I have been in New York two or three days, and have been in a condition
of strict diligence night and day, the object of this diligence being
to regulate the moral and political situation on this planet—put it on
a sound basis—and when you are regulating the conditions of a planet it
requires a great deal of talk in a great many kinds of ways, and when
you have talked a lot the emptier you get, and get also in a position
of corking. When I am situated like that, with nothing to say, I feel as
though I were a sort of fraud; I seem to be playing a part, and please
consider I am playing a part for want of something better, and this is
not unfamiliar to me; I have often done this before.
When I was here about eight years ago I was coming up in a car of the
elevated road. Very few people were in that car, and on one end of it
there was no one, except on the opposite seat, where sat a man about
fifty years old, with a most winning face and an elegant eye—a beautiful
eye; and I took him from his dress to be a master mechanic, a man who
had a vocation. He had with him a very fine little child of about four
or five years. I was watching the affection which existed between those
two. I judged he was the grandfather, perhaps. It was really a pretty
child, and I was admiring her, and as soon as he saw I was admiring her
he began to notice me.
I could see his admiration of me in his eye, and I did what everybody
else would do—admired the child four times as much, knowing I would get
four times as much of his admiration. Things went on very pleasantly. I
was making my way into his heart.
By-and-by, when he almost reached the station where he was to get off,
he got up, crossed over, and he said: “Now I am going to say something
to you which I hope you will regard as a compliment.” And then he went
on to say: “I have never seen Mark Twain, but I have seen a portrait of
him, and any friend of mine will tell you that when I have once seen a
portrait of a man I place it in my eye and store it away in my memory,
and I can tell you now that you look enough like Mark Twain to be his
brother. Now,” he said, “I hope you take this as a compliment. Yes,
you are a very good imitation; but when I come to look closer, you are
probably not that man.”
I said: “I will be frank with you. In my desire to look like that
excellent character I have dressed for the character; I have been
playing a part.”
He said: “That is all right, that is all right; you look very well on
the outside, but when it comes to the inside you are not in it with the
original.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account