At seven in the morning
we reached Hannibal, Missouri, where my boyhood was spent. I had had a glimpse
of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpse six years earlier, but both were
so brief that they hardly counted. The
only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory of it as I had
known it when I first quitted it twenty-nine years ago. That picture of it was
still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph.
I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone
generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must
have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity,
and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before
them. I saw the new houses--saw them plainly enough--but they did not affect
the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricks and mortar I saw
the vanished houses, which had formerly stood there, with perfect distinctness.
It was Sunday morning,
and everybody was abed yet. So I passed through the vacant streets, still
seeing the town as it was, and not as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically
shaking hands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist; and
finally climbed Holiday's Hill to get a comprehensive view. The whole town lay spread out below me then,
and I could mark and fix every locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good
deal moved. I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of
my childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.' The things about me and before me made me
feel like a boy again--convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had
simply been dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all
that; for they forced me to say, 'I see fifty old houses down yonder, into each
of which I could enter and find either a man or a woman who was a baby or
unborn when I noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who was a plump young
bride at that time.'
From this vantage
ground the extensive view up and down the river, and wide over the wooded
expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful-- one of the most beautiful on the
Mississippi, I think; which is a hazardous remark to make, for the eight
hundred miles of river between St. Louis and St. Paul afford an unbroken
succession of lovely pictures. It may be that my affection for the one in question
biases my judgment in its favor; I cannot say as to that. No matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to
me, and it had this advantage over all the other friends whom I was about to
greet again: it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely
and gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be
old, and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefs and
defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit.
An old gentleman, out
on an early morning walk, came along, and we discussed the weather, and then
drifted into other matters. I could not remember his face. He said he had been living
here twenty-eight years. So he had come
after my time, and I had never seen him before.
I asked him various questions; first about a mate of mine in Sunday
school--what became of him?
'He graduated with
honor in an Eastern college, wandered off into the world somewhere, succeeded
at nothing, passed out of knowledge and memory years ago, and is supposed to
have gone to the dogs.'
'He was bright, and
promised well when he was a boy.'
'Yes, but the thing
that happened is what became of it all.'
I asked after another
lad, altogether the brightest in our village school when I was a boy.
'He, too, was graduated
with honors, from an Eastern college; but life whipped him in every battle,
straight along, and he died in one of the Territories, years ago, a defeated man.'
I asked after another
of the bright boys.
'He is a success,
always has been, always will be, I think.'
I inquired after a
young fellow who came to the town to study for one of the professions when I
was a boy.
'He went at something
else before he got through--went from medicine to law, or from law to medicine--then
to some other new thing; went away for a year, came back with a young wife;
fell to drinking, then to gambling behind the door; finally took his wife and
two young children to her father's, and went off to Mexico; went from bad to
worse, and finally died there, without a cent to buy a shroud, and without a
friend to attend the funeral.'
'Pity, for he was the
best-natured, and most cheery and hopeful young fellow that ever was.'
'Oh, he is all right.
Lives here yet; has a wife and children, and is prospering.'
Same verdict concerning
other boys.
I named three
school-girls.
'The first two live
here, are married and have children; the other is long ago dead--never
married.'
I named, with emotion,
one of my early sweethearts.
'She is all right. Been
married three times; buried two husbands, divorced from the third, and I hear she
is getting ready to marry an old fellow out in Colorado somewhere. She's got
children scattered around here and there, most everywheres.'
The answer to several
other inquiries was brief and simple--
'Killed in the war.'
I named another boy.
'Well, now, his case is
curious! There wasn't a human being in this town but knew that that boy was a
perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a stupid ass, as you may say. Everybody
knew it, and everybody said it. Well, if that very boy isn't the first lawyer
in the State of Missouri to-day, I'm a Democrat!'
'Is that so?'
'How do you account for
it?'
'Account for it? There
ain't any accounting for it, except that if you send a damned fool to St.
Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool they'll never find it
out. There's one thing sure--if I had a
damned fool I should know what to do with him: ship him to St. Louis--it's the
noblest market in the world for that kind of property. Well, when you come to
look at it all around, and chew at it and think it over, don't it just bang
anything you ever heard of?'
'Well, yes, it does
seem to. But don't you think maybe it was the Hannibal people who were mistaken
about the boy, and not the St. Louis people'
'Oh, nonsense! The people
here have known him from the very cradle--they knew him a hundred times better than
the St. Louis idiots could have known him. No, if you have got any damned fools
that you want to realize on, take my advice--send them to St. Louis.'
I mentioned a great
number of people whom I had formerly known.
Some were dead, some were gone away, some had prospered, some had come
to naught; but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot, the answer was comforting:
'Prosperous--live here
yet--town littered with their children.'
I asked about Miss ----
Died in the insane
asylum three or four years ago--never was out of it from the time she went in;
and was always suffering, too; never got a shred of her mind back.'
If he spoke the truth,
here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. Thirty-six
years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw
those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where Miss ---- sat
reading at midnight by a lamp. The girl
at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface, she crept behind the
victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and screamed, and then
fell into convulsions. She did not
recover from the fright, but went mad. In these days it seems incredible that
people believed in ghosts so short a time ago.
But they did.
After asking after such
other folk as I could call to mind, I finally inquired about MYSELF:
'Oh, he succeeded well
enough--another case of damned fool. If
they'd sent him to St. Louis, he'd have succeeded sooner.'
It was with much
satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman,
in the beginning, that my name was Smith.
Excerpted cited from Literature Network.
The old gentleman that Twain interrogates here is
just that perfect crusty character (kind of reminds me of me in my opinionated moments!) who has been at one place so long he knows
everyone and has a snippy opinion of them.
Makes for perfect comic layering.
We live a couple of hours from Hannibal and have been there several times. You can tour the homes too. My husband says to tell you that if you have never been on the Mississippi, by reading this book you should have a very good feel for it. His family has had cruisers and the last was docked in a marina on the Mississippi outside of St Charles MO about 12 miles by river from Alton IL
ReplyDeleteI guess my Mississippi experiences are limited to being in Minneapolis a few times and New Orleans once, which interesting enough are the north and south ends of the great river. I hope one day I can make it to Hannibal, just to see the Twain museum. I totally believe your husband; the book is very descriptive, not just of the river but of the life that went on there in Twain's day. It's not an exciting or intense book (it is a memoir after all) but I grew very fond of it as it went on. I'm probably going to post one more on it, one that goes deeper than just appreciating a few passages. Thanks Kathy, and thank your husband
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