Who Is Mark Twain? (8 page)

A
re all dentists active talkers? And have they come by this gift by inheritance? The barber was the first dentist; he had been pulling teeth for thousands of years before the earliest dental specialist made his appearance and became his professional child and heir; for thousands of years he had been
the
talker of talkers, and when his heir inherited and carried off the pattern of his barber-chair for use in the new field, doubtless he inherited along with it the barber’s facility of speech, the gradually and patiently perfected marvel of those ages of faithful and pains-taking practice.

But these are deep questions of theology, philology, mathematics; with them we have nothing to do. We will come to the point. I was not able to remember that I had ever sat in a dentist’s chair; I was not able to remember that I had ever had a pain in any tooth. And so it was a cold awakening to me when a dentist who had caught a fleeting glimpse of my interior when I was laughing at something which spread me wider open than usual, told me I ought to go to Dr. Riggs and get my teeth attended to. He said I had a certain disease of the teeth which had a scientific name but was sometimes called “Riggs’s disease” because Dr. Riggs had invented a method of treating it which cured it in some instances and arrested its progress and rendered it harmless in all; whereas it had formerly refused to succumb to dental science. Having got a vicious looking gouging-iron out of his pocket to fondle, his gift of talk came to him at once, just the same as if he had been behind his chair with a waiting subject paling under him, and proceeded with his flow. He said that most people had Riggs’s disease, especially people whose teeth appeared to be perfectly sound and flawless; said one did not often find it with bad teeth; said it was heritable—where it existed in the parents, it would usually be found in the children. He said it was in the nature of blood poisoning; a secretion decayed the bone-surface of the roots of the teeth, then the gums retreated from these surfaces, pus was engendered in the gums, the teeth began to loosen, and the man’s general health was injured. He said that Dr. Riggs’s method was to dig up under the gums with his instruments and carve and scrape all the dead bone away, down to the living bone; then the gums would return to their place, attach themselves to the living bone, and become healthy again. Then he went on to say that talk was generally wasted on a Riggs disease victim; there being no pain, they didn’t mind the disease, and they did mind the desperate operation required to check the malady. By way of example, he instanced the case of a young woman who came to him to have her teeth examined. They were beautifully white and regular, and perfectly sound, and he told her so; but he also told her that the whole thirty-two were in danger, because Riggs’s disease was at their roots. She was a teacher, and had a salary of seven or eight hundred dollars; but she refused to pay “any such price;” she hadn’t any pain, and didn’t choose to import any; she wouldn’t take all that proposed thirty-two batches of agony as a gift, let alone go into the market and buy it. When the dentist had got this far, his gouging-iron slipped out of his hand, and this broke his connection and gave me a chance to get on first base with a question: which was, why he didn’t propose to operate upon my Riggs disease himself. He said he doubted if any dentist could do the work quite as well as Riggs himself.

Dr. Riggs lives in my own town; so, when I reached home, I went to him. He was gray and venerable, and humane of aspect; but he had the calm, possessed, surgical look of a man who could endure pain in another person. I got in the chair and looked about me, noting the cuspidor at my left elbow, the convenient glass of water; the table at my right covered with long steel bodkins laid out in rows on a white napkin; then laid my head back in the rest, feeling pale and nervous, for this thing was all new to me; new and hellish, if I may use such a word without offense. The doctor bent over me, I spread my mouth, and he put a mirror the size of a nickel into it, and inspected it all around. And began to talk. Not swiftly, not excitedly; but evenly, smoothly, tranquilly. He said I must have smoked considerable tobacco in my time. I responded, as well as the mirror would let me—“tons.” He said it was the best of preservatives for the teeth; and went on tapping around in there with the mirror and examining, while I made mental note of his remark for use against the anti-tobacco incendiaries.

Presently he laid the mirror aside, raked among his bodkins, selected one, gave it a pass or two over an “Arkansas stone,” laid a rag over my chin, placed a couple of fingers where I could have closed on them, and approached my mouth with the bodkin, which he held in the grip of his other hand. I began to shrink into myself and curl together, in a cold nightmare of expectancy. There was a strength-exhausting pause; then the doctor eased up his attitude and began to tell me some particulars concerning the Riggs disease. He said, among other things, that he had known it to so affect a victim’s health as to prostrate him and keep him bed-ridden and helpless during long intervals, the physicians doctoring his stomach, not suspecting that the chief trouble was in the teeth, and so failing to afford relief. He instanced the case of a lady who had lain thus for a long time, under the hands of the most noted physicians of New York, until she was so wasted away that she could be gathered up and carried in one’s arms like a child. When the case came to him, at last, he stopped the medicines, went to work with his dental instruments, and she was presently sound and well.

