The $30,000 Bequest, Mark Twain [best book club books for discussion TXT] 📗

maybe the trouble was with the dog. He said:

 

“These are CONTADINI, you know, and they have a prejudice against dogs—

that is, against marimane. Marimana dogs stand guard over people’s

vines and olives, you know, and are very savage, and thereby a grief

and an inconvenience to persons who want other people’s things

at night. In my judgment they have taken this dog for a marimana,

and have soured on him.”

 

I saw that the dog was a mistake, and not functionable:

we must try something else; something, if possible, that could

evoke sentiment, interest, feeling.

 

“What is cat, in Italian?” I asked.

 

“Gatto.”

 

“Is it a gentleman cat, or a lady?”

 

“Gentleman cat.”

 

“How are these people as regards that animal?”

 

“We-ll, they—they—”

 

“You hesitate: that is enough. How are they about chickens?”

 

He tilted his eyes toward heaven in mute ecstasy. I understood.

 

“What is chicken, in Italian?” I asked.

 

“Pollo, PODERE.” (Podere is Italian for master. It is a title

of courtesy, and conveys reverence and admiration.) “Pollo is one

chicken by itself; when there are enough present to constitute

a plural, it is POLLI.”

 

“Very well, polli will do. Which squad is detailed for duty next?”

 

“The Past Definite.”

 

“Send out and order it to the front—with chickens. And let them

understand that we don’t want any more of this cold indifference.”

 

He gave the order to an aide, adding, with a haunting tenderness

in his tone and a watering mouth in his aspect:

 

“Convey to them the conception that these are unprotected chickens.”

He turned to me, saluting with his hand to his temple, and explained,

“It will inflame their interest in the poultry, sire.”

 

A few minutes elapsed. Then the squad marched in and formed up,

their faces glowing with enthusiasm, and the file-leader shouted:

 

“EBBI POLLI, I had chickens!”

 

“Good!” I said. “Go on, the next.”

 

“AVEST POLLI, thou hadst chickens!”

 

“Fine! Next!”

 

“EBBE POLLI, he had chickens!”

 

“Moltimoltissimo! Go on, the next!”

 

“AVEMMO POLLI, we had chickens!”

 

“Basta-basta aspettatto avanti—last man—CHARGE!”

 

“EBBERO POLLI, they had chickens!”

 

Then they formed in echelon, by columns of fours, refused the left,

and retired in great style on the double-quick. I was enchanted,

and said:

 

“Now, doctor, that is something LIKE! Chickens are the ticket,

there is no doubt about it. What is the next squad?”

 

“The Imperfect.”

 

“How does it go?”

 

“IO AVENA, I had, TU AVEVI, thou hadst, EGLI AVENA, he had,

NOI AV—”

 

“Wait—we’ve just HAD the hads. What are you giving me?”

 

“But this is another breed.”

 

“What do we want of another breed? Isn’t one breed enough?

HAD is HAD, and your tricking it out in a fresh way of spelling

isn’t going to make it any hadder than it was before; now you know

that yourself.”

 

“But there is a distinction—they are not just the same Hads.”

 

“How do you make it out?”

 

“Well, you use that first Had when you are referring to something

that happened at a named and sharp and perfectly definite moment;

you use the other when the thing happened at a vaguely defined time

and in a more prolonged and indefinitely continuous way.”

 

“Why, doctor, it is pure nonsense; you know it yourself. Look here:

If I have had a had, or have wanted to have had a had, or was in a

position right then and there to have had a had that hadn’t had any chance

to go out hadding on account of this foolish discrimination which lets

one Had go hadding in any kind of indefinite grammatical weather but

restricts the other one to definite and datable meteoric convulsions,

and keeps it pining around and watching the barometer all the time,

and liable to get sick through confinement and lack of exercise,

and all that sort of thing, why—why, the inhumanity of it is enough,

let alone the wanton superfluity and uselessness of any such a loafing

consumptive hospital-bird of a Had taking up room and cumbering

the place for nothing. These finical refinements revolt me;

it is not right, it is not honorable; it is constructive nepotism

to keep in office a Had that is so delicate it can’t come out when

the wind’s in the nor’west—I won’t have this dude on the payroll.

Cancel his exequator; and look here—”

 

“But you miss the point. It is like this. You see—”

 

“Never mind explaining, I don’t care anything about it. Six Hads

is enough for me; anybody that needs twelve, let him subscribe;

I don’t want any stock in a Had Trust. Knock out the Prolonged

and Indefinitely Continuous; four-fifths of it is water, anyway.”

 

“But I beg you, podere! It is often quite indispensable in cases where—”

 

“Pipe the next squad to the assault!”

 

But it was not to be; for at that moment the dull boom of the noon gun

floated up out of far-off Florence, followed by the usual softened

jangle of church-bells, Florentine and suburban, that bursts out in

murmurous response; by labor-union law the COLAZIONE [1] must stop;

stop promptly, stop instantly, stop definitely, like the chosen

and best of the breed of Hads.

