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

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and a chat, and there we sat just as sociable, and talking away

and laughing and chatting, just the same as if we had been born

in the same bunk; and all the servants in the anteroom could see

us doing it! Oh, it was too lovely for anything!”

 

The king, class Q, is happy in the modest entertainment furnished him

by the king, class M, and goes home and tells the household about it,

and is as grateful and joyful over it as were his predecessors

in the gaudier attentions that had fallen to their larger lot.

 

Emperors, kings, artisans, peasants, big people, little people—at the

bottom we are all alike and all the same; all just alike on the inside,

and when our clothes are off, nobody can tell which of us is which.

We are unanimous in the pride we take in good and genuine compliments

paid us, and distinctions conferred upon us, in attentions shown.

There is not one of us, from the emperor down, but is made like that.

Do I mean attentions shown us by the guest? No, I mean simply

flattering attentions, let them come whence they may. We despise

no source that can pay us a pleasing attention—there is no source

that is humble enough for that. You have heard a dear little girl

say to a frowzy and disreputable dog: “He came right to me and let

me pat him on the head, and he wouldn’t let the others touch him!”

and you have seen her eyes dance with pride in that high distinction.

You have often seen that. If the child were a princess, would that

random dog be able to confer the like glory upon her with his

pretty compliment? Yes; and even in her mature life and seated

upon a throne, she would still remember it, still recall it,

still speak of it with frank satisfaction. That charming and

lovable German princess and poet, Carmen Sylva, Queen of Roumania,

remembers yet that the flowers of the woods and fields “talked to her”

when she was a girl, and she sets it down in her latest book;

and that the squirrels conferred upon her and her father the valued

compliment of not being afraid of them; and “once one of them,

holding a nut between its sharp little teeth, ran right up against

my father”—it has the very note of “He came right to me and let

me pat him on the head”—“and when it saw itself reflected in his

boot it was very much surprised, and stopped for a long time to

contemplate itself in the polished leather”—then it went its way.

And the birds! she still remembers with pride that “they came

boldly into my room,” when she had neglected her “duty” and put

no food on the window-sill for them; she knew all the wild birds,

and forgets the royal crown on her head to remember with pride

that they knew her; also that the wasp and the bee were personal

friends of hers, and never forgot that gracious relationship

to her injury: “never have I been stung by a wasp or a bee.”

And here is that proud note again that sings in that little child’s

elation in being singled out, among all the company of children,

for the random dog’s honor-conferring attentions. “Even in the very

worst summer for wasps, when, in lunching out of doors, our table

was covered with them and every one else was stung, they never

hurt me.”

 

When a queen whose qualities of mind and heart and character are

able to add distinction to so distinguished a place as a throne,

remembers with grateful exultation, after thirty years, honors and

distinctions conferred upon her by the humble, wild creatures of

the forest, we are helped to realize that complimentary attentions,

homage, distinctions, are of no caste, but are above all cast—

that they are a nobility-conferring power apart.

 

We all like these things. When the gate-guard at the railway-station

passes me through unchallenged and examines other people’s tickets,

I feel as the king, class A, felt when the emperor put the imperial

hand on his shoulder, “everybody seeing him do it”; and as the child

felt when the random dog allowed her to pat his head and ostracized

the others; and as the princess felt when the wasps spared her

and stung the rest; and I felt just so, four years ago in Vienna

(and remember it yet), when the helmeted police shut me off,

with fifty others, from a street which the Emperor was to pass through,

and the captain of the squad turned and saw the situation and said

indignantly to that guard:

 

“Can’t you see it is the Herr Mark Twain? Let him through!”

 

It was four years ago; but it will be four hundred before I forget

the wind of self-complacency that rose in me, and strained my

buttons when I marked the deference for me evoked in the faces of my

fellow-rabble, and noted, mingled with it, a puzzled and resentful

expression which said, as plainly as speech could have worded it:

“And who in the nation is the Herr Mark Twain UM GOTTESWILLEN?”

 

How many times in your life have you heard this boastful remark:

 

“I stood as close to him as I am to you; I could have put out my

hand and touched him.”

 

We have all heard it many and many a time. It was a proud

distinction to be able to say those words. It brought envy to

the speaker, a kind of glory; and he basked in it and was happy

through all his veins. And who was it he stood so close to?

