I know that he deliciously enjoys hearing about it for three or four weeks, and that pretty soon after that he begins to dread the mention of it, and by and by wishes he had been with the damned before he ever thought of doing that deed; I remember how General Sherman used to rage and swear over “When we were Marching through Georgia,” which was played at him and sung at him everywhere he went; still, I think I suffered a shade more than the legitimate hero does, he being privileged to soften his misery with the reflection that his glory was at any rate golden and reproachless in its origin, whereas I had no such privilege, there being no possible way to make mine respectable.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! Thirty-five years after those evil exploits of mine I visited my old mother, whom I had not seen for ten years; and being moved by what seemed to me a rather noble and perhaps heroic impulse, I thought I would humble myself and confess my ancient fault. It cost me a great effort to make up my mind; I dreaded the sorrow that would rise in her face, and the shame that would look out of her eyes; but after long and troubled reflection, the sacrifice seemed due and right, and I gathered my resolution together and made the confession.
To my astonishment there were no sentimentalities, no dramatics, no George Washington effects; she was not moved in the least degree; she simply did not believe me, and said so! I was not merely disappointed, I was nettled, to have my costly truthfulness flung out of the market in this placid and confident way when I was expecting to get a profit out of it. I asserted, and reasserted, with rising heat, my statement that every single thing I had done on those long-vanished nights was a lie and a swindle; and when she shook her head tranquilly and said she knew better, I put up my hand and swore to it — adding a triumphant “Now what do you say?”
It did not affect her at all; it did not budge her the fraction of an inch from her position. If this was hard for me to endure, it did not begin with the blister she put upon the raw when she began to put my sworn oath out of court with arguments to prove that I was under a delusion and did not know what I was talking about. Arguments! Arguments to show that a person on a man’s outside can know better what is on his inside than he does himself! I had cherished some contempt for arguments before, I have not enlarged my respect for them since. She refused to believe that I had invented my visions myself; she said it was folly: that I was only a child at the time and could not have done it. She cited the Richmond fire and the colonial mansion and said they were quite beyond my capacities. Then I saw my chance! I said she was right — I didn’t invent those, I got them from Dr. Peake. Even this great shot did no damage. She said Dr. Peake’s evidence was better than mine, and he had said in plain words that it was impossible for me to have heard about those things. Dear, dear, what a grotesque and unthinkable situation: a confessed swindler convicted of honesty and condemned to acquittal by circumstantial evidence furnished by the swindled!
I realised, with shame and with impotent vexation, that I was defeated all along the line. I had but one card left, but it was a formidable one. I played it — and stood from under. It seemed ignoble to demolish her fortress, after she had defended it so valiantly; but the defeated know not mercy. I played that matter card. It was the pin-sticking. I said, solemnly —
“I give you my honor, a pin was never stuck into me without causing me cruel pain.”
She only said —
“It is thirty-five years. I believe you do think that, now, but I was there, and I know better. You never winced.”
She was so calm! and I was so far from it, so nearly frantic.
“Oh, my goodness!” I said, “let me show you that I am speaking the truth. Here is my arm; drive a pin into it — drive it to the head — I shall not wince.”
She only shook her gray head and said, with simplicity and conviction —
“You are a man, now, and could dissemble the hurt; but you were only a child then, and could not have done it.”
And so the lie which I played upon her in my youth remained with her as an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death. Carlyle said “a lie cannot live.” It shows that he did not know how to tell them. If I had taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted me ages ago.
Mark Twain.
(To be Continued.)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCVII.
JANUARY 18, 1907.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY. — X.
(1825.)
(1837.)
[Dictated March 28, 1906.] Orion Clemens was born in Jamestown, Fentress County, Tennessee, in 1825. He was the family’s firstborn, and antedated me ten years. Between him and me came a sister, Margaret, who died, aged ten, in 1837, in that village of Florida, Missouri, where I was born; and Pamela, mother of Samuel E. Moffett, who was an invalid all her life and died in the neighborhood of New York a year ago, aged about seventy-five. Her character was without blemish, and she was of a most kindly and gentle disposition. Also there was a brother, Benjamin, who died in 1848 aged ten or twelve.
(1843.)
Orion’s boyhood was spent in that wee little log hamlet of Jamestown up there among the “knobs” — so called — of East Tennessee. The family migrated to Florida, Missouri, then moved to Hannibal, Missouri, when Orion was twelve and a half years old. When he was fifteen or sixteen he was sent to St. Louis and there he learned the printer’s trade. One of his characteristics was eagerness. He woke with an eagerness about some matter or other every morning; it consumed him all day; it perished in the night and he was on fire with a fresh new interest next morning before he could get his clothes on. He exploited in this way three hundred and sixty-five red-hot new eagernesses every year of his life. But I am forgetting another characteristic, a very pronounced one. That was his deep glooms, his despondencies, his despairs; these had their place in each and every day along with the eagernesses. Thus his day was divided — no, not divided, mottled — from sunrise to midnight with alternating
