Europe and elsewhere

by Mark Twain

I found Smith at the Water Color dinner that night, and asked him if it were merely my face that had enabled me to borrow the overcoat from a stranger, but he was surprised and said:

“No! What an idea--and what intolerable conceit! She is my housekeeper, and remembered your drawling voice from overhearing it a moment that night four or five years ago in my house; so she knew where to send the police if you didn’t bring the coat back!”

After all those years I was sitting here, now, at midnight in the peasant hotel, in my night clothes, and honoring womankind in my thoughts; for here was another woman, with the noble and delicate intuitions of her sex, trusting me, a total stranger, with all her modest wealth. She entered the room, just then, and stood beaming upon me a moment with her sweet matronly eyes--then took away the jewelry.

Tuesday, September 22d.--Breakfast in open air. Extra canvas was now to be added to the boat’s hood to keep the passengers and valises better protected during rainstorms. I passed through the villagette and started to walk over the wooded hill, the boat to find us on the river bank somewhere below, by and by. I soon got lost among the high bushes and turnip gardens. Plenty of paths, but none went to river. Reflection. Decision--that the path most traveled was the one leading in the right direction. It was a poor conclusion. I got lost again; this time worse than before. But a peasant of above eighty (as she said, and certainly she was very old and wrinkled and gray and bent) found me presently and undertook to guide me safely. She was vigorous, physically, prompt and decided of movement, and altogether soldierlike; and she had a hawk’s eye and beak, and a gypsy’s complexion. She said that from her girlhood up to not so very many years ago she had done a man’s work on a woman’s pay on the big keel boats that carry stone down the river, and was as good a man as the best, in the matter of handling stone. Said she had seen the great Napoleon when she was a little child. Her face was so wrinkled and dark and so eaglelike that she reminded me of old Indians one sees out on the Great Plains--the outside signs of age, but in the eye an indestructible spirit. She had a couple of laden baskets with her which I had found heavy after three minutes’ carrying, when she was finding the way for me, but they seemed nothing to her. She impressed one rather as a man than as a woman; and so, when she spoke of her child that was drowned, and her voice broke a little and her lip quivered, it surprised me; I was not expecting it. “Grandchild?” No--it was her own child. “Indeed? When?” So then it came out that it was sixty years ago. It seemed strange that she should mind it so long. But that was the woman of it, no doubt. She had a fragment of newspaper--religious--with rude holy woodcuts in it and doubtful episodes in the lives of mediæval saints and anchorites--and she could read these instructive matters in fine print without glasses; also, her eyes were as good at long distances. She led hither and thither among the paths and finally brought me out overlooking the river. There was a steep sandy frontage there, where there had recently been a small landslide, and the faint new path ran straight across it for forty feet, like a slight snow track along the slant of a very steep roof. I halted and declined. I had no mind to try the crumbly path and creep and quake along it with the boiling river--and maybe some rocks--under my elbow thirty feet below. Such places turn my stomach. The old woman took note of me, understood, and said what sounded like, “Lass’ ma allez au premier”--then she tramped briskly and confidently across with her baskets, sending miniature avalanches of sand and gravel down into the river with each step. One of her feet plowed from under her, about midway, but she snatched it back and marched on, not seeming to mind it. My pride urged me to move along, and put me to shame. After a time the old woman came back and coaxed me to try, and did at last get me started in her wake and I got as far as midway all right; but then to hearten me still more and show me how easy and safe it was, she began to prance and dance her way along, with her knuckles in her hips, kicking a landslide loose with every skip. The exhibition struck a cold panic through me and made my brain swim. I leaned against the slope and said I would stay there until the boat came and testified as to whether there were rocks under me or not. For the third time in my life I was in that kind of a fix--in a place where I could not go backward or forward, and mustn’t stay where I was. The boat was a good while coming, but it seemed longer than that. Where I was, the slope was like a roof; where the slope ended the wall was perpendicular thence to the water, and one could not see over and tell what the state of things might be down there. When the boat came along, the courier said there was nothing down there but deep water--no rocks. I did not mind the water; so my fears disappeared, now, and I finished my march without discomfort. I gave the old woman some money, which pleased her very much and she tried her grateful best to give us a partridge, newly killed, which she rummaged out of one of her baskets, and seemed disappointed when I would not take it. But I couldn’t; it would have been a shabby act. Then she went her way with her heavy baskets and I got aboard and afloat once more, feeling a great respect for her and very friendly toward her. She waved a good-by every now and then till her figure faded out in the plain, joining that interminable procession of friends made and lost in an hour that drifts past a man’s life from cradle to grave and returns on its course no more. The courier said she was probably a poacher and stole the partridge.