Then he put his tool into my mouth, rooted it up under a gum and began to carve. He seemed to fetch away chips of bone the size of my hand. In truth, what he removed could hardly have been seen without a microscope, I suppose—but my imagination is a microscope. If I had been honest enough to speak my mind, I would have said “Ow!” to every dig, and shouted it; but I was ashamed to do that, and so only said “Um,” in a low voice, and kept back the exclamation point. The doctor worked fast, and with a hand that was as sure as it was vigorous, though along at first I was all the time expecting the instrument would slip and carry away all my Riggs disease at one rake.

The doctor talked along entertainingly, and I responded “Um” when my turn came—which was when I was hurt or thought I was. I was hurt a little, of course, but I think the main discomfort about the operation was not the pain but the disagreeable sense of having my bone cut into; and then, too, your teeth are so near your ears, that the work sounds like digging gravel and shoveling coal. I could go through those two days of bone-scraping now without minding it much; but I was inexperienced, then, and my imagination exaggerated the pain out of all reason.

At the end of an hour, something was said about chloroform. I knew I did not need it myself, but I believed my imagination did; so I accepted the bottle, and after that I held it always in my hand, and put it to my nose whenever my imagination got too brisk. The chloroform created a radical change; it made everything comfortable and pleasant. The pains were about as sharp as they had been before, but they rather seemed to be impersonal pains; pains that belonged to the community in general, including me, but not me particularly, not me any more than the others. So I did not care for them any longer; I do not care for a pain unless I can have it all to myself. The doctor’s voice seemed removed to a little distance and somewhat subdued, or muffled; but his work seemed more aggressive and vigorous than ever (as perhaps it was), and nearer by, too.

The chloroform introduced the subject of anaesthetics, and the doctor told me about the first painless operation that was ever performed in this world; and his story had a most vivid interest, for the reason that he was the operator himself. We have been so accustomed, all our lives, to hearing about painless surgical operations, that I was as well prepared to be confronted by Columbus himself as to find myself in the living presence of the man who was midwife at the birth of the most merciful, the most beneficent of all the gracious host of the children of Science, the application of anaesthetics to the banishment of human agony. Yet it was true. The world had gone on enduring torture a thousand ages, and then science brought a miracle for its relief worth more than all the miracles that had ever preceded it; and had placed it, as her generous custom is, within the reach of every sufferer, instead of restricting it to a pious half dozen, after the old way. And this prodigious event itself had happened so long ago that it seemed part and parcel with the dim and dreamy antiquities; and yet it was certainly true that here was a man who was there at the time, and saw the thing done; was there, and himself inaugurated an event of such vast influence, magnitude, importance, that one may truly say it hardly has its equal in human history.

It was my ignorance that had made the event so old. It had happened in 1835. The doctor was a young dentist, then, and had just set up his shingle with young Wells. They visited a traveling laughing-gas exhibition one winter night, and were consumed with laughter over the grotesque performances of some of the Hartford youth while under the happy dominion of the gas. Presently one of them, a young chap named Cooley, went sprawling over a chair or a table, and reached the stage with a crash, but immediately jumped up and plunged into the fun again with no diminution of spirit.

I was in the chair a good part of two days—nine hours the first day and five the next—and then came out of it with my thirty-two teeth as polished and ship-shape and raw as if they had been taken out of the sockets and filed. It was a good job, and quickly and skilfully done; but if I opened my mouth and drew in a cold breath it woke up my attention like pouring ice water down my back. I could not touch anything to my teeth for several days, they were so supernaturally sensitive. But after that they became as tough as iron, and a thorough comfort. If by some blessed accident my conscience could catch the Riggs disease, I know what I would do with it.

My teeth had lasted more than twenty years longer than people’s teeth usually last, but they had begun to develop specks of decay here and there, and the doctor said that these places ought to be gouged out and filled; but I had had enough holiday for the present, and said I would chance them five or six years longer. Friends told me that they might all get to decaying in that time; but I doubted it and went my own way.

That was my first experience in dentistry. Physically, I mean, though not pecuniarily. I had paid plenty of dental bills, but had not made one before. When my six-year limit was up, I went to the doctor again, and he found, sure enough, that my harvest was fine and large and ripe for the sickle. I had to put the thing off, for a while, as I was just leaving for the summer; but as soon as I got a chance I hunted up a dentist.

L
ast night I read in the
Atlantic
a passage from one of Rev. Dr. Van Dyke’s books, and I cut it out, with a vaguely defined notion that I might need it sometime or other, by and by. I like Van Dyke, and I greatly admire his literary style—this notwithstanding the drawback that a good deal of his literary product is of a religious sort. He is about 35 years old, he is a Presbyterian, he is a clergyman, he is a member of the faculty of Princeton University. Still, I like him and admire him, notwithstanding.