- - -

1. Colazione is Italian for a collection, a meeting, a seance,

a sitting.—M.T.

***

A BURLESQUE BIOGRAPHY

 

Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I

would write an autobiography they would read it when they got leisure,

I yield at last to this frenzied public demand and herewith tender

my history.

 

Ours is a noble house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity.

The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of

the family by the name of Higgins. This was in the eleventh century,

when our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England.

Why it is that our long line has ever since borne the maternal

name (except when one of them now and then took a playful

refuge in an alias to avert foolishness), instead of Higgins,

is a mystery which none of us has ever felt much desire to stir.

It is a kind of vague, pretty romance, and we leave it alone.

All the old families do that way.

 

Arthour Twain was a man of considerable note—a solicitor on the

highway in William Rufus’s time. At about the age of thirty he went

to one of those fine old English places of resort called Newgate,

to see about something, and never returned again. While there he

died suddenly.

 

Augustus Twain seems to have made something of a stir about the

year 1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old

saber and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night,

and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump.

He was a born humorist. But he got to going too far with it;

and the first time he was found stripping one of these parties,

the authorities removed one end of him, and put it up on a nice high

place on Temple Bar, where it could contemplate the people and have

a good time. He never liked any situation so much or stuck to it so long.

 

Then for the next two hundred years the family tree shows

a succession of soldiers—noble, high-spirited fellows,

who always went into battle singing, right behind the army,

and always went out a-whooping, right ahead of it.

 

This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart’s poor witticism

that our family tree never had but one limb to it, and that that

one stuck out at right angles, and bore fruit winter and summer.

 

Early in the fifteenth century we have Beau Twain, called “the Scholar.”

He wrote a beautiful, beautiful hand. And he could imitate anybody’s

hand so closely that it was enough to make a person laugh his head

off to see it. He had infinite sport with his talent. But by and

by he took a contract to break stone for a road, and the roughness

of the work spoiled his hand. Still, he enjoyed life all the time

he was in the stone business, which, with inconsiderable intervals,

was some forty-two years. In fact, he died in harness. During all

those long years he gave such satisfaction that he never was through

with one contract a week till the government gave him another. He was

a perfect pet. And he was always a favorite with his fellow-artists,

and was a conspicuous member of their benevolent secret society,

called the Chain Gang. He always wore his hair short, had a

preference for striped clothes, and died lamented by the government.

He was a sore loss to his country. For he was so regular.

 

Some years later we have the illustrious John Morgan Twain.

He came over to this country with Columbus in 1492 as a passenger.

He appears to have been of a crusty, uncomfortable disposition.

He complained of the food all the way over, and was always threatening

to go ashore unless there was a change. He wanted fresh shad.

Hardly a day passed over his head that he did not go idling about

the ship with his nose in the air, sneering about the commander,

and saying he did not believe Columbus knew where he was going

to or had ever been there before. The memorable cry of “Land ho!”

thrilled every heart in the ship but his. He gazed awhile through a

piece of smoked glass at the penciled line lying on the distant water,

and then said: “Land be hanged—it’s a raft!”

 

When this questionable passenger came on board the ship, he brought

nothing with him but an old newspaper containing a handkerchief

marked “B. G.,” one cotton sock marked “L. W. C.,” one woolen one

marked “D. F.,” and a night-shirt marked “O. M. R.” And yet during

the voyage he worried more about his “trunk,” and gave himself more

airs about it, than all the rest of the passengers put together.

If the ship was “down by the head,” and would not steer, he would

go and move his “trunk” further aft, and then watch the effect.

If the ship was “by the stern,” he would suggest to Columbus to detail

some men to “shift that baggage.” In storms he had to be gagged,

because his wailings about his “trunk” made it impossible for the

men to hear the orders. The man does not appear to have been

openly charged with any gravely unbecoming thing, but it is noted

in the ship’s log as a “curious circumstance” that albeit he brought

his baggage on board the ship in a newspaper, he took it ashore in

four trunks, a queensware crate, and a couple of champagne baskets.

But when he came back insinuating, in an insolent, swaggering way,

that some of this things were missing, and was going to search

the other passengers’ baggage, it was too much, and they threw

him overboard. They watched long and wonderingly for him to

come up, but not even a bubble rose on the quietly ebbing tide.

But while every one was most absorbed in gazing over the side,

and the interest was momentarily increasing, it was observed with

consternation that the vessel was adrift and the anchor-cable hanging

limp from the bow. Then in the ship’s dimmed and ancient log we

find this quaint note:

 

“In time it was discouvered yt ye troblesome passenger hadde gone

downe and got ye anchor, and toke ye same and solde it to ye dam

sauvages from ye interior, saying yt he hadde