The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain (good book recommendations .TXT) 📕

now become extinct in some of the Western towns and in all of the Eastern towns and cities. He was transparently a good and sincere and honest man. He was a humble helper of Mr. Langdon, and had been in his employ many years. His role was general utility. If Mr. Langdon’s sawmills needed unscientific but plain commonsense inspection, Atwater was sent on that service. If Mr. Langdon’s timber rafts got into trouble on account of a falling river or a rising one, Atwater was sent to look after the matter. Atwater went on modest errands to Mr. Langdon’s coal mines; also to examine and report upon Mr. Langdon’s interests in the budding coal-oil fields of Pennsylvania. Mr. Atwater was always busy, always moving, always useful in humble ways, always religious, and always ungrammatical, except when he had just finished talking and had used up what he had in stock of that kind of grammar. He was effective⁠—that is, he was effective if there was plenty of time. But he was constitutionally slow, and as he had to discuss all his matters with whomsoever came along, it sometimes happened that the occasion for his services had gone by before he got them in. Mr. Langdon never would discharge Atwater, though young Charley Langdon suggested that course now and then. Young Charley could not abide Atwater, because of his provoking dilatoriness and of his comfortable contentment in it. But I loved Atwater. Atwater was a treasure to me. When he would arrive from one of his inspection journeys and sit at the table, at noon, and tell the family all about the campaign in delicious detail, leaving out not a single inane, inconsequential, and colorless incident of it, I heard it gratefully; I enjoyed Mr. Langdon’s placid patience with it; the family’s despondency and despair; and more than all these pleasures together, the vindictiveness in young Charley’s eyes and the volcanic disturbances going on inside of him which I could not see, but which I knew were there.

I am dwelling upon Atwater just for love. I have nothing important to say about Atwater⁠—in fact, only one thing to say about him at all. And even that one thing I could leave unmentioned if I wanted to⁠—but I don’t want to. It has been a pleasant memory to me for a whole generation. It lets in a fleeting ray of light upon Livy’s gentle and calm and equable spirit. Although she could feel strongly and utter her feelings strongly, none but a person familiar with her and with all her moods would ever be able to tell by her language that that language was violent. Young Charley had many and many a time tried to lodge a seed of unkindness against Atwater in Livy’s heart, but she was as steadfast in her fidelity as was her father, and Charley’s efforts always failed. Many and many a time he brought to her a charge against Atwater which he believed would bring the longed-for bitter word, and at last he scored a success⁠—for “all things come to him who waits.”

I was away at the time, but Charley could not wait for me to get back. He was too glad, too eager. He sat down at once and wrote to me while his triumph was fresh and his happiness hot and contenting. He told me how he had laid the whole exasperating matter before Livy and then had asked her, “Now what do you say?” And she said, “Damn Atwater.”

Charley knew that there was no need to explain this to me. He knew I would perfectly understand. He knew that I would know that he was not quoting, but was translating. He knew that I would know that his translation was exact, was perfect, that it conveyed the precise length, breadth, weight, meaning, and force of the words which Livy had really used. He knew that I would know that the phrase which she really uttered was, “I disapprove of Atwater.”

He was quite right. In her mouth that word “disapprove” was as blighting and withering and devastating as another person’s damn.

One or two days ago I was talking about our sorrowful and pathetic brief sojourn in Buffalo, where we became hermits, and could have no human comradeship except that of young David Gray and his young wife and their baby boy. It seems an age ago. Last night I was at a large dinner party at Norman Hapgood’s palace uptown, and a very long and very slender gentleman was introduced to me⁠—a gentleman with a fine, alert, and intellectual face, with a becoming gold pince-nez on his nose and clothed in an evening costume which was perfect from the broad spread of immaculate bosom to the rosetted slippers on his feet. His gait, his bows, and his intonations were those of an English gentleman, and I took him for an earl. I said I had not understood his name, and asked him what it was. He said “David Gray.” The effect was startling. His very father stood before me, as I had known him in Buffalo thirty-six years ago. This apparition called up pleasant times in the beer mills of Buffalo with David Gray and John Hay when this David Gray was in his cradle, a beloved and troublesome possession. And this contact kept me in Buffalo during the next hour, and made it difficult for me to keep up my end of the conversation at my extremity of the dinner table. The text of my reveries was: “What was he born for? What was his father born for? What was I born for? What is anybody born for?”

His father was a poet, but was doomed to grind out his living in a most uncongenial occupation⁠—the editing of a daily political newspaper. He was a singing bird in a menagerie of monkeys, macaws, and hyenas. His life was wasted. He had come from Scotland when he was five years old; he had come saturated to the bones with Presbyterianism of the bluest, the