This forenoon I was lounging along Fifth avenue, and I stopped opposite the Roman Catholic cathedral to contemplate the crowd massed in front of the edifice. It is a grand Catholic day—a grand Catholic week, in fact. There’s a cardinal here with a message from the Pope, there are sixty bishops on hand, and there is to be great doings. A hand touched my shoulder—it was Van Dyke’s! We hadn’t met for a year. He nodded toward the multitude, and said:

“What do you think of it? Doesn’t it warm your heart? They are ignorant and poor, but they have faith, they have belief, and it uplifts them, it makes them free. They have feelings, they have views, convictions, and they live under a flag where they have no master, and where they have the right and the privilege of doing their own thinking, and of acting according to their preference, unmolested. What do you think of it?”

“I think you have misinterpreted some of the details. You think that these people think. You know better. They don’t think; they get all their ostensible thinkings at second hand; they get their feelings at second hand; they get their faith, their beliefs, their convictions at second hand. They are in no sense free. They are like you and me and like all the rest of the human race—slaves. Slaves of custom, slaves of circumstance, environment, association. This crowd is the human race in little. It is no trouble to love the human race, and we do love it, for it is a child, and one can’t help loving a child; but the minute we set out to
admire
the race we do as you have done—select and admire qualities which it doesn’t possess.”

And so on and so on; we argued and argued, and arrived where we began: he clung to his reverence for the race as the grandest of the Creator’s inventions, and I clung to my conviction that it was not an invention to be really proud of. We had settled nothing. We were quiet for a while, and loafed peaceably along down the street. Then he took up the matter again. He reminded me that there were certain undeniably fine and beautiful qualities in our human nature. To wit, that we are brave, and hate cowardly acts; that we are loyal and true, and hate treachery and deceit; that we are just and fair and honorable, and hate injustice and unfairness; that we pity the weak, and protect them from wrong and harm; that we magnanimously stand between the oppressor and the oppressed, and between the man of cruel disposition and his friendless victim.

I asked him if he was acquainted with this person.

He said he was—hundreds of him; that, broadly speaking, he had been describing a Christian; that a Christian, at his best, was just such a person as he had been portraying. I said—

“I know a very good Christian who cannot fill this bill—nor any detail of it, in fact.”

“I must take that as a jest,” he said, lightly.

“No, not a jest.”

“Then as at least an extravagance, an exaggeration?”

“No, as fact, simple fact. And I am not speaking of a commonplace Christian, but of a high-class one; one whose Christian record is without spot; one who can take rank, un-challenged, with the very best. I have not known a better; and I love him and admire him.”

“Come—you love and admire him, and yet he cannot fill any single detail of that beautiful character which I have portrayed?”

“Not a single one. Let me describe one of his performances. He conceived the idea of getting some pleasure out of deceiving, beguiling, swindling, pursuing, frightening, capturing, torturing, mutilating and murdering a child—”

“Im-possible!”

“A child that had never done him any harm; a child that was gratefully enjoying its innocent life and liberty, and not suspecting that any one would want to take them away from it—for any reason, least of all for the mere pleasure of it. And so—”

“You are describing a Christian? There is no such Christian. You are describing a madman.”

“No, a Christian—as good a one as lives. He sought out the child where it was playing, and offered it some dainties—offered them cunningly, persuasively, treacherously, cowardly, and the child, mistaking him for one who meant it a kindness, thankfully swallowed the dainties—then fled away in pain and terror, for the gift was poisoned. The man was full of joy at the success of his ingenious fraud, and chased the frightened child from one refuge to another for an hour, in a delirium of delight, and finally caught it and killed it; and by his eloquent enthusiasms one could see that he was as proud of his exploit as ever brave knight was, of deceiving, beguiling, betraying and destroying a cruel and wicked and pestilent giant thirty feet high. There—do you see? Is there any resemblance between this Christian and yours? This one was not brave, but the reverse of it; he was not fair and honorable, he was a deceiver, a beguiler, a swindler, he took advantage of ignorant trustfulness and betrayed it; he had no pity for distress and fright and pain, but took a frenzied delight in causing them, and watching the effects. He was no protector of threatened liberty and menaced life, but took them both. And did it for fun. Merely for fun. But you seem to doubt me. Here is his own account of it; read it yourself; I clipped it out of the
Atlantic
last night. For ‘fish’ in the text, read ‘child.’ There is no other difference. It is a Christian in both cases, and in both cases the human race is exposed for what it is—a self-admiring humbug.”

We had a very good time together for an hour. And didn’t agree about anything. But it was for this reason that we had a good time, disagreement being the salt of a talk. Van Dyke is a good instance of a certain fact: that outside of a man’s own specialty, his thinkings are poor and slipshod, and his conclusions not valuable. Van Dyke’s specialty is English literature; he has studied it with deep and eager interest, and with an alert and splendid intelligence. With the result that the soundness of his judgments upon it is not to be lightly challenged by anybody. But he doesn’t know any more about the human being than the President does, or the Pope, or the philosophers, or the cat. I wanted to give him a copy of my privately printed, unsigned, unacknowledged and unpublished gospel, “What is Man?” for his enlightenment, but thought better of it. He wouldn’t understand it.