The answer would cover all the grades. Sometimes it was a king;

sometimes it was a renowned highwayman; sometimes it was an unknown

man killed in an extraordinary way and made suddenly famous by it;

always it was a person who was for the moment the subject of public

interest of a village.

 

“I was there, and I saw it myself.” That is a common and

envy-compelling remark. It can refer to a battle; to a handing;

to a coronation; to the killing of Jumbo by the railway-train;

to the arrival of Jenny Lind at the Battery; to the meeting of the

President and Prince Henry; to the chase of a murderous maniac;

to the disaster in the tunnel; to the explosion in the subway;

to a remarkable dog-fight; to a village church struck by lightning.

It will be said, more or less causally, by everybody in America who has

seen Prince Henry do anything, or try to. The man who was absent

and didn’t see him to anything, will scoff. It is his privilege;

and he can make capital out of it, too; he will seem, even to himself,

to be different from other Americans, and better. As his opinion

of his superior Americanism grows, and swells, and concentrates

and coagulates, he will go further and try to belittle the distinction

of those that saw the Prince do things, and will spoil their pleasure

in it if he can. My life has been embittered by that kind of person.

If you are able to tell of a special distinction that has fallen

to your lot, it gravels them; they cannot bear it; and they try

to make believe that the thing you took for a special distinction

was nothing of the kind and was meant in quite another way.

Once I was received in private audience by an emperor. Last week

I was telling a jealous person about it, and I could see him wince

under it, see him bite, see him suffer. I revealed the whole episode

to him with considerable elaboration and nice attention to detail.

When I was through, he asked me what had impressed me most.

I said:

 

“His Majesty’s delicacy. They told me to be sure and back

out from the presence, and find the door-knob as best I could;

it was not allowable to face around. Now the Emperor knew it would

be a difficult ordeal for me, because of lack of practice; and so,

when it was time to part, he turned, with exceeding delicacy,

and pretended to fumble with things on his desk, so I could get

out in my own way, without his seeing me.”

 

It went home! It was vitriol! I saw the envy and disgruntlement rise

in the man’s face; he couldn’t keep it down. I saw him try to fix

up something in his mind to take the bloom off that distinction.

I enjoyed that, for I judged that he had his work cut out for him.

He struggled along inwardly for quite a while; then he said,

with a manner of a person who has to say something and hasn’t anything

relevant to say:

 

“You said he had a handful of special-brand cigars on the table?”

 

“Yes; I never saw anything to match them.”

 

I had him again. He had to fumble around in his mind as much

as another minute before he could play; then he said in as mean

a way as I ever heard a person say anything:

 

“He could have been counting the cigars, you know.”

 

I cannot endure a man like that. It is nothing to him how unkind

he is, so long as he takes the bloom off. It is all he cares for.

 

“An Englishman (or other human being) does dearly love a lord,”

(or other conspicuous person.) It includes us all. We love to be

noticed by the conspicuous person; we love to be associated with such,

or with a conspicuous event, even in a seventh-rate fashion,

even in the forty-seventh, if we cannot do better. This accounts

for some of our curious tastes in mementos. It accounts for the large

private trade in the Prince of Wales’s hair, which chambermaids

were able to drive in that article of commerce when the Prince made

the tour of the world in the long ago—hair which probably did

not always come from his brush, since enough of it was marketed

to refurnish a bald comet; it accounts for the fact that the rope

which lynches a negro in the presence of ten thousand Christian

spectators is salable five minutes later at two dollars and inch;

it accounts for the mournful fact that a royal personage does not

venture to wear buttons on his coat in public.

 

We do love a lord—and by that term I mean any person whose situation

is higher than our own. The lord of the group, for instance:

a group of peers, a group of millionaires, a group of hoodlums,

a group of sailors, a group of newsboys, a group of saloon politicians,

a group of college girls. No royal person has ever been the object

of a more delirious loyalty and slavish adoration than is paid

by the vast Tammany herd to its squalid idol in Wantage. There is

not a bifurcated animal in that menagerie that would not be proud

to appear in a newspaper picture in his company. At the same time,

there are some in that organization who would scoff at the people

who have been daily pictured in company with Prince Henry, and would

say vigorously that THEY would not consent to be photographed

with him—a statement which would not be true in any instance.

There are hundreds of people in America who would frankly say to you

that they would not be proud to be photographed in a group with

the Prince, if invited; and some of these unthinking people would

believe it when they said it; yet in no instance would it be true.

We have a large population, but we have not a large enough one,

by several millions, to furnish