The courier was not able to understand why I had not nerve enough to walk along a crumbling slope with a precipice only thirty feet high below me; but I had no difficulty in understanding it. It is constitutional with me to get nervous and incapable under the probability of getting myself dropped thirty feet on to a pile of rocks; it does not come from culture. Some people are made in one way, and some in another--and the above is my way. Some people who can skirt precipices without a tremor have a strong dread of the dentist’s chair, whereas I was born without any prejudices against the dentist’s chair; when in it I am interested, am not in a hurry, and do not greatly mind the pain. Taken by and large, my style of make has advantages over the other, I think. Few of us are obliged to circumnavigate precipices, but we all have to take a chance at the dental chair.

People who early learn the right way to choose a dentist have their reward. Professional superiority is not everything; it is only part. All dentists talk while they work. They have inherited this from their professional ancestors, the barbers. The dentist who talks well--other things being equal--is the one to choose. He tells anecdotes all the while and keeps his man so interested and entertained that he hardly notices the flight of time. For he not only tells anecdotes that are good in themselves, but he adds nice shadings to them with his instruments as he goes along, and now and then brings out effects which could not be produced with any other kind of tools at all. All the time that such a dentist as this is plowing down into a cavity with that spinning gouge which he works with a treadle, it is observable that he has found out where he has uncovered a nerve down in there, and that he only visits it at intervals, according to the needs of his anecdote, touching it lightly, very lightly and swiftly, now and then, to brighten up some happy conceit in his tale and call a delicate electric attention to it; and all the while he is working gradually and steadily up toward his climax with veiled and consummate art--then at last the spindle stops whirling and thundering in the cavity, and you know that the grand surprise is imminent, now--is hanging in the very air. You can hear your heart beat as the dentist bends over you with his grip on the spindle and his voice diminished to a murmur. The suspense grows bigger--bigger--bigger--your breath stops--then your heart. Then with lightning suddenness the “nub” is sprung and the spindle drives into the raw nerve! The most brilliant surprises of the stage are pale and artificial compared with this.

It is believed by people generally--or at least by many--that the exquisitely sharp sensation which results from plunging the steel point into the raw nerve is pain, but I think that this is doubtful. It is so vivid and sudden that one has no time to examine properly into its character. It is probably impossible, with our human limitations, to determine with certainty whether a sensation of so high and perfect an order as that is pain or whether it is pleasure. Its location brings it under the disadvantage of a common prejudice; and so men mistake it for pain when they might perceive that it is the opposite of that if it were anywhere but in a tooth. I may be in error, but I have experimented with it a great deal and I am satisfied in my own mind that it is not pain. It is true that it always feels like pain, but that proves nothing--ice against a naked back always passes for fire. I have every confidence that I can eventually prove to everyone’s satisfaction that a nerve-stab produces pleasure; and not only that, but the most exquisite pleasure, the most perfect felicity which we are capable of feeling. I would not ask more than to be remembered hereafter as the man who conferred this priceless benefaction upon his race.

11.30.--Approaching the Falls of the Rhône. Canal to the left, walled with compact and beautiful masonry. It is a cut-off. We could pass through it and avoid the Falls--are advised by the Admiral to do it, but all decline, preferring to have a dangerous adventure to talk about.

However....

The truth is, the current began to grow ominously swift--and presently pretty lumpy and perturbed; soon we seemed to be simply flying past the shores. Then all of a sudden three hundred yards of boiling and tossing river burst upon our sight through the veiling tempest of rain! I did not see how our flimsy ark could live through such a place. If we were wrecked, swimming could not save us; the packed multitude of tall humps of water meant a bristling chaos of big rocks underneath, and the first rock we hit would break our bones. If I had been fortified with ignorance I might have wanted to stay in the boat and see the fun; but I have had much professional familiarity with water, and I doubted if there was going to be any fun there. So I said I would get out and walk, and I did. I need not tell anybody at home; I could leave out the Falls of the Rhône; they are not on the map, anyhow. If an adventure worth recording resulted, the Admiral and the courier would have it, and that would answer. I could see it from the bank--nothing could be better; it seemed even